"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thee back," I in these words Continu'd, "where thou saidst, that usury Offends celestial Goodness; and this knot Perplex'd unravel." He thus made reply: "Philosophy, to an attentive ear, Clearly points out, not in one part alone, How imitative nature takes her course From the celestial mind and from its art: And where her laws the Stagyrite unfolds, Not many leaves scann'd o'er, observing well Thou shalt discover, that your art on her Obsequious follows, as the learner treads In his instructor's step, so that your art ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... wit have a Daedalus to guide him. That Daedalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation; that is art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules, nor imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal. Exercise, indeed, we do, but that very forebackwardly; for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known; and so is our brain delivered of much matter which never was begotten by ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... "Have I really acquired the correct diplomatic air?" he asked. "I can assure you that it is an accident—or perhaps I am imitative." ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are that seem," is one of those conceits which the poet delights to admit into his creed,—a creed, by the way, more marvellous and mystic than ever Athanasius dreamed of. Page 315: I need only mention those lines ending with "She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart!" They are good imitative lines: "he toiled and toiled, of toil to reap no end, but endless toil and never-ending woe." Page 347: Cruelty is such as Hogarth might have painted her. Page 361: all the passage about Love (where ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... name for the Lyre-bird (q.v.). This native name is imitative. The most southerly county in Victoria is called Buln-Buln; it is ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... yet the fun was never of an ill-natured sort. When Dolly gave them a correct embodiment of Lady Augusta in reception of her guests, with an accurate description of the "great Copper-Boiler costume," the bursts of applause meant nothing more than that Dolly's imitative gifts were in good condition, and that the "great Copper-Boiler costume" was a success. Then, the feminine mind being keenly alive to an interest in earthly vanities, an enlargement on Philistine adornments was considered necessary, and Dolly always rendered herself popular ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in vain." Then, like every dreamer, he reviled himself. "What a frightful failure! I wore myself out in a pure loss of imitative harmony. But what is to be ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of Bull Run, we were thrown on the defensive, and the fortifications of our capital were called for in a hurry. There were no models, in this country, from which to copy,—and few, if any, in Europe. Luckily, however, the art of fortification is not imitative; it is based on scientific principles; and we found in General Barnard and his assistants the science to comprehend the problem before them, and the experience and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... offered to Jube afterward, exactly as it had been offered to him. And Jube had taken it. The imitative monkey thrust it hastily into his pocket, and came down from his fantastic toe, and stood soberly enough ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is it! That Mr. Epstein should combine with the taste and intelligence to perceive the beauty of Mexican sculpture the skill and science to reproduce its fine qualities is surely something to note and admire. There is enough in this figure, imitative though it be, to secure for its author pre-eminence amongst living ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of cheap "objects ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... the fusion of two types of life, commonly led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in happiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... imitative and semi-dramatic character of the choral dance ("Laws," II, 655): "Choric movements are imitations of manners occurring in various actions, chances, characters—each particular is imitated, and those to whom the words, the song or the dances are suited, either by nature or ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... church: having before twice seen it. But the Crypt is the only thing worth talking about, on the score of antiquity. The same accomplished guide bade me remark the extraordinary formation of the capitals of the pillars: which, admitting some perversity of taste in a rude, Norman, imitative artist, are decidedly of Roman character. "Perhaps," said M. Le Prevost, "the last efforts of Roman art previous to the relinquishment of the Romans." Among these capitals there is one of the perfect Doric order; while in another you ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... lion, the seal and the elephant are all found; indeed, a lively imagination is not needed to discover in this Garden of the Gods an endless variety of imitative forms of human beings, of birds and beasts and reptiles. These figures possess a curious interest and attract wondering attention; but the notable and majestic objects here are the "Great Gateway" and the "Cathedral Spires." Two lofty tables ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... between his teeth, and resumes his imitations of many birds and quadrupeds. His mocking-bird is very fair; his thrush, passable; but his canary less successful, being rather too reedy and harsh. Farm-yard sounds are thrown off with considerable imitative power. His pig is so good, indeed, that it invites a purchaser, who puts one of the calls into his mouth, and frightfully distorts his features in his wretched efforts to produce the desired grunts and squeaks. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... l. 76. The application of mankind, in the early ages of society, to the imitative arts of painting, carving, statuary, and the casting of figures in metals, seems to have preceded the discovery of letters; and to have been used as a written language to convey intelligence to their distant ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... railway shops, and in great private establishments like Whitworth's and Roberts' of Manchester, Maudslay and Field's of London, Ransome and May of Ipswich, Wilson of Leeds, and Stephenson of Newcastle, must produce by imitative inoculation a powerful effect on the national character. The time has passed when the best workmen were the most notorious drunkards; in all skilled trades self-respect ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... scholars have discovered that the short lines in which Thorpe's translation is couched are imitative of the Old English measure. Iam unable to agree with them. Probably any short-line translation would ipso facto assume a choppiness not dissimilar to the Old English, and probably plenty of lines could be discovered which correspond well enough to the 'five types,' but the agreement seems ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... projector, sublimely confident in himself, seems to expect to realize, on a most gigantic scale, the fable of Mesmerism; he will put the whole world in rapport with him, and it shall have no will but his, and none but such blind, imitative movements as he shall impress on it. And it is to a sort of coma that these projectors would, for the most part, reduce mankind—a state where there is some shadow of thought and passion, but no will, no self-direction, no connexion between the past and present—a state ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... babies lisped and gurgled their merry, imitative "'Scuse me's," though with no thought of any attention ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... imitative hero of Praed's The Troubadour, after disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six dismisses passion forever. We are ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... already out. With a curt nod the Indian seated himself by the fire, and, producing a square plug of tobacco and a knife, began leisurely to fill his pipe. Thorpe watched him in silence. Finally Injin Charley spoke in the red man's clear-cut, imitative English, a pause between ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... boys!" came down from the top of the tree, followed by bursts of imitative shrieks and vociferous applause. "Ha! ha! ha!" shouted Master Ara, as he rolled his head and doubled up his body quite beside himself with laughter. Then came tumultuous applause and encores, and further shouts of "Ha! ha! ha! Haul away! ye ho, ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... intensely self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now native-born,—a novel that would have corrected the too languidly accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like the hive ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... effort a certain imitative melody, but disapproved of the subject itself as low and unworthy of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... flame and splendour of Athens, this institution rose into celebrity and magnificence, until it appears to have become the most impressive spectacle of the heathen world. It is evident that a people so imitative would reject no innovations or additions that could increase the interest or the solemnity of exhibition; and still less such as might come (through whatsoever channel) from that antique and imposing Egypt, which ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and literature, is its prevailing spirit of types and symbols. This is conspicuous both in the poetical books and in those that are didactic or historical. It has had the same influence on the thoughts and imagination of all Christian people and upon the poetry and imitative arts of the Middle Ages (and nearly the same upon later and more cultivated times) that Homer had upon the Ancients. For in it we find the standard of all our Christian images and figures, and it gives us a model of imitation that is far more beautiful ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... own provincial habits. In Manhattanese parlance, for instance, a 'square' is a 'park,' or, even a 'garden' is a 'park.' A promenade, on the water, is a 'battery!' It is a pity that, in this humour for change, they have not thought of altering the complex and imitative ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... Three sides of an extensive square were enclosed by the semi-gothic buildings, floridly decorated with stone carving; one consisted of the main edifice, the lower windows tented with striped projecting blinds; a second of the wing containing the reception rooms, fronted by the imitative cloister, which was continued and faced with glass on the third side—each supporting column covered with climbing plants, the passion-flower, the tropaeolum, the trumpet honeysuckle, or even the pomegranate, opening their gay blooms on every side. The close-shaven ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... made of the grain of the sacred last sheaf from the previous harvest, and therefore sacramental in character, were also used in different ways in folk-survivals. They were rolled down a slope—a magical imitative act, symbolising and aiding the course of the sun. The cake had also a divinatory character. If it broke on reaching the foot of the slope this indicated the approaching death of its owner. In another custom in Perthshire, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... must know that all the Bushmen have that talent, and that their caves are full of the sketches of all sorts of animals, remarkably characteristic. The organ of imitation is very strongly developed in the Bushmen, which accounts for their talents as draftsmen, and Omrah's remarkable imitative powers." ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that I have received no encouragement from those who are the best critics of this art, though I have submitted my work to many since I left school. Some have said that my work was commonplace, others that it was imitative; all have agreed that it was dull, and they have unanimously urged me to abandon every thought of such composition. Nevertheless I am convinced that I have the highest possible talents not only in this department ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... with mortal pencil shalt thou trace An imitative radiance:[1] thy pure lyre, Springs from our changeful atmosphere's embrace, And beams and breathes in empyreal fire: The Homeric and Miltonian sacred tone Responsive hail that ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... twenty-four when he published this rather immature work, and it might have been better if he had waited longer. It was to him what the "Sorrows of Werther" was to Goethe, but while the "Sorrows of Werther" made Goethe famous in many countries, "Fanshawe" fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative of Scott than the "Sorrows of Werther" is of Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the "Sorrows of Werther" ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the spirit without the body is vain, ineffectual, fruitless. Imagination alone can no more make a painter or a poet than wings can constitute a bird. Each must have a body. Unfortunately, in painting we have more than enough of body without spirit. Correct drawing, wonderful imitative powers, cleverness, adaptiveness, great facility and dexterity of hand, much largeness of quotation, and many material and mechanical qualities, all go to form an amusing, and, it may be, useful spectacle, but not a true picture. We have also, but not so often, the reverse of all this,—the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All imitative imagery is the grave ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... at this, and Captain Miles hearing what had been said, every word being distinctly audible on the poop, began speaking to Mr Marline about the imitative habits ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the success is perfect. A sense of fitness always enhances the effect of beauty. I will not attempt a long essay on the subject, but if America, in her vastness, her immense natural resources, and her remote grandeur, would be less imitative, she would be infinitely more picturesque ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... deal of the child in the self-indulgent trader; and he had not lived among the breeds for twenty-five years without imbibing many of their characteristics. As to the boy, Garth and Natalie felt not a moment's uneasiness; Charley met Nick's advances with a kind of imitative bluster, that was a source of great secret ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... moves by most irregular, angular leaps from point to point of the figure. The theory is therefore remodeled by substituting for the movement sensations of the eye, the tendencies corresponding to those early movements of touching imitative of the form, by which we learned to know a form for what it is, and the reproduction of feeling-tones belonging to the character of such movement. The movements of touching and feeling for a smooth continuous curved object are themselves pleasant. This complex of psychical factors makes a pleasurably ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... in the dome of mighty Mars the red With different figures all the sides were spread; This temple, less in form, with equal grace, Was imitative of the first in Thrace; For that cold region was the loved abode And sovereign mansion of the warrior god. The landscape was a forest wide and bare, Where neither beast nor human kind repair, The fowl that scent afar ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... to a frame-house, or store, where there was an extensive display of Indian work. The Lake Superior and Huron Red Indians are particularly noted for the beauty of their embroidery on skins, silk, birch bark, and cloth, in beads, porcupine quills, or silk. Their imitative genius is so great that the squaws can copy anything, and I know people who have had their crests and coats-of-arms embroidered upon their tobacco-pouches and belts, from an impression on paper or sealing-wax. Generally ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... be the imitative instinct asserting itself," suggests the good woman. "As you, dear, have so often pointed out, one crime ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... as those of Scotland; but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the opinion ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... then, with a wonderful display of the imitative faculty, he went through a clever pantomime, turning his black face into a grotesque copy of Mallam's, as he made believe to pour rum out of a bottle, drinking again and again, smiling in an imbecile manner at first, ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... in Schumann's Op. 68 is well conceived in the sense that it is freely harmonic in some places, imitative in others, while in the opening the melody is very simply accompanied. Show the children how interesting the left-hand part ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... could not have been written among the forests of Canada, while men were labouring with the many difficulties of a pioneer existence. But with the greater opportunities of leisure and culture necessarily opening up to us in the future, Canadians may yet have a literature, not merely imitative, as at present, but creative and original. It is stated somewhere in an old English review of American literature, that on this new continent we can hardly expect the rich fruition which springs from that deep, humanized soil of the old world, which has for ages been enriched ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... was a street by that name until last week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep her hands still ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... conversazione best translates it,) but is applied to a series of short narratives, or rather anecdotes, told alternately in verse and rhymed prose, with all the brilliance of rhetoric, the richness of alliteration, antithesis, and imitative sound, and the endless grammatical subtilties of which the Arabic language is capable. The work of Hariri is considered the unapproachable model of this style of narrative throughout all the East. Rueckert called ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... mind. In like manner, before one plays or sings a single note, he must have the idea of that note in mind; in other words, the idea is the antecedent to the movement, and absolutely essential. To have such an idea, memory is necessary. It is impossible to sing a tone after another, as an imitative effort, unless one has the power to retain that tone in memory for at least a brief period of time; and before this same tone can be reproduced on sight of it as represented by a written note, the memory of the sound to which it answers ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... is the most imitative creature in the world. Before he is out of pinafores he tries to talk and act just like his elders. It is because of this inherent tendency to say and do those very things which he hears others say and do, that, if faith-thoughts are early and constantly suggested to the unfolding mind of ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... is no such thing as a dryad," said Diana. Diana's mother had found out about the Haunted Wood and had been decidedly angry over it. As a result Diana had abstained from any further imitative flights of imagination and did not think it prudent to cultivate a spirit of belief even ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that they would not see short of reading her letters entire. Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where she ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... make a ghastly sport of them. Once, when they were in a specially jocular mood, Alexander, in company with his brother Constantine and some comrades in play, enacted—as youngsters in their apishly imitative mood will do—one of the most hideous scenes that concluded a previous reign. The throttling of the Emperor Paul was the subject! Alexander, standing for Paul, was assaulted and thrown down by his brother, who knelt ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... and sculpture are imitative arts above all others, and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, more tinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... said he, with conviction, whereupon the mother, the father and Monsieur Rouquin filled the room with joyous exclamations and the baby, imitative little beggar that he ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... ancestral laces, what ancient flowers, more imaginative than imitative, were boldly displayed on some perennial caps! The Presidente Boirouge, Bianchon's cousin, exchanged a few words with the doctor, from whom she extracted some "advice gratis" by expatiating on certain pains in the chest, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps, too, with more real advantage to his auditory. It is, indeed, very difficult happily to excite the passions and draw the characters of men; but our nature leads us more directly to such paintings than to the invention of a story. We are imitative animals; and we are more naturally led to imitate the exertions of character and passion than to observe and describe a series of events, and to discover those relations and dependencies in them which will please. Nothing can be more rare than this quality. Herein, as I believe, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting. As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, Robert's eager hand on the boy's arm, whenever the clumsy rustic movements made too much noise among the underwood. They watched it uttering its jarring imitative note on bush after bush, just dropping to the ground as they came near, and flitting a yard or two farther, but otherwise showing no sign of alarm at their presence. Then suddenly the impulse which had been leading him on died in the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... attain to the position of importance which the great poet had rendered obligatory for future aspirants. It is worth noting that Pushkin's best work, in his second, non-Byronic, purely national style, enjoyed less success among his contemporaries than his early, half-imitative efforts, where the characters were weak, lacking in independent creation, and where the whole tone was gloomy. This gloomy tone expressed the sentiments of all Russia of the period, and it was natural that Byronic heroes should be in consonance with the general taste. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... to me singularly original!" he said.. "In fact, one of your critics says you are TOO original! Mind you, Alwyn, that is a very serious fault in this imitative age!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... then took pains to prove that "nearly all the book is imitative" ... and concluded: "Work of this nature ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... is the opinion of Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting, that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to eminence;—sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractere de la bonte de l'ame et ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... far as Latin literature was founded on the Greek, that is, in so far as it was a derivative and imitative literature, it was not very fit for missionary purposes. One people can give to another only what is its own. The Greek gods were useless for export. An example may be taken from the English rule in India. We can give to the peoples of India our own representative ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... calls—the two shade indefinitely into each other—expresses a sympathetic emotional consciousness of the actions going on about them, particularly of the life of their kind. In general these utterances are directed toward their kindred of their own species. In many cases, however, as among the imitative birds, the sounds which they utter indicate a curiously keen interest in the actions of their masters or other human affairs. The mocking-birds and some other species will, with great assiduity, endeavor to copy any sound which they happen to hear. I well remember watching ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... that in guiding the child to the formation of these habits, example and practice are far more important than precepts and rules. Example is more important because the child is very imitative; one rude act on the part of some older member of the household will counteract the benefit of many verbal lessons in politeness. Practice is important because it is through constant repetition of an act that it at ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... True to her imitative instincts, Audrey could be frank with the frank. "Yes, I am. But it's our own little secret, and we don't want anybody ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... be noticed that these works of Giotto, in common with all others of the period, are independent of all the inferior sources of pictorial interest. They never show the slightest attempt at imitative realisation: they are simple suggestions of ideas, claiming no regard except for the inherent value of the thoughts. There is no filling of the landscape with variety of scenery, architecture, or incident, as in the works of Benozzo Gozzoli or Perugino; no wealth of jewellery and gold spent on the ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... either lost or saved. If democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... voice, and added to them gestures, which are, in their own nature, more expressive, and whose meaning depends less on any prior determination. They therefore expressed visible and movable objects by gestures and those which strike the ear, by imitative sounds: but as gestures scarcely indicate anything except objects that are actually present or can be easily described, and visible actions; as they are not of general use, since darkness or the interposition of an ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... be his manner of testifying to his own preference for the ideal of usefulness and immediate efficiency. But even so he would never for an instant admit that he was pursuing a merely conventional good. He may be largely imitative in his standards of value, recognizing such aims as are common to some time or race; nevertheless none would be more sure than he of the truth of his ideal. Question him, and he will maintain that ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... leaf and flower designs is generally modern. The old-time patterns are for the most part simple geometrical figures, which are decorative and emblematic rather than imitative. Shafts of light and shadow alternating or dovetailed represent life, its joys and sorrows. The world is conceived of as rectangular and flat, and is represented by a square. The sky is concave—a hollow sphere. ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... points on which two equally good Greek scholars may well differ in the mere interpretation of the words. What, for instance, are the 'two natural causes' in Chapter IV which have given birth to Poetry? Are they, as our translator takes them, (1) that man is imitative, and (2) that people delight in imitations? Or are they (1) that man is imitative and people delight in imitations, and (2) the instinct for rhythm, as Professor Butcher prefers? Is it a 'creature' a thousand miles long, or a 'picture' a thousand miles long which raises some trouble ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... blunt chisels than anything else. They also make and keep in repair the hussowahs, or serrated sickles, with which the crops are cut. They are slow at their task, but many of them are ingenious workers in metal. They are very imitative, and I have seen many English tools and even gun-locks, made by a common native village blacksmith, that could not be surpassed in delicacy of finish by any English smith. It is foreign to our ideas of the brawny blacksmith, to hear that he sits to his work, but this is ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... with a Latin oration on the state of society by Mr. Kipley. Then an English Oration on the Imitative Arts, by Mr. J. Wheelock. The degrees were then conferred, and, in addition to the usual ceremony of the book, diplomas were delivered to the candidates, with this form of words: 'Admitto vos ad primum (vel secundum) gradum in ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... opening in C minor, and passing to, and closing in E flat. It contains imitative passages evolved from the ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... little wealth of thought; and Mr. Fox, who had read 'Incondita' and been struck by its promise, confessed afterwards to Mr. Browning that he had feared these tendencies as his future snare. But the imitative first note of a young poet's voice may hold a rapture of inspiration which his most original later utterances will never convey. It is the child Sordello, singing against ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... happens to kill a porcupine big with young while the girl is undergoing her period of separation, the foetus is given to her, and she lets it slide down between her shirt and her body so as to fall on the ground like an infant.[122] Here the imitation of childbirth is a piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic designed to facilitate the effect which ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... time, had been tentative and imitative, being mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him in his reading. He had read considerably in some six languages, (Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French and English) and widely in at least four of them, besides his scholarship ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... out this simple direction, however, we are confronted by another of the peculiar characteristics of music. Music, in distinction from the static, concrete and imitative arts, is always in motion, and to follow it requires an intensity of concentration and an accuracy of memory which can be acquired, but for which, like most good things, we have to work. We all know ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... found a noble expression; and in modern days a perhaps still completer expression in music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition. But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little sympathy with the art which has moved ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... division there must rule another yet more important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural objects or limited to useful appliance. You may either paint a picture that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting; you may mold a statue, or a plate; build the resemblance of a cluster of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... it?" I asked, after a moment's pause; since Johnny seemed to expect some astonishment. "Boys are imitative little monkeys." ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... spontaneity seemed to have passed out of it, it was repetition of repetition by poor workmen, and the simplicity and purity of the technic were corrupted by foreign influences. With the Alexandrian epoch Egyptian art came in contact with Greek methods, and grew imitative of the new art, to the detriment of its own native character. Eventually it was entirely lost in the art of the Greco-Roman world. It was never other than conventional, produced by a method almost as unvarying as that of the hieroglyphic writing, and in this very respect characteristic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... about 1640, Rembrandt's etching is characterised by a clear lineal manner with little tendency to the chiaroscuro which gradually became the characteristic feature of his artistic style in etching as well as in painting. Later he tends to a greater breadth of treatment in line, and a less imitative treatment of physical form. At first his experiments in chiaroscuro were produced by the close mesh of etched lines, but it must be confessed that etching as such rather loses its character when the line is so entirely ...
— Rembrandt, With a Complete List of His Etchings • Arthur Mayger Hind
... transformed from the forlorn-looking elf to a natty little personage, more like the pictures of jeunes filles on the back of French pattern plates than she could have believed possible for Irish flesh and blood. Imitative Pixie had caught "the air," and the good Therese had evidently taken immense pains with the costume in which her pupil should make her reappearance in ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... common observers reason from the progress of the experimental sciences to that of the imitative arts. The improvement of the former is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting materials, ages more in separating and combining them. Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I became her teacher, she had made for herself upward of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for anything very much she would gesticulate in a very expressive manner. Failing ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... through all the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry was exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off only some strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. "If a man," said Johnson, "hops on one leg, Foote can hop on one leg." Garrick, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "imitative play" impulse of children and provides them with tiny bricks with which to "build a house," and dolls upon which they may lavish their tenderness. We exalt the love of the mother and the stability of the home, but in regard to those difficult years between childhood and maturity we beg the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... Landon's literary popularity upon the mind of Miss Roberts very probably caused that lady to desire similar celebrity. Indeed, so imitative are the impulses of the human mind, that it may fairly be questioned if Miss Landon would ever have attuned her lyre had she mot been in the presence of Miss Mitford's and Miss Rowden's "fame, and felt its influence." Miss Mitford has chronicled so minutely all the sayings and doings ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... She had gone through the night unscathed, and was now renewing herself in calm, oblivious sleep. Her ingenuous girlishness was apparent then. It seemed as if all her wise and sweet behaviour of the evening could have been nothing but so many imitative gestures. It seemed impossible that a being so young and fresh could have really experienced the mood of which her gestures had been the expression. Her strong virginal simplicity made Constance ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... sedge-bird be pleased to say it sings most part of the night; its notes are hurrying, but not unpleasing, and imitative of several birds; as the sparrow, swallow, skylark. When it happens to be silent in the night, by throwing a stone or clod into the bushes where it sits you immediately set it a-singing; or in other words, though it slumbers sometimes, yet as ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... to say what his ultimate rank will be. It seems probable that it will be a high one, and it is possible that, centuries hence, the historian of American letters will start with Whitman as the first exponent of an original and democratic literature, disregarding all that has gone before as merely imitative of Europe. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Emphasis by Direct Proportion; 5. Emphasis by Inverse Proportion; 6. Emphasis by Iteration; 7. Emphasis by Antithesis; 8. Emphasis by Climax; 9. Emphasis by Surprise; 10. Emphasis by Suspense; 11. Emphasis by Imitative Movement. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... imitative, hence the value of example over precept. The children of courteous parents will imbibe courtesy as naturally and unconsciously as the growing plant absorbs oxygen from the air and sunlight that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... after the other in monotonous imitative fashion, the hour of nine when I delivered my horse to a sleepy groom at the little tavern ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... apart from such importance as might be implied in her finding herself presently in the enjoyment of a very pretty little income for a young lady, was a simple, good-natured school-girl, in the echoing and imitative stage of school-girl life. She looked up to her brother in everything, and was disposed to regard whatever was by ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... frequent cause of strength in Saxon and other primitive words-their imitative character may be similarly resolved into the more general cause. Both those directly imitative, as splash, bang, whiz, roar, &c., and those analogically imitative, as rough, smooth, keen, blunt, thin, hard, crag, &c., have a greater or less likeness to the things symbolized; and by ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ essentially ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... in order to find out the way they work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature do; or he imitates his own instinctive actions by setting up before him in ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... translations into the Anglo-Saxon of Boethius de Consolatione, the Universal History of Orosius, Baeda's Ecclesiastical History, and Pope Gregory's Regula Pastoralis. But the fact that AElfred still has recourse to Roman originals, marks the stage of civilisation as yet mainly imitative; while the interesting passages intercalated by the king himself show that the beginnings of a really native prose literature were already taking shape ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... that bonny book of thine Where the extreme waste-paper basket gapes, There shall thy futile fancies peak and pine, With other minor poets, pallid shapes, Who come a long way short of the divine, Tormented souls of imitative apes. ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... Lance, if you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a song or poem is cuicatl. It is derived from the verb cuica, to sing, a term probably imitative or onomatopoietic in origin, as it is also a general expression for the twittering of birds. The singer was called cuicani, and is distinguished from the composer of the song, the poet, to whom was applied the term cuicapicqui, in which compound the last member, picqui, corresponds ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... predilections for the pacific pursuits of an agricultural or commercial country, is religiously banished, and their places supplied by an infinite variety of military toys:—platoons of gens-d'armerie, troops of artillery, tents, waggons, camp equipage, all are arranged in imitative array upon the counter. The infant of the grande nation becomes familiar, in his nurse's arms, with all the detail of the profession to which he is hereafter to belong; and when he opens his eyes for the first time, it is to rest them upon that terrible machinery of war, in ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... also highly probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison called them. It is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. Suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, harmony, modulation, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of McGaw's eldest son became visible to Mr. Crimmins, his face broke into creases so nearly imitative of a smile that his best friend would not have known him. He slapped the patched knees of his overalls gayly, bent over in a subdued chuckle, and disported himself in a merry and much satisfied way. His rum-and-watery ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions—the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... of the suburb has just struck ten, when quick, light steps approach the studio door. A gentleman enters—trips gaily over the imitative pen and brush—and, walking up to the fire, begins to warm his back at it, looking about him rather absently, and whistling "Drops of Brandy" in the minor key. This gentleman is Mr. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... il Pensieroso," etc., enchants me less, yet it has interested me much as an important contribution to imitative music; and, if you will kindly allow me, I want to keep the volume here a few days longer and to send it back with ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... day and day. The years have silently buried themselves, with no crown of happy memories. She left her merry home at the Alameda shore of the great bay to be the lonely lady of this distant domain. Her narrow nature has settled into imitative and mechanical devotion, a ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... is identical with Tancred. Stiggins goes back to the illustrious Anglo-Saxon name Stigand, as Wiggins does to wigand, a champion. Cadman represents Caedmon, the name of the poet-monk of Whitby. Segar is an imitative form of the Anglo-Sax. Saegaer, of which the normal modern representative is Sayers. Giblett is not a name one would covet, but it stands in the same relationship to Gilbert as ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... same as I do," cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of the word Barbar may be classed under four periods, 1. In the time of Homer, when the Greeks and Asiatics might probably use a common idiom, the imitative sound of Barbar was applied to the ruder tribes, whose pronunciation was most harsh, whose grammar was most defective. 2. From the time, at least, of Herodotus, it was extended to all the nations who were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but his talent was not mimetic—not imitative; he could never have been an actor—never thrown himself into existences wholly alien or repugnant to his own. Grave or gay, stern or kind, Guy Darrell, though often varying, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than a mechanical invention, imitative of the act of hearing; as writing is a mechanical mode of indicating sounds, and thus becomes a substitute for the art of speaking, and conveying ideas. But there is this material difference between reading and hearing, that in hearing the person giving attention is in a great ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... we were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... road, and in that meaning it may be called his road; but his it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an incommunicable excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever led his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits not ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... this view, that the department of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassed that which derived its power from coloring and perspective. The sculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural result of the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in every posture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educated senses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature through the medium of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... of Windermere to what Mr. B * * terms 'entusumusy' for lakes, and mountains, and daffodils, and buttercups; but I should be glad to be apprised of the foundation of the London propensities of their imitative brethren to the same' high argument.' Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have rambled over half Europe, and seen Nature in most of her varieties (although I think that they have occasionally not used her very well); ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... concerning itself with its objects rather than with the social model of the day, it is self-corrective and tends inevitably toward the common truth. It is the opinion that is not really individual, but imitative, respectful of persons, generally submissive to ulterior motives of a social kind, that is private in the bad sense. Its privacy lies in its artificiality, in its partisanship, and in its remove from the open ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... which were blended the tones of childhood and age. Annie, with her sweet soprano, led, and gave time and key to them all, very much as by the force and loveliness of her character she influenced the daily harmony of their lives. The children, with their imitative faculty, seemed to gather from her lips how to follow with fair correctness, and they chirped through the tunes like two intelligent robins. Miss Eulie sang a sweet though rather faint alto that was like a low minor key in a happy ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... successful with the fantasy-trick. There were new devices. They were triumphs. They were plainly the beginnings of progress of a brand-new kind, not derived wholly from the present, and certainly not imitative of the children's. But the devices couldn't be used. Their existence couldn't be revealed. Because anything of unprecedented design would seem to have been learned from the children, and the United ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... supposes herself alone with her natural love, the understanding listens furtively and substitutes for the holy child's-play mere memories of former purposes or prospects of new ones. Yes, it even continues to give to the hollow, cold illusions a tinge of color and a fleeting heat; and thus by its imitative skill it tries to steal from the innocent fantasy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... first time, an opportunity of forming an opinion of French beauty, the assemblage of ladies being very numerous, and all of them most elegantly dressed. Travelling, and the imitative arts, have given a most surprising uniformity to all the fashions of dress and ornament; and, whatever may be said to the contrary, there is a very slight difference between the scenes of a French and English polite assembly. If any thing, however, be ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... movements of large limbs, or finer accessory motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive, and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm, attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record every word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, by which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... island, dedicated to the temple the image of Venus which Ariadne had given him, and danced with the young Athenians a dance that, in memory of him, they say is still preserved among the inhabitants of Delos, consisting in certain measured turnings and returnings, imitative of the windings and twistings of the labyrinth. And this dance, as Dicaearchus writes, is called among the Delians, the Crane. This he danced round the Ceratonian Altar, so called from its consisting of horns ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the strings; the fundamental beat—the time now changed from 2/2 to 3/4—preserving the same value. Now we begin to foresee that this theme is to be the climax of the whole work. In measure 140 the development proper is resumed; based, at first, on some modulatory and imitative treatment of the first theme and followed by two ff sostenuto announcements of the jubilant second theme. After these have subsided there are a number of measures (piu lento) of a shadowy outline, developed from preceding melodic phrases. The pace gradually ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the doctrines he taught; admired in the poems in which he went halting after Byron, and in the eloquence with which he meant one day to astonish great congregations. There was nothing original as yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet. He did possess one invaluable gift—that of perceiving and admiring more than a little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered merely ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition—poor as that of any mountebank emperor—to ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... great elaboration on their similes, and as a rule imitated them from a certain limited number of Greek originals. In Virgil but a few are original, i.e., taken from things he had himself witnessed, or feelings he had known. Lucan is less imitative in form, and he first used with any frequency the simile founded on a recollection of some well-known passage of Greek literature or conception of Greek art. In this Statius follows him; the simile of the infant Apollo noticed in this chapter is a ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... to the subject of chewing. Whether the rock goat, the filthy animal to which we have before adverted, or the tobacco worm, first taught imitative man to masticate tobacco, we are ignorant. One thing, however, is most certain, that of all modes of using it, chewing seems most vulgar and ungentlemanlike, and it is worthy of particular remark, that in our country it is more used in ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... living among the people, the Burnses, the Brangers, the Heines are unknown in Russia. I have already stated that originality must not be looked for on Russian soil; that Russian literature is essentially an imitative literature in its forms, hence imitative force must have time to look about, examine, copy, and for ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... probability that in the mind of the natives such resemblances are not purely figurative or symbolic, but that they are also magical in intention, being supposed not merely to represent the object of the supplicant's prayer, but actually, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to contribute to its accomplishment. If that is so, we must conclude that the religion of these savages, as manifested in their prayers to the spirits of the dead, is tinctured with an alloy of magic; they do not trust entirely to the compassion ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... always, of course, empirical. Thus, too, he regarded the principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and indicates a necessary connection, as a mere rule of association, lying in the imitative faculty of imagination, which can present only contingent, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant |
