"Fibre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... girl alone at home with her cranky father, and no variety or change or outlook or help, struck him painfully. It would hardly have struck most young men; but Pitt, with all his rollicking waywardness and self-pleasing, had a fine fibre in him which could feel things. Then Esther's nature, he knew, was one rich in possibilities; to which life was likely to bring great joy or great sorrow; ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... stage neared my home, my heart leaped within me, and every fibre of it trembled with emotion. I could have hugged and kissed each familiar sturdy old tree, looking so grand and natural. My soul warmed and yearned toward the well remembered scene; and as I thought ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... sometimes endure. And none the lighter is this load, from her being excluded, by her silence, from the supports of sympathy. On whom shall she cast her cares? If there are motives, which forbid the disclosure to human ears, of the sword that is cutting the bare fibre of her frame, and piercing her heart, to whom shall she go ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... which are said to be the same as those used for this belt, said that the split cane-like material is a strip from the periphery of the petiole or stem of a palm, and that the other material is sclerenchyma fibre from the petiole or rhizome of a fern, and not that of a creeping plant. I may say that I felt a doubt at the time as to the complete accuracy of the information given to me concerning the vegetable materials used for the manufacture of various articles, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... its advocacy. The upheaval to the air of that dark inward nature which is ever working in us,—the startling proof of that loudly proclaimed, faintly realized truth, that this mind, so pervading every fibre of the body, is yet separate in its essence,—the novel gratification of the petty vanities and petty questionings which beset undecided men,—what wonder that persons not accustomed to sound analysis of evidence should be beguiled by these subtilest adaptations to their conditions, and hold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Bobtail went home. An arrangement had been made for the removal of the boxes, but the presence of Ezekiel Taylor seemed to interfere with its execution. He was at home, sullen and ugly, and nothing could be done while he was in the house. But after supper he went out, shaking in every fibre of his frame, and hankering for a dram to quiet ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... she steered down the Tiber, It shook every fibre Of the conclave from forehead to femur; But, 'twas when in her glee, She got sight of the sea, That she showed them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... knew Kearney in every fold and fibre of his nature, Kearney had not the very vaguest conception of him with whom he sat every day at meals, and communed through almost every hour of his life. He treated Joe, indeed, with a sort of proud protection, thinking him a sharp, clever, idle fellow, who would never ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... lip thirsted for the stream, is it not delicious to sit at the brink of a wild, impetuous torrent, to gaze on its white foam and breaking waves, till you can almost feel their gush in every nerve and fibre, and can bathe your very soul in them. And while you slowly smoke your pipe of purest tobacco, the sands of the desert, and their burning sun, rise again before you, when you prayed for even the shadow of a cloud on your way. The banks are in some parts ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... decentralized," he declared. "What she wanted she could not achieve. The living force within could not find expression. When it could not get expressed in one way it took another. Sex spread itself out over her body. It permeated the very fibre of her being. At the last she was sex personified, sex become condensed and impersonal. Certain words, the touch of a man's hand, sometimes even the sight of a man passing in the ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... up with thanks: a cheerful thrill quivers through his heart, like the melody of an Aeolian harp; but the earnest duties of life soon claim his attention and his cares. The melodious thrill dies away, and on he must go; on he goes, joyless, cheerless, and cold, every fibre of his heart bent to the earnest duties of the day. But when the hard work of the day is done, and the stress of mind for a moment subsides, then the heart again claims its right, and the tender fingers of our memory ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... far short of the ideal thus pictured. His bravery, versatility, frankness, and readiness of speech are all vividly portrayed, while his mettlesome temper and his arrogance are alike essential to his role, and are true to the record of the historical D'Ambois. But there is a coarseness of fibre in Chapman's creation, an occasional foul-mouthed ribaldry of utterance which robs him of sympathetic charm. He has in him more of the swashbuckler and the bully than of the courtier and the cavalier. Beaumont and Fletcher, one ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... to help themselves!" Mrs. Heth was saying. "Wholesale, thoughtless generosity is demoralizing to poverty. It is sheer ruination to their moral fibre." ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... far forward as I could without hitting the stirrup. The man seemed to be in a sort of military trance, for he never winced. Quick as thought, I repeated the blow, and this time the fellow fairly yelled with rage, astonishment and pain. I have since made up my mind that his nerve-fibre must have been of that inert sort which transmits waves of sensation but slowly, so that the perception of the first blow reached the interior of his helmet just about as the second descended. At all events, he jerked back his foot, and somehow, between the involuntary contraction of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... brawny arms and manly chest are scored By frequent passage of the sounding string; Unharmed he bears the mid-day sun; no toil His mighty spirit daunts; his sturdy limbs, Stripped of redundant flesh, relinquish nought Of their robust proportions, but appear In muscle, nerve, and sinewy fibre cased. [Approaching the King.] Victory to the King! We have tracked the wild beasts to their lairs in the forest. Why delay, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... South Wales, of which the Coast Murring tribe may be regarded as typical, the drama of resurrection from the dead was exhibited in a graphic form to the novices at initiation. The ceremony has been described for us by an eye-witness. A man, disguised with stringy bark fibre, lay down in a grave and was lightly covered up with sticks and earth. In his hand he held a small bush, which appeared to be growing in the soil, and other bushes were stuck in the ground to heighten the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... joy of victory surged through her veins. She had bared the mailed fist! Had wrested a people from the hand of their oppressor! The Snare Lake Indians were henceforth to be her Indians! She had ridded the North of MacNair! Every fibre of her sang with the exultation of it as she turned into the room and encountered the fishlike stare of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... him trembling. He held out his quivering hand and looked at it, and set his teeth. Heaven and earth, how strange it was! This girl had taken possession of him body and soul; every fibre of his being clamoured for her. To be near her, just to be able to see her, hear her, meant happiness; to ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Next in importance to the production of rice, which is the staple food of the people, come the mulberry and tea plants, one species of the former not only feeding the silkworm, but it also affords the fibre of which Japanese paper is made, as well as forming the basis of their cordage and some descriptions of dress material. In usefulness the bamboo is most remarkable, growing to a height of sixty feet, and entering ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... if all the lives in the universe and the future of her soul were at stake, did she struggle to free herself from his grasp—but in vain; every fibre, every muscle of her body was completely at his will. On and on he pushed her, until foot by foot, inch by inch, she approached the cradle, and all the while his hellish voice was breathing the vilest of inspirations into her brain. At last she stood by the side of the baby, and bent ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... apparently survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface. A little while, and, without a nod of warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and falls prostrate with ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lines of the old Vedic hymn to the dawn maiden, rose to my lips. I had never appreciated or felt their truth down in the dusty plains, but here, on the free hills, the glad welcoming of the morning light seemed to run through every fibre, as thousands of years ago the same joyful thrill of returning life inspired the pilgrim fathers of the Aryan race. Almost unconsciously, I softly intoned the hymn, as I had heard my old Brahmin teacher in Allahabad when ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... we must set ourselves to make our lives simpler and plainer, and oppose the ever-increasing luxury and love of pleasure, with its sure and certain result, a relaxed moral fibre, which, to a race called to such high destinies and difficult tasks as our Anglo-Saxon race, is simply fatal. It can, and it must be done. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... another class whose health is habitually poor, but who furnish the usual quantity of milk without the exhaustion experienced by the class just described. The milk of these women is of poor quality. It is abundant, but watery. Their infants are pallid having soft and flabby fibre.' ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Howe's assistance, who had some practice that way during his roving life, proceeded to cleanse the wounds with the decoction: after which he held some of them in his hands until they were wilted, then laid them smoothly over the wound, confining the whole with the small fibre of leather wood—that never-failing substitute for ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... shaded by the leafy trees. An electric tramcar, quite empty, ran along the avenue with a metallic rustle. It seemed to him he would have given anything to be sitting inside all alone. He was inexpressibly weary, weary in every fibre of his body, but he had a reason for not being the first to break off the conversation. At any instant, in the visionary and criminal babble of revolutionists, some momentous words might fall on his ear; from her lips, from anybody's lips. As long as he ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of Sinfi's eyes indicated to me, who knew them so well, that every nerve, every fibre in her system, was trembling under the stress of some intense emotion. I stood and watched her, wondering as to her condition, and speculating as to what her crazy project ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Merino sheep have been introduced from Australia. Ostrich farms have also been established. Clover, lucerne, ryegrass and similar grasses have been introduced to improve and vary the fodder. Other vegetable products of economic value are many varieties of timber trees, and fibre-producing plants, which are abundant in the scrub regions between the coast and the higher land bordering the rift-valley. Over the greater part of the country the soil is light reddish loam; in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... sir," Stephen said, "that if we could get some strong fibre, or some of those thin climbers that barred our way—they were not thicker than string, but there was no breaking them, and I should think that they would do—that with them we could sew the planks together and caulk them afterwards with the threads from a bit of the leg of ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... worn to a mere splinter. Warned by the voice below me, I proceed with a trembling caution, tenfold more exciting to the strained nerves than the wildest bound on a mettled racer, the fiercest rush that ever tingled through every fibre ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... section we encounter as we pass down is that of the corpus callosum, a body of white fibre firmer than the external surface of the brain, and therefore called the corpus callosum or callous body, which consists of white nerve fibres gathered in from nearly all parts of the brain on each side and crossing the median line. We may regard ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted nor approved of were necessary to ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wrinkles around her eyes. He did not know that her skin was weather-beaten, her figure less graceful, her hair fast turning gray. To him she was simply "Hetty:" the word meant as it always had meant, fulness of love, delight, life. Doctor Eben was a man of that fine fibre of organic loyalty, to which there is not possible, even a temptation to forsake or remove from its object. Men having this kind of uprightness and loyalty, rarely are much given to words or demonstrations of affection. To them love takes its place, side by ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... either lie among the aquatic plants, or openly feed on the turf plain. (3/5. In the stomach and duodenum of a capybara which I opened, I found a very large quantity of a thin yellowish fluid, in which scarcely a fibre could be distinguished. Mr. Owen informs me that a part of the oesophagus is so constructed that nothing much larger than a crowquill can be passed down. Certainly the broad teeth and strong jaws of this animal are well fitted to grind into pulp ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the waters of Bath, and bathed, in diametrical opposition to the opinion of some physicians there settled, and found myself better every day, notwithstanding their unfavourable prognostic. If I had been of the rigid fibre, full of blood, subject to inflammation, I should have followed a different course. Our acquaintance, doctor C—, while he actually spit up matter, and rode out every day for his life, led his horse to water, at the pond in ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... said pitifully in after life. Certainly with this exacting grandmother, there can be no childhood as it is understood to-day; but if Dorothea submits to the rigorous discipline enforced upon her, she will make a woman of iron fibre who will flinch from no hardship and will leave no task undone. Happily she did submit to it. The alternative would have been to return to her half-vagabond father. Too much discipline or too little was her destiny. She preferred to take the medicine in ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... his life; to read its hidden lesson; to transmute it, by the miracle of divine grace, into something fairer and sweeter; to let its scorching fire make steel of that which was only iron. To accept, to believe, to feel this, in every fibre of his nature, is to "glory" in the tribulation. It is to extract its best meaning, and to go on in life better equipped than before. "The tests of life are to make and not break us." Here is the truer view, and one ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... forgotten, that every fibre passes through no less than ten sets of machinery, hence, the united spindles and threads travel through 1,000 miles a minute. The noise of their united frictions and collisions, and the united hum of thousands of little spindles, each revolving 4,000 times ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... usual. But it should be borne in mind that there should be no trace of "give" in the shaft, for such would be all against the accuracy that is wanted, and a man when he is playing the short approach shot wants to feel that he has a club in his hand that can be relied upon in its every fibre. Moreover, gentle as is much of its work, even the mashie at times has some very rough jobs to accomplish. So let the stick be ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... sinks in me while I hear him speak, And every slackened fibre drops its hold, Like nature letting down the springs of life; So much the name of father awes me still— [Aside. Send off the crowd; for you, now I have conquered, I can hear ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... a criminal, of such an unfortunate youth, and my countryman, when every hand is turned against him, and all tongues are reviling him. But let Angelo pass; I pray to heaven he may escape. All who are worth anything in our country are strained in every fibre, and it's my trick to be half in love with anyone of them when he is persecuted. I fancy he is worth more than the others, and is simply luckless. You must make allowances for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been entitled to call himself so, would have been little better than a pariah, one whom all might have kicked because he had no friends, a mere waif on the turbulent current of the surging and unruly life of those days, felt in every fibre of his being, and from his cradle to his grave, that what he was in the world, and what all that he cared for in the world depended on, was the fact that he was a constituent part of this, that or the other civic community. His fellow-citizens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... that the volume is becoming more and more a friend and a guide. The principles and methods herein set forth should not be laid aside, at least permanently, nor forgotten, but should be worked into the very fibre of your being. You will then, and by so much, ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... her to find her father sitting with his head in his hands at a table littered with business papers. His face had frightened her, and it had never wholly lost the look she saw upon it then, for Townshead was lacking in fibre, and had found that a fondness for horses and some experience of amateur cattle-breeding on a small and expensive scale was a very poor preparation for the grim reality of ranching in ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... and are worked about in borax and water until they become soft. They are washed, too. Then after all the skins have been washed and softened they are thrown into lime and are left there until the fibre swells and the hair is loosened. The men you see with rubber gloves on are the limers. If they did not wear gloves they would get their hands burned and raw, for the lime and the chemicals used in the tan often make the hands and ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... inherent force, is a part of the constitution of the fibre, and is as much a property of its organization as are its tenacity, tensibility, &c. The sum of this force varies, in proportion as the constitution of the fibre is more or less perfect. It is strongest in athletic men and strong ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... drink-avid woman touches the deeps of degradation more quickly, but the reasons for this are patent. They are economic reasons usually, and physical, and not adherent to any inevitably weaker moral fibre in the woman. ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... gallows attack the hind-legs of the Mouse, a little below the ligature. They strip them bare, flay them and cut away the flesh about the heel. They have reached the bone, when one of them finds the raphia beneath his mandibles. This, to him, is a familiar thing, representing the gramineous fibre so frequent in the case of burial in grass-covered soil. Tenaciously the shears gnaw at the bond; the vegetable fetter is severed and the Mouse falls, to be buried ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... as the out-of-date flesh-eater. But no! For the most part, his vegetables are boiled, and when the best part of the food constituents and all the flavour have been extracted, he dines off a mass of indigestible fibre—mere waste matter—and allows the "broth" to be thrown down the sink, with the consequence that many vegetarians are pale, flabby individuals who succumb to the slightest strain, and suffer from ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel
... nor heeded his demands. Magua trembled in every fibre. He raised his arm on high. Just then a piercing cry was heard from above, and Uncas leapt frantically from a fearful height upon the ledge on which they stood. He fell prostrate for a moment. As he lay there, Magua plunged his knife into his back, and at the same moment one of the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... heart beat wildly, and a thrill of rapture rushed through every nerve and fibre of his being. He sprang up and peered through the gloom, and moved forward in the direction from which the voice seemed to have come. At this moment he did not stop to consider how Dolores could have got there. It was enough ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... much to feel and hear—the shrill wail of the wind that buffeted their shelter, the bewildering throb and quiver of the locomotive which, with its suggestion of Titanic effort, seemed to find a response in human fibre, pounding and clashing with their burden of strain, and the roar of the great drivers that rose and fell like a diapason. Perhaps Breckenridge, who was also under a strain that night, was fanciful, but ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... that the sad preacher in Ecclesiastes said there is no "knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest." It is by this character that we classify civilized and even semi-civilized races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow accumulation of inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from lower to higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful influence of governments ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... nothing was more certain to them than that trouble for Deerfoot was near. He could not be frightened into any attempt to hide his light under a bushel, or to deny the faith that was woven into the very fibre of his being. The brothers talked the question over many times. It was never referred to between them and Mul-tal-la, for the Blackfoot could give them no help, and the final solution of the problem must be reached ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... VIRTUTES, manhoods, conformities to the Divine Law appointed you; which are the great and indeed sole strength to any Man or Nation! Discipline yourselves, wisely, in all kinds; more and more, till there be no anarchic fibre left in you. Unanarchic, disciplined at all points, you might then, I should say, with supreme composure, let France, and the whole World at its back, try what they could do upon you and the unique little Island you are so lucky as to live in?—Foolish ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Within this mass of twigs was the nest proper, thick and roughly constructed, three and a half inches in inside diameter, made of string, rags, newspaper, cotton wadding, bark, Spanish moss, and feathers, lined with fine root fibre, I think. The feathers were not inside for lining, but outside on the upper edge. It was, like the foundation, so frail that, though carefully managed, it could only be kept in shape by a string around it, even after the mass ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... drove from Bursley to Hanbridge in the cab, and as I got out of the cab in the crowd, and gave up my ticket, and entered the glittering auditorium of the Jubilee Hall. I was alone, at night, in the public places, under the eye of the world. And I was guiltily alone. Every fibre of my body throbbed with the daring and the danger and the romance of the adventure. The horror of revealing the truth to Aunt Constance, as I was bound to do—of telling her that I had lied, and that I had left ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... on the other hand, are saved by great breadth and heartiness, and a constitutional tendency to coarseness of fibre which art and civilization abate very little. What is to save us in this country, I wonder, who have not the French regency and fire, nor the Teutonic heartiness and vis inertiae, and who are already in danger of refining or attenuating into a high-heeled, shortjawed, genteel race, with more ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... father's ideas. M. Chardon had talked of a method of refining sugar by a chemical process, which would reduce the cost of production by one-half; and he had another plan for employing an American vegetable fibre for making paper, something after the Chinese fashion, and effecting an enormous saving in the cost of raw material. David, knowing the importance of a question raised already by the Didots, caught at this latter notion, saw a fortune in ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... improbable that in some parts of the world the single hook developed pari passu with the double, and that, on the sea-shore for instance, where man was able to employ so adaptable a substance as shell, the first hook was a curved fragment of shell lashed with fibre to a piece of wood or bone, in such a way that the shell formed the bend of the hook while the wood or bone formed the shank. Both early remains and recent hooks from the Fiji Islands bear out ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... something possible only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's body. He was simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and elan, and the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and very weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters together, could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... more than patient; she abode courageously in the suspense, the uncertainty of the time; and she hoped for something from the father's endeavors in the different ways he turned. At one time there was much talk in the family of using the fibre of a common weed in making paper, which he thought he could introduce; perhaps it was the milk-weed; but he could not manage it, somehow; and after a year of inaction he decided to go into another newspaper. By this time ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... trees, smashed with stones, to extract the ligneous parts. In the cool weather they make tunics of bark, and the women wear drawers of the same material. They adorn their waists with sea-shell and cocoanut shell ornaments, whilst the fibre of the palm serves for a waistband. The women pierce very large holes in their ears, in which they place shells, wood, etc. They never bathe intentionally. Their arms are bows and arrows, and darts blown ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... forgive, now that you have explained matters, Mr. Merrill" said the storekeeper, and he smiled again. "If my fibre had been a little tougher, this thing would never have happened. There is only one more request I have to make. And that is, to assure Mr. Duncan, from me, that I did not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and silently like a good-natured domestic animal. A newly-built shed with its white walls looked dazzling in the sunshine, and all round about the long black rows of compressed peat were to be seen. The blocks were hard and heavy, with little fibre and much coal. They easily beat all competition and had a good reputation as ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... say but little. To put it as mildly as possible, it must be admitted, to use the words of one of its modern admirers,[10:1] that "the Reformation did not at first carry with it much cleansing force of moral enthusiasm." In the hands of men more logical or of a less healthy moral fibre, Luther's favourite dogma, of justification by faith alone, led to conclusions subversive of all morality. However this may be, enemies and friends alike have to admit that the immediate effects of the ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... me, Monsieur, has nothing in common with that of Monsieur Hafner nor with yours, since you are come, it seems, to pursue studies of moral teratology. Rome to me is not Cosmopolis, as you say, it is Metropolis, it is the mother of cities.... You forget that I am a Catholic in every fibre, and that I am at home here. I am here because I am a monarchist, because I believe in old France as you believe in the modern world; and I serve her in my fashion, which is not very efficacious, but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break in the strata at the arch ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... are of very great promise. Commencing in latitude 39 deg. 30 min. (see Mattoon on the Branch, and Assumption on the Main Line), the Company owns thousands of acres well adapted to the perfection of this fibre. A settler having a family of young children, can turn their youthful labor to a most profitable account in the growth and perfection of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... about three centuries ago, they saw them cultivating this plant, which must have been brought by them from its native prairies beyond the Mississippi—a plant whose stalks furnished them with a textile fibre, its leaves fodder, its flowers a yellow dye, and its seeds, most valuable of all, food and hair-oil! Early settlers in Canada were not slow in sending home to Europe so decorative and useful an acquisition. Swine, poultry, and parrots were fed on its rich seeds. Its flowers, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... branch out from the brain through openings in the skull, and go to every part of the body. Every little muscle fibre, the heart, the stomach, the lungs, the liver, even the bones—all have nerves coming to them from the brain. So you see that the brain is not wholly shut up in the skull, because its cells have slender branches running into all parts of the body; ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... of a foreign land, but thoroughly American in every fibre of her being, Mrs. Mary W. Lee stands among the foremost of the earnest persistent toilers of the great army of philanthropists. She was born in the north of Ireland, of Scotch parentage, but came with her parents to the United States when she was five years of age, and has ever since made ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... different from that of the present day. The line was made of a filament of bark stripped from the trunk of a tree; the book was of wood, having a sharp bone, forming a barb, lashed to it with a cord of a grassy fibre, a kind of wild hemp, growing spontaneously in that region. Champlain landed, distributed trinkets among the natives, examined and sketched an outline of the place, which identifies it as Plymouth harbor, which captain John Smith visited in 1614, and where ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... success in love as real merit: there is no necessity for any other example than the present; for though Jermyn was brave, and certainly a gentleman, yet he had neither brilliant actions, nor distinguished rank, to set him off; and as for his fibre, there was nothing advantageous in it. He was little: his head was large and his legs small; his features were not disagreeable, but he was affected in his carriage and behaviour. All his wit consisted in expressions learnt ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a fact. To follow out the simile, life is the tobacco with which we are loaded, and when the vital spark is applied we live; when that tobacco is exhausted we die, the essence of our life ascending from the lukewarm clay when the last fibre burns out, as a curl of smoke from the ashes in the bowl of the pipe, and mingling with the perfumed breeze of heaven, or the hot breath of—well, never mind; we hope not. Then the clay is cold, and glows no more from the fire within; the pipe is broken, and ceases to comfort and console. We ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... venerable figure, Festus came forward stealthily, till he was immediately above the old man's back. The latter was clothed in faded nankeen breeches, speckled stockings, a drab hat, and a coat which had once been light blue, but from exposure as a scarecrow had assumed the complexion and fibre of a dried pudding-cloth. The farmer was, in fact, returning to the hall, which he had left in the morning some time later than his nephew, to seek an asylum in a hollow tree about two miles off. The tree was so situated as to command a view of the building, and Uncle Benjy had managed ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... dancing spole. In level lines the length of woof to spread, And dart the shuttle through the parting thread. 260 So ARKWRIGHT taught from Cotton-pods to cull, And stretch in lines the vegetable wool; With teeth of steel its fibre-knots unfurl'd, And with the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... summons of the day; and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human discussions and pretences, when boon Nature, reticent no more, was singing that full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control of every fibre. The air was wine; the moist earth-smell, wine; the lark's song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train,—all were wine,—or song, was it? or odour, this unity ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... spirited performance of their national dances, whether it be high-class Russians at a Russian opera in the Imperial Theatre, or the masses on informal occasions like the present. This soldier, who danced with joy in every fibre, was quite willing to oblige them indefinitely, and seemed to be made of steel springs. He stopped with great reluctance, and that only when his company was ordered peremptorily to march off to ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... the still face, and called wildly to him who heard her not, and then, utterly unmindful of the intruders, sent up again that dreary wail into the dreary air, they felt a sacred horror, which almost made them turn away, and leave her unquestioned: but Yeo, whose nerves were of tougher fibre, asked quietly— ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... swags and spread the blankets on the stretchers; and then we stripped and hung our clothes about the fire to dry. There was plenty in our tucker-bags, so we had a good feed. I hadn't shaved for days, and Dave had a coarse red beard with a twist in it like an ill-used fibre brush—a beard that got redder the longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. But he in whose narrow brain is no space for high Olympus and deep Orcus,—he whose coarse fibre never felt the shudder of the world at the shaking of the ambrosial locks, nor a thrill in the air when a hero fails,—what can this grand stoop of the ideal upon the actual world signify to him? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to assume this. The causes that have been at work for thirty years past, undermining and honeycombing the whole structure of the German army, are too manifold, too much ingrained in the very fibre of the German people of to-day, and too complex to yield at the mere bidding of even so imperious a voice as the Kaiser's. Bilse, in his book, lays a pitiless finger on the ulcers that have been festering and growing in the bosom ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... all men feel. But three times blessed he Whose eye and ear, of finer fibre spun, Sense the elusive thread of beauty, where The common man hath deemed that none can be. The beauty of the commonplace is one In substance with the ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... mighty reserve which ultimately sweeps the obstruction impetuously to the sea. Poverty and obscurity are not insurmountable obstacles, but they often act as a stimulus to the naturally indolent, and develop a firmer fibre of mind, a stronger muscle and stamina of body. If the germ of the seed has to struggle to push its way up through the stones and hard sod, to fight its way up to sunlight and air, and then to wrestle with storm and tempest, with snow and frost, the fibre of its timber ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... most influential of human agencies. The zealous energetic man unconsciously carries others along with him. His example is contagious, and compels imitation. He exercises a sort of electric power, which sends a thrill through every fibre—flows into the nature of those about him, and makes them give ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... recognized and truly mastered, not held by a passive acquiescence in the statements of another, but really appropriated, so as to enter decisively into a man's habit of thought, forming in that direction the fibre of his mind, they not only illuminate conditions apparently novel, by revealing the essential analogies between them and the past, but they supply the clue by which the intricacies of the present can best be threaded. Nothing ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... and sloth, lack of breadth and depth in thought and planning; the softening of our fibre through easy prosperity and luxury; unwise or hampering laws, inadequacy of vision and of purposeful, determined effort, individual and national, are what we have to ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn
... "neighbours" hold an "American wake," and in the morning, with heartrending embraces and wild caioning, give them the last "Bannact Dea Leat"—"God's blessing be on your way"; but when they come to Cove, the sorrow is smothered; they are buoyed up by that trusting faith in the future which is the first fibre in the Irish nature. They may look melancholy to us, but they themselves make merry, and before the "big ship" is but on the "Old Sea," as the Atlantic is called, the girls and young men are slipping through rollicking reels to improvised music "to show their heart's ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... attracted; Hamil could understand what drew them—the instinctive recognition of a fibre finer and a metal purer than was often found under ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... eagerly prepared to risque his life for the safety and glory of his king and country. The brave admiral was calm, but no mortal can convey to another the sense of ineffable delight which glowed in every fibre of his frame. The bliss of his bosom, at this impressive moment, was that of extatic perfection; for, it admitted not the smallest doubt of success. His calmness was the result of his piety; for his noble heart was pouring forth to Heaven the sacred effusions of ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... woman who puzzled and tantalized him and caused him more mental discomfort than he had ever known in his life before that night when she entered so unexpectedly the line-camp and his life. He scarcely knew just how he did feel toward her; sometimes he hungered for her with every physical and mental fibre and was tempted to leave everything and go to her. Times there were when he resented deeply her treatment of him and repeated to himself the resolution not to lie down and let her walk all over him ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... and permit no emotional prompting in its behalf to escape you. 'Hell is paved with good intentions,' hence to have good desires, thoughts, intentions without actually working them out weakens and destroys the moral fibre. 'Character is a completely fashioned will,' says J.S. Mill, and a will in this sense is an aggregate of tendencies which act in a firm, prompt, and definite way in every emergency of life. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... enterprise, and caused longer voyages to be undertaken, and greater dangers to be affronted by the daring seamen of the Syrian coast than had ever been ventured on before. The Tyrian seamen were, perhaps, of a tougher fibre than the Sidonian, and the change of hegemony is certainly accompanied by a greater display of energy, a more adventurous spirit, a wider colonisation, and a more wonderful commercial success, than characterise the preceding period of Sidonian ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... character, as his life will attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise, and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles. He respected the priesthood,—with the exception, it seems, of the Jesuits,— and he was under obligations to the Sulpitians of Montreal. ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... to welcome the change, but a notion that has nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities. The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances have no power ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another miracle he didn't get drowned. But he struggled instinctively like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his exertions, and so much fear. Later on, in his broken English that resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... covered with 4" thick batts of rock-wool or fibre-glass, combination aluminum foil insulation, applied immediately over lath ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... marriage had been too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as though it had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... my habit. At last I fell asleep, lying on my back with arms and feet folded, a position I always find myself in when I awake, no matter in what position I may go to sleep. Very soon I awoke, every fibre tingling, an exquisite sensation of glow, and I was lying on my left side (something I am never able to do), folded in the arms of my counterpart. I cannot give you any idea of the beauty of his flesh, and with what joy I beheld and felt it. Luminous flesh, and full of ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... possibilities has suddenly been enormously extended. I no longer wonder at Wilson's demonic energy and enthusiasm. Who would not work hard who had a vast virgin field ready to his hand? Why, I have known the novel shape of a nucleolus, or a trifling peculiarity of striped muscular fibre seen under a 300-diameter lens, fill me with exultation. How petty do such researches seem when compared with this one which strikes at the very roots of life and the nature of the soul! I had always looked upon spirit as a product of matter. The brain, ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... very much disposed to grow fat with good food. The flesh, like that of the Ox or spayed heifer, is generally much finer in the fibre than either the bull or cow; is even supposed to exceed that of the Ox and heifer in delicacy of flavour, and bears a higher price at market. However this superiority of the flavour does not appear to be universal, for Mr. Hunter was informed of a case ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... fibre of his being, Andy dragged up a dead buck-bush and laid the butt of it across his blaze. Then he lay down near it—and went to sleep as quickly as if ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... military school should soon completely alter the complexion of his ideas, for he would find his failures in the execution of orders treated as disobedience. He would not be punished at first, it is true, but pretty theories that he was nervous, or ill, or the victim of hereditary disability, or of fibre too delicately attenuated to perform any required act, would not be admitted except, indeed, as a reason for expulsion. Moreover, the tests to which he would be compelled to submit before this escape from discipline lay open to him, would be neither slight nor easily ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear. "You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your belief in pain, through ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... result was all that he could wish, yet he doubted. Miss Nermal thoroughly understood Belton and was anxious for him to find some way out of his dilemma. Of course it was out of the question for her to volunteer to tell him that she loved him—loved him madly, passionately; loved him in every fibre of her soul. ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... These were the premises upon which he set out to build. But he would not have been a child of his time had he not seen life through the temperament of his generation. With all his sturdy mental and moral fibre he could not withstand the torrential current of skepticism and revaluation that swept through the intellectual world and uprooted its spiritual mainstays. Though the action of his plays was based upon eternal conflicts of the human tragi-comedy—the irreconcilable contrast between two ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... past mistress. But as Mary Lant described him, she not only bore with and trembled before him—she adored him. The taste for him and his like, as well as for the story-teller herself—a girl of a tremulous, melancholy fibre, sweet-natured, possessed by a Calvinist faith, and already prescient of death—grew upon her. Soon her absorbing desire was to be altogether shut up with Mary, except on Sundays and at practising times. For this purpose she gave herself the worst ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... name and agony are too sacred to be named in a political argument," and she uttered these last words with intense bitterness. Then rising to end the interview, she continued coldly in biting sarcasm, "Mr. Clancy, I have no relations with the North. I do not deal in cotton, and none of its fibre has found ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... destined to surprise me, and she had done it again. I had thought her too finely woven and strong of fibre to be easily emotional. It was some hours before it came to me that she had not been with another woman since the night the savages had found her in the Connecticut farmhouse. All the world had been a foe to be feared and parried except myself, and I had been a despot. Perhaps she did ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... not go off; only the click of the trigger could be heard. Half fainting, his hand dropped to his side. Every fibre within him quivered, his head swam, his lips were parched, and his hand trembled so much that when he laid down the revolver it rattled ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... processes by which this grand shadow attained its final harmonious and terrible proportions. This may be a noble sacrifice to the principles of Art, intended as a warning to rash novices against the sin of slovenliness in composition; but the poem must be of solid fibre to resist this disenchanting test. The unveiling of hidden mysteries, the disclosure of trap doors, ropes, and pulleys, may assist in the general dissemination of knowledge; but in behalf of those who prefer to be ignorant that they may be happy, we protest against ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... umile e queta, Ed in alto intelletto un puro core Frutto senile in sul giovenil fibre, E in aspetto pensoso ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... making, as usual, fame the arbiter of his worth; and showing, even in the moment of seeking for truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly impossible it was for him to feel it. Mean and great; both, I think, at once. But of the meanness, the narrowness of nature, the want of resonance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality in so many things; of Alfieri's vanity, intolerance, injustice, indifference, hardness; of all these peculiarities which make the real man repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I have said more than enough, and when we ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee) |
