"Survival" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shape, first, of incessant Variability in organisms as an actual circumstance, which we may see exemplified in its extreme form in the monstrous deviations of structure that occur from time to time before our own eyes; second, of Adaptation to environment as the determining condition of Survival among the forms that present themselves. Even as a bald and unsustained guess, this was an effective side-blow at the doctrine of final causes—a doctrine, as has been often remarked, which does not survive, in any given set of phenomena, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... ruling the destinies of nations. For she could ride rough-shod over convention and prejudice and human dignity. She was perhaps the last representative of an autocratic egotism in a world in which the individual will had almost ceased to exist. She seemed to him the survival ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... arms, nor ammunition. There was no system for rationing the men. All of these things had to be provided, and they were provided through a natural evolution of practical processes, crystallizing into form, tested by the duties of the day. The organization which grew up was a true survival of the fittest, both in personnel and in methods. The wonder is not that some abuses occurred, but that they were so few; not that there were occasional evidences of lack of efficiency, but that efficiency was on the whole so high from ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... murmured, the brown velvet shadows that lay like trappings on the white flanks of his horse, the quivering heat, and the stinging spice of bay. Mr. Hamlin had vague ideas of dryads and fauns, but at that moment would have bet something on the chances of their survival. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... speeches. By some henidical process—henidical, by the way is a favorite word of mine which nobody understands—by some henidical process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the strength from ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... leather and waxed-ends provided on the spot, and eating out of the same bowl as the farm servants. So much pride of craft was still left in Pelle. Since his apprentice days, he had been accustomed to regard Sort as a pitiful survival from the past, a species properly belonging to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... extremely long in some of the lower vegetable-eating animals, and the vermiform appendix seems to be a rudiment of the formerly extended portion of this organ. It is large in the anthropoid apes, especially in the orang, in which it is very long and spirally convoluted. Its survival in man as a useless and dangerous aborted organ is a powerful argument in favor of his ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... themselves in the care of Ailwin, the strong and sturdy maid-of-all-work. Before they can get reunited with the parents, Geordie, the weakly two-year-old, dies, and they have various struggles for survival, with foul water killing many of the animals they would rely on for food. At last help comes in the form of the local pastor, who has enlisted the aid of some men to row him ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... facts comes to these city-bred children when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful farm. John Burrows says: "No race that does not take to the soil can long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its country to some incoming race that loves the soil." Already the Japanese farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American farmer out ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... a life. Hereupon the Rabbi opens his eyes, and turns upon the bystanders a look of such absolute relief, such utter happiness, that, as Tsaddik declares, only a second miracle can explain it. It is a case of the three days' survival of the "Ruach" or spirit, conceded to those departed saints whose earthly life has anticipated the heavenly; who have died, as it were, half ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... pick of the rural population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the whole, inasmuch as the more energetic and vigorous members of the community are consumed more rapidly than the rest of the population. The system is one which leads to the survival of the unfittest." ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... appalling. Those of us who pay most attention to sanitary laws live unhealthily, diminishing our powers to resist attack. I mention these facts, not as making a list of them, but to indicate the many causes through which we bring bereavement on ourselves, when the Will of God would naturally make for survival and happiness. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... for one reason or another is turned away from its object and has not succeeded in being applied. Then his death. That simply means that you have a feeling that you might be happier if he were away and didn't devil you. It is a survival of childhood, when death is synonymous with absence. I know you don't believe it. But if you had studied the subject as I have in the last few days you'd understand. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes. Boy-collectors are often cruel; but Robert showed from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care for life: we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be nursed, of ladybirds picked up in the depths of winter and preserved with wondering delight at their survival. Even in stories the death of animals moved him to bitter tears. He was equally quick at books, and soon outdistanced his companions at the elementary schools which he attended up to his fourteenth year. Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... an unusual number of aboriginal visitors, delegations for treaties, settlement of lands, &c.—some young or middle-aged, but mainly old men, from the West, North, and occasionally from the South—parties of from five to twenty each—the most wonderful proofs of what Nature can produce, (the survival of the fittest, no doubt—all the frailer samples dropt, sorted out by death)—as if to show how the earth and woods, the attrition of storms and elements, and the exigencies of life at first hand, can train and fashion men, indeed chiefs, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Vestrydom's called, by its new-fangled rival, (The smart "Parish Council") "decrepit survival." P. C., be not hard on the old form thou twittest! Thou yet hast to prove thy "Survival" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... the most remarkable essays which ever appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" magazine, now over thirty years ago, Herbert Spencer stepped on to the stool of repentance and read his recantation and renunciation of the doctrine of natural selection and the survival of the fittest; first doing vicarious penance (unauthorized, however) for Darwin, and then, in no uncertain terms, for himself. There was no mistaking Spencer's meaning. His language was explicit. "The phrases (natural selection and survival of the fittest) employed in discussing organic evolution," ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... independent minds into one narrow prescribed channel that admitted of no individual expansion, the waste of material and the fettering of intellects, that were heaven-sent gifts to be put out to usury and not shrouded away in a napkin, revolted him. The conventual system was to him a survival of medievalism, a relic of the dark ages; the last refuge of the shirkers of the world. The communities themselves, if he had thought of them at all, had been regarded as a whole. He had never troubled to consider them as composed of single individuals. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... he was older, and had got rid of his cranks;" but all the same he was not understood by the youth of his generation. "The Fossil," as they called him at Lincoln, was hardly modern enough for their taste; he was a survival of the mediaeval age—he took life too gravely, and gave himself the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... resist disease? You talk about Nature when it suits you; but it is the cant of the subject you employ, for you are at variance with Nature. Your whole endeavour is to thwart her. Nature decrees the survival of the fittest; you exercise your skill to preserve the unfittest, and stop there—at the beginning of your responsibilities, as it seems to me. Let the unfit who are with us live, and save them ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... this legend, incident to the survival of the deer's white fawn. An English hunter, visiting the lake with dog and gun, was surprised to see on its southern bank a white doe. The animal bent to drink and at the same moment the hunter put his gun to his shoulder. Suddenly a howl was heard, so ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... foundations of human knowledge. Wiser men deride the dream, and laugh at the idea of scientific kabbala. The wiser men are fools. Suppose that Aristotle had discovered on a cuneiform-covered tablet at Nineveh the few words, 'Survival of the Fittest.' Philosophy would have gained twenty-two hundred years. I will give you, in almost as few words, a truth equally pregnant. The ultimate evolution of the creature is into the creator. Perhaps it will be twenty-two hundred years before the truth finds general acceptance, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto's father and mother and the musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland's exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... substantial man, owning or hiring a considerable extent of land, he ceases to be called 'paysan,' and is designated 'cultivateur.' The very word 'peasant,' as I have shown elsewhere, will, in process of time, become a survival, so steady and sure is the social upheaval of rural France. The most eminent Frenchmen of the day, witness the late Paul Bert, are often peasant-born; and hardly a village throughout the country but sends some promising son of the soil to Paris, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in Madras is perhaps a survival of the social system of the early village community. Under it only a few of the higher castes were allowed to hold land, and the monopoly was preserved by the rule that the right of taking up waste lands belonged primarily to the cultivators of the adjacent ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... the landlord, with a silver candlestick in his hand. The landlord then proceeded ceremoniously to "light us upstairs" to a sitting-room on the first floor, although the staircase was bright with gas. This was a survival from the eighteenth century, when staircases and passages in inns were but dimly lit; but it was an attention that was expected. In the same way, when dinner was ready in our sitting-room, the landlord always ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... as a recognized symbol of their subscription. It was their signum manuale, their sign manual. In courtly imitation of the royal practice, monograms and other marks were adopted by official personages, even though they could write. The notarial marks of modern times are a survival of the practice. By the illiterate other signs, besides the monogram, came to be employed, such as the cross, &c., as signs manual. The monogram was used by French monarchs from the reign of Charlemagne to that of Philip the Fair, who died ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... having an unusual position, is remarkable as being one of the most complete groups of buildings set apart for this object. A noticeable feature of the cloister garth is a Norman arch belonging to a doorway that appears to be of later date. This is probably the only survival of the first monastery founded, it is said, by Roald, Constable of Richmond Castle, in 1152. Building of an extensive character was, therefore, in progress at the same time in these sloping meadows, as on the castle heights, and ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... fairly quiet. This child is not an object of terror, like the twin children; it was just thrown away because no one would be bothered to rear it, but when Miss Slessor had had all the trouble of it the natives had no objection to pet and play with it, calling it "the child of wonder," because of its survival. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew that our love—miraculously sweet as it was—probably was not greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... superbly clad, faultless in physique and raiment from top to toe. He stood as though ready to step into his carriage for some voyage to rout or ball. Youth, vigor, self-reliance, confidence, this was the whole message of the splendid figure. The blood of Mary Connynge, this survival, this half-savage woman, unregulated, unsubdued, leaped high within her bosom, fled to her face, gave color to her cheek and brightness to her eye. Her breath shortened after feline fashion. Deep ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... no reply to such an argument, because in the border settlements the round peg must go in the round hole; the conditions of survival demanded ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were the festivals of the Virgin of Heaven. A survival of the national religion, these feasts were dear to the hearts of the Carthaginians. Augustin went to them with his fellow-students. "We trooped there from every quarter," he says. There was a great gathering of people in the interior ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... truth is that morals are built on a far surer foundation than that of creeds, which are here to-day and gone to-morrow. They are built on the solid rock of experiences, and of the 'survival of the fittest,' which in the long evolution of the human race from primeval savages, have by 'natural selection' and 'heredity' become almost instinctive." (How careless is this terminology. In the previous page he denies morality to be a matter of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... image, with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and the meaning of the image; if William Blake, to our so great delight, makes the morning stars [100] literally "sing together,"—these fruits of individual genius are in part also a "survival" from a different age, with the whole mood of which this mode of expression was more congruous than it is with ours. But there are traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also; and through these we ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is not lack of rain. It is a dry soil condition in which plant growth slows or stops and plant survival may be threatened. The earth loses water when wind blows, when sun shines, when air temperature is high, and when humidity is low. Of all these factors, air temperature most affects ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... of the manner of the soul's survival. The same reasons which Ibn Daud brings forward against the possibility of the existence of many souls before the body, apply with equal cogency to their survival after death. If simple substances having a common essence cannot differ either in essence or in accident, the human souls after ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... them. Anything beyond that point but offers temptation and opportunity for the formation of a monopoly by domestic producers. Then, too, the rate may intentionally be fixed so as to make just possible the survival of the most favorably located or most efficiently operated establishments, while compelling the abandonment of other establishments. See ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... understood ages ago. These elements are (1) the universal occurrence of variation, (2) an excessive natural rate of multiplication, (3) the struggle for existence entailed by the foregoing, (4) the consequent elimination of the unfit and the survival of only those that are satisfactorily adapted, and (5) the inheritance of the congenital variations that make for success in the struggle for existence. It is true that these elements are by no means the ultimate causes of evolution, but their complexity does not lessen their validity ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... value were stipulated for in the contract made between the painter and his employer before the picture was begun, and an artist's remuneration at that time was much of the nature of a salary, calculated on an approximate guess at the time he might need for the work. That was, of course, a survival from the time of the Byzantine artists, to whom gold and silver and paints were weighed out by the ecclesiastics for whom they painted, and had to be accounted for in the finished picture. There is a story told of an artist's ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... not onhappy because his socks ar-re not darned but because they ar-re. An' as f'r buttons on his shirt, whin th' buttons comes off a bachelor's shirt he fires it out iv th' window. His rule about clothes is thurly scientific. Th' survival iv th' fit, d'ye mind. Th' others to th' discard. No marrid man dares to wear th' plumage iv a bachelor. If he did his wife wud suspict him. He lets her buy his cravats an' his seegars an' 'tis little diff'rence it makes to him ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... thinkers carried to an extreme the theory of the survival of the fittest. This doctrine teaches that all living things have reached their present forms through a gradual development of those qualities which best fit them to live in their present surroundings. Those ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... idea at the back of the old man's head, gave his address; he did not see that he had to do with a bookseller of the old school, a survival of the eighteenth century, when booksellers tried to keep Voltaires and Montesquieus starving in garrets under ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sounded mirthlessly. "However, we will give a charitable interpretation to the act; the boat was already overcrowded; one more might have endangered all. Call it an impulse of self-preservation. Self-preservation," he repeated; "the struggle of the survival of the fittest! Let the episode go. Especially as your lordship incidentally did me a great service; a very great service." The other stared at him. "I should have looked at it only in that light, and then ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... of Edward Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J.R. Planche, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque has since given place to the "musical comedy," and its only survival is to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... C. R. V.[F] band droned on, While guests had come and guests had gone Since my arrival; My brow grew gloomier with despair, And on it sat the guilty air Of a survival Of some remorse for ancient crimes ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... consciousness of superior strength, and to become despotic, if not harsh. To escape this fault, a man must be either a saint or a sluggard. And the tendency to race enmity lies very deep in human nature. Perhaps it is a survival from the times when each race could maintain itself ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... social evolution the problems of inbreeding or crossing of stocks merge into the discussion of the endogamous and exogamous types of society. Whatever may have been the origin of exogamy, the survival of the exogamous type in progressive societies may easily be explained on the ground of superior adaptability, variability and plasticity, which enables such societies to survive a change of environment while the more rigid ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... perish after one spawning and the oftener they return, the larger they are. What conservationists call "escapement," or the freedom to get back to the ocean from the rivers, is considered vital to their survival in quantity. ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... face the same enigmatic smile which was the chief memory he had retained of the Venetian picture. Truly, the likeness between the painting and the wife of his friend was marvellous; and Laurence tried to shake off a morbid wonder whether there might be any obscure and inscrutable survival from one generation to another across the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... slender rod. They grasped the rod at once and could be lifted from the bed by it and kept in this position about half a minute. He argued that this early strength of arm, which soon begins to disappear, was survival from the remote period when the baby's ancestors were monkeys or monkey-like people ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... clad in an old serge dress, which was a survival from Bruges days, Therese ran up to her with ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reviewed rapidly, but not carelessly, the vicissitudes of the book's wonderful career, and we ought to be in a position to draw some sort of instructive inference from it all. Well, one thing taught us is this, the singular power of survival that lives in gracious words. They wondered at the "gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth," and because they wondered at them ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... said we're not immortal but, Treb, your survival would be another step in that direction. The soul's immortality has to be taken on faith now—if it's taken at all. You could be the first scientific proof that the developing soul has the momentum to carry past the body in which it grows. At the least you would ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native originality has been intensified by circumstances, until it has become a matter of tradition and habit. The processes of natural selection have favored the survival of the ingenious, and the quality ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... think, all round That, by the English custom bound I hold the lady safe and sound In trust for either rival, Until you clearly testify By sword and pistol, by and by, Which gentleman prefers to die, And which prefers survival. ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... of by-gone times underwent many vicissitudes, and it was long before our ancestors conquered their dislike to the bitter hop, after having been accustomed to a thick, sweet liquor of which the modern Kentish ale is in some measure a survival. Beer was made from a variety of grain; oats were most commonly employed. In France, they resorted even to vetches, lentils, rye, and darnel. But as a rule it was a poor, thin drink which resulted from the operation, and the monks of Glastonbury ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... against the general acquiescence in the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health and a great ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... circumstances that led to this crisis, learn to soften down considerably their angry feelings; and to see, indeed, in the whole history of the connection,—from its first formation, in the hey-day of youth and party, to its faint survival after the death of Mr. Fox,—but a natural and destined gradation towards the result at which it at last arrived, after as much fluctuation of political principle, on one side, as there was of indifference, perhaps, to all political principle ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... intolerance a worthy element of character? Is it consistent with the Beatitude pronounced (if it was pronounced) by Jesus on the meek? May we not, with Mr. L. Johnston's namesake, fitly say, 'Such notions as these are a survival from the bad old days'? [Footnote: Johnston, Buddhist China, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... test to destruction. Written, as it has been, in August, 1920, it is impossible in this chapter to give any conception of how the developments of War will be applied to commercial aeroplanes, as few truly commercial machines have yet been designed, and even those still show distinct traces of the survival of war mentality. When, however, the inevitable recasting of ideas arrives, it will become evident, whatever the apparent modification in the relative importance of different aspects of design, that enormous advances were ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... hardier forms and more readily adaptable. They increased in size and in intelligence until they were ready to supplant all other forms. The last vestiges of the bipeds were carefully nurtured and guarded by our forefathers until the vanishing atmosphere made their survival impossible. The insect form ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... o'clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there—in the States—called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. It was humorous. And it ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... said, 'bringing Chose, le petit Chose, who lives behind the Odeon and admires Corot, to see you, bringing him, you know, as a sort of strange survival, a curious relic. It ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... seen, scarce articles; sometimes there was only one, a throne-like seat for an honoured guest or for the master or mistress of the house, and doubtless our present phrase of "taking the chair" is a survival of the high place a chair then held amongst the household gods of a gentleman's mansion. Shakespeare possibly had the boards and trestles in his mind when, about 1596, he wrote in ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... a welcome piece of evidence in support of the theory that sees in the poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach the survival of a genuine variant of the Perceval story, differing in important particulars from that preserved by Chretien de Troyes, and based upon a French original, ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... new street connecting Holborn and the Strand will come out near St. Clement's Church. The name Holywell referred to a holy well which stood on the spot. There were, apparently, several of these wells in the vicinity; one was on the site of the Law Courts (Times, May 1, 1874). The street was a survival of old London, with its houses picturesquely old, with pointed gables, and it is a cause for regret that it had to go down in the march ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... however, of inestimable value; it consisted of an unpublished chapter in Our Mutual Friend, in which the golden dustman was killed by Silas Wegg. Dickens excised this chapter, had the type broken up, and all the proofs, with the exception of this unique survival, were destroyed. I am not ashamed to confess that when I got back to London and learned the fate which had befallen my old friend's collection, I had a bitter cry over it, which lasted me a good two hours. Christie was a very accomplished man, and was on terms of friendly correspondence with most ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... not wanting, there is no confident or general belief in an after-life. But what was only guessed at by the ancients was declared as a fact by Christ, and preached as a sublime and comforting truth by the apostles; and it is not too much to say that survival after death is at once the most distinctive doctrine of Christianity and the most precious hope of Christendom. The whole moral temperature of the world, says Jean Paul Richter, has been raised immeasurably ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... spot chosen for a dwelling place is either some sheltered nook in a mesa or a southward slope on the edge of a pinon grove near a good fuel supply and not too far from water. A house is very seldom built close to a spring—perhaps a survival of the habit which prevailed when the people were a hunting tribe and kept away from the water holes in order not to disturb ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... nebulous material within their sphere of gravitational influence. Naturally, there would at first be a vast confusion of small and large centres of condensation in the arms of the nebula, moving in various directions, but a kind of natural selection—and, in this case, survival of the biggest—would ensue. The conflicting movements would be adjusted by collisions and gravitation, the smaller bodies would be absorbed in the larger or enslaved as their satellites, and the last state would be a family of smaller suns circling at vast distances round the parent ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... condition belongs to the geologic age—the great birth and growth of the world, when natural forces ran riot, when the struggle for existence was so savage that no vitality which was not founded in a gigantic form could have even a possibility of survival. That such a time existed, we have evidences in geology, but there only; we can never expect proofs such as this age demands. We can only imagine or surmise such things—or such conditions and such ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... are abundantly in circulation.'[6] Now, the modern hallucinations themselves can scarcely, perhaps, be called 'survivals from savagery,' though the opinion that an hallucination of a person must be his 'spirit' is really such a survival. It is with that opinion, with Animism in its hallucinatory origins, that Mr. Tylor is concerned, not with the hallucinations themselves or with the evidence for ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... statements in royal proclamations or in royal assertions too seriously. Even in this country there are documents issued from time to time bearing the royal sign manual which every one regards as interesting but meaningless formalities—interesting because they are a survival of mediaeval documents which meant something some hundreds of years ago and still remain though their meanings have long since lapsed. And yet there are persons in this country who peruse such documents and know ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... him in the promotion of the enterprise into the back room of the bank and told them of the situation. "We're up against something here," he said. "If we let word of the failure of this machine get out, where'll we be? It is a case of the survival of the fittest." ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... again many cases of "insects which invariably lay their eggs in the only places where the grubs, when hatched, will find the food they need and can eat, or where the larvae will be able to attach themselves as parasites to some host in a way that is necessary to their survival."[3] In many instances these complicated trains of action are performed by the animal in a situation absolutely strange to it, without its ever having seen the act performed before, having been born frequently after its parents had died, and itself destined to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the fact that as yet he was not master of the wilderness. Far from it. He was but one of the hordes of creatures struggling for existence and the sooner he learned that caution and stealth led to success while bravado led to failure, the greater were his chances of survival and growth to the stage where he could fearlessly proclaim ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... that appeared in a newly born animal was to protect itself and its own constitution which were conciliated to it by nature. What tended to its survival, it sought; what tended to its destruction, it shunned. Thus self-preservation was the ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... his hat with a slight exaggeration of Chesterfieldian elegance. Sandy, no less than his master, was a survival of an interesting type. He had inherited the feudal deference for his superiors in position, joined to a certain self-respect which saved him from sycophancy. His manners had been formed upon those of old Mr. Delamere, and were not a bad ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... traversed the various methods by which statesmen were seeking to prevent that survival of Slavery, addressing himself by turns to the arguments of those who, with John Sherman, "seemed," said he, "to consider it as within the power of Congress by virtue of its Legislative authority;" to those of the "many well-judging men, with ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... survival kit from behind the seat and pulled out some rations, a first-aid kit, finally a tele-talkie. Raising the antenna, he plugged in the mike cord from his mask and held down the ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... fool was an institution born in barbarism, though it survived long into the age of civilization, having its latest survival in Russia, the last European state to emerge from barbarism. In the days of Peter the Great the fool was a fixed institution in Russia, though this element of court life had long vanished from Western Europe. In truth, the buffoon flourished in Russia like a green ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or difficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance,"—all this strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the eighteenth-century philosophes had not yet been ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... was very hard, and it is no wonder that the stragglers back from the mines increased in numbers as time went on. It was a true case of survival of the fittest. Those who remained and became professional miners were the hardiest, most optimistic, and most persistent of the population. The mere physical labor was very severe. Any one not ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... with people and with criticism of people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her age. Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which, moreover, would be invidious; but the old London of her talk—the direction I liked is best to take—was, in particular, a gallery of portraits. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... beautiful and harmless serpent said to kill the fer-de-lance—over ten feet long and thick as a man's leg; but a large couresse is now seldom seen. The negro woodsmen kill both creatures indiscriminately; and as the older reptiles are the least likely to escape observation, the chances for the survival of extraordinary individuals lessen with the yearly ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... it out of many verifications. She stood up and put it about her waist. This was part of the ritual. It almost met. In places it did meet. Without her dress it would meet everywhere as it had met on her mother. Closest of all, this survival of old California-Ventura days brought Saxon in touch. Hers was her mother's form. Physically, she was like her mother. Her grit, her ability to turn off work that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... all, results with boilers as with other things, in the survival of the fittest. When judged on this basis the Babcock & Wilcox boiler stands pre-eminent in its ability to cover the whole field of steam generation with the highest commercial efficiency obtainable. Year after year the Babcock ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... hospitals were intended originally for the destitute sick, the practice of sending well-to-do patients there is rapidly spreading. The prejudice against hospitals, still so general among the poor, is a survival from a time when hospital care was far less humane than now. If the visitor has ever been a patient in a hospital, and can tell his own experience or the experiences of friends, or if he happens to know some of the doctors or nurses, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Druid priests cut the yule-oak and with their golden sickles reaped the sacred mistletoe; but old Jan here, who is so stiff for preserving ancient customs, does not know that this custom, like many others that he stands for, is the survival of a rite." ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... with the new social state that has grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and institutions—necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, this perpetual compromise ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... obtain a clear conception of anything we must 'study it in its growth from the very beginning' is formally set down in the opening of the Politics, where, indeed, we shall find the other characteristic features of the modern Evolutionary theory, such as the 'Differentiation of Function' and the 'Survival of the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... at Seville Cathedral and before the High Altar every year, the very curious Dance of the Seises (sixes), performed now by 16 instead of (as of old) by 12 boys, quaintly dressed. It seems to be a survival of some very ancient ritual, probably astronomical, in which the two sets of six represent the signs of the Zodiac, and is celebrated during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the Immaculate Conception, and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... another, those men, as readily as they prey upon society. Among them it is always merely a question of the survival of the fittest—and the fittest is always the quickest, and the strongest, ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... although hunted as game, is not yet a survival here, nor the eagle and bear, the latter only making ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... anti-orthodoxy, women's rights, total abstinence, and opposition to war. They established themselves at Hopedale, Massachusetts, where, so far as our knowledge goes, some vestige of them may still remain, though the analogies and probabilities are all against such a survival. A second band of "come-outers," as people used to be called in that day and region, when they abandoned the common road for reasons not obviously compulsory, went to Northampton in the same State, and from there ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... "A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic of marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and never knew his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring but the symbol ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... impulse. Cry over spilled milk enough to memorize how you spilled it. Let your mistakes worry you enough to prevent repetition. Let your left hand know what your right hand does and how to do it. Nature helps, but she is no more interested in the survival of your patient than in the survival of the attacking ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Ezekiel—also probably not modish in the eyes of contemporaries. It was noticeable that the thin tails of the fried fish were given to Mordecai; and in general the sort of share assigned to a poor relation—no doubt a "survival" of prehistoric practice, not yet generally admitted ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... strange cowardly inclination to fling myself upon this ancient survival and squeeze his throat until it closed like a pursel. And my inclination was so strong that ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... food, munitions, and instruments. Such a device alone made possible the establishment of these posts in such incredible places, and the perilous journey along the wire rope swung from precipice to precipice and over intervening gulfs was the only condition of their continued survival. The post itself clung to the extreme summit of the mountain as a bird's nest clings to the cranny of rock in which it is built; while huts, devised to the exact and difficult contours of the last crags and hidden as best they might be from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the food he ate; where he could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully—and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? A taciturn long-armed shellback, with hooked fingers, who had been lying on his back smoking, turned in his bed to examine him dispassionately, then, over his head, sent a long jet of clear saliva towards the door. They all ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... by great ingenuity, to force our posterity to have their cupola of St Paul's with the stone mouldings stencilled and "picked out" with niggling colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured "overture"—three knocks on the boards—dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor's approach to the front of the stage after ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... sentiment to the atrocity of this barbarous survival of the ordeal of private battle. That one of the most justly renowned of public men, of unsurpassed ability, should be shot to death like a mad dog, because he had expressed the general feeling about an unprincipled schemer, was an exasperating ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of "elective affinity;" and certainly an acid has no more choice in combining ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of the Red Company, Earthmen. Only we're not all Earthmen now, every year there are fewer recruits, and it won't be long before we die out and the Council will have the last laugh. Old Red Stone, the Traitor of the War of Survival, the little finger of my left hand still missing and telling the Universe I was a very old soldier of the outlawed Free Companies hanging onto life on a rocky planet of the distant Salaman galaxy. Back at the old stand because United Galaxies ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... charms cattle or sore throats, disowning the darker magic of older days, so the Shaman acts against the real wizard. Rink tells us that among the heathen Eskimo the Shaman is sacred, and witchcraft a deadly crime, but that the latter is the secret survival of a more ancient religion. Voodoo, whether practiced, as it is to-day, in Philadelphia, New York, Havana, or Senegambia, deals with alleged devils, poisons, chicken bones, the ivory root, unnatural orgies,—all, in short, that can ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... "in the universal principle, the survival of the fittest? Where there is wealth there ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... what sense, or on what plane, any particular letter should be taken. I think it probably that in the Sacred Language before mentioned, this could at once have been recognized by a difference in the intonation of the voice. This may have been a survival to some extent of the chanting which was the distinguishing characteristic of the speech of the Second Race. (Secret Doctrine, vol. II, p. 198) In the written language it is not easily possible to discover this without much thought, unless endeavour has previously been ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... environment. In other words, nature, though unconscious, selects in a negative way the stronger and the better adapted. Animals vary in nature as well as under domestication from causes not yet well understood. The variations that were favorable to survival, Darwin argued, would secure the survival, through the passing on of these variations by heredity of the better adapted types of plants and animals. The natural process of weeding out the inferior or least adapted through early death, or through failure ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... revolt from Babylon and blindly confident of the strength of their walls and of their men to resist the arms of the great Empire. Of their nation they and their fellows alone had been spared the judgment of the Lord and prided themselves on being the Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival and security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, Get ye far from the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession.(475) Through the early uneventful years of Sedekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party found time ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... professor assumes that while a long-continued war had strengthened rather than weakened the instinct of paternal devotion, it had also dulled other humanitarian instincts, and raised to the first magnitude the law of the survival of the fittest, with the result that when the exodus took place the strong, the intelligent, and the cunning, together with their offspring, crossed the waters of the Channel or the North Sea to the continent, leaving in unhappy ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it was such, being the survival of the old-fashioned one o'clock dinner of a departing age—William entered into conversation with me. He took occasion to inquire into the object of my visit to Manchester. I told him, as briefly as I could, that I intended to begin the business of a mechanical engineer on a very moderate scale, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... published in "Life and Letters," II., page 390. It is not clear why a belief in "direct action" should diminish the glory of Natural Selection, since the changes so produced must, like any other variations, pass through the ordeal of the survival of the fittest. On the whole question of direct action see Mr. Adam Sedgwick's "Presidential Address to the Zoological Section ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... which (trapped, doubtless, by means of some mysterious bait known only to alchemists) three worn but brutal-looking sponges were apparently slumbering in exhaustion. Back of these a dusty plaster cast of a male figure lightly draped seemed to represent the survival of the fittest over some strange and deadly patent medicine. The recessed door bore an inscription in gold letters, tarnished and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... at such a period, in the old Greek phrase, "to follow the argument whithersoe'er it leads," to look facts squarely in the face, and, particularly, the great ugly outstanding fact of war itself, the survival of which democrats, especially in Great Britain and the United States, have of recent years been so greatly tempted ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... frou-frou of a brocaded spectre. She wore black silk mittens, and on either bony wrist a band of black velvet clasped with a large cameo set hideously in pale gold. Thus attired—a veritable caricature by Leech—this survival of a prehistoric age sat rigidly upright and mangled the reputations ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the establishment of the world's work upon a new basis—and that and no less is what this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification—is just one of those large alterations which will never be made by the collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survival and the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling against the continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by which our present method of weekly wages employment can change by imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension—for it is quite evident that only ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus. Although apparently successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow. On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain. Again ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... will never extract and containing agricultural possibilities they will never seek to realize. His plan would be to have only the same governmental care exercised over the red man as is now enjoyed by the white, and then look to the law of the survival of the fittest to furnish a solution of the problem. The case seems so clear and the arguments so potent that he looks for some outside reasons for their failure, and very naturally thinks he discovers them in governmental quarters. "There's too many people living ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind that entails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat? Our ancestors really believed there was always somebody to blame—man, witch, or spirit—if only you could find him; and though we ourselves have mostly got beyond that stage, yet the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... higher immortality than art's,—the immortality of love. The immortality of art indeed is one of those curious illusions of man's self-love which a moment's thought dispels. Art, who need be told, is as dependent for its survival on the survival of its physical media as man's body itself—and though the epic and the great canvas escape combustion for a million years, they must burn at last, burn with all the other accumulated shadows of time. What we call immortality in art is but the shadow of the soul's immortality; but ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... his coat he walked briskly down the avenue, and crossing over to Union Square, entered the gloomy old building which is the sole survival of the days when the Stengel estate foresaw the upward trend of business toward Fourteenth Street. Stepping from the elevator at the seventh floor, he ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wood or to set one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove—the only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of primitive man and is as ancient ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... Jew, the Talmud has had a history, almost as checkered as that of its creator. Like him it was singled out for persecution. Louis IX. burned twenty-four cart-loads of Talmuds in Paris. Its right of survival had often been wrested through church synods and councils. It has been banned, it has been excommunicated, it has been made the subject of popish bulls; but it was in the sixteenth century that the Benedictine Monks ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... a tough tale about tough men. Right from the first chapter we are living with men who are fighting for survival, the enemy being as often as not other men who would rob them. Chapter after chapter leaves the heroes in some new desperate plight, which, when overcome, is almost at once replaced by ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn |
