"Fixedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or fixedness of impressions of sexual life, 99 may be only result of a special intensive somatic sexual manifestation of ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... last words, the fixedness of the tragic look, were not to be resisted. Marcella laughed out, and both ladies simultaneously thought her ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... superfluous Body be again put to it, wherein the abounding fix'd bloud may disperse itself, this additional Metallick Body, by reason of the great heat of the fix'd Lions bloud, is penetrated as by fire, and purged from all impurity, and forthwith throughly digested to a perfect ripeness and fixedness: That first of all the Servant brings the Matter unto Riches, because the Master before could not spare any of his Cloaths to give away, seeing that Nature had lent and endowed him with one Noble ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... sight,' said Mrs Brown, whose working mouth and nodding head stopped for the moment, in the fixedness of her attention. 'We saw him pass this morning, afore he got off his horse; when you were ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... heightened ever so little, and she kept her eyes on the questioner with involuntary fixedness. The last shadow of doubt regarding Sibyl having disappeared (no woman with an uneasy conscience, she said to herself, could talk in this way), she had now to guard herself against the betrayal of suspicious sensibilities. Sibyl, of course, meant nothing ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... to fill the hearts of those whose lives seemed to hang in his hands with alarm if not dismay. His spirit seemed to be stirred within him. There was indeed no anger, either in his looks or tones; but there was a stern fixedness of purpose in his manner and aspect which aroused, yet repelled, the curiosity of those around him. Even Ole Thorwald and Montague agreed that it was best to let him alone; for although they might overcome ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... beginning the Negroes were not a live issue in Cincinnati. The question of their settlement in that community was debated but resulted in great diversity of opinion rather than a fixedness of judgment among the citizens. The question came up in the Constitutional Convention of 1802 and provoked some discussion, but reaching no decision, the convention simply left the Negroes out of the pale of the newly ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... translated copy of "Robinson Crusoe" (and it is a most remarkable circumstance that the book which has for its avowed purpose the disheartening of restless adventurers, should have made wanderers and voyagers innumerable), gave form and fixedness to his purpose of rambling; and, in company with his youngest brother, the boy set out one fine morning, without any intention but the somewhat vague one of "traveling to seek their fortune." The young fugitives walked several miles, without knowing, in the least, whither they were going, when ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.[87] Rosamund Grey written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it, strikes clearly this note in ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... monumental, in which a full, graceful drapery is requisite; but when, as is often the case, the sculptor is required to reproduce the actual costume of the day, what can we look for? The truth is, it has no grace in itself; what, then, must it be when put into the fixedness of bronze or marble? Yet where is the remedy for this? We do not wish to see the men whom we have known and who have moved among us in the dress of other men put into an antique disguise by the sculptor; the incongruity ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... found that she breathed more regularly and distinctly—presently her eyes lost that fixedness which had made them so painful to look upon. Then she recognised me, and took hold of my hand, regarding me with the sweet smile with which I ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... Ugolino had been a man in power; there is not much mark in the picture of his nobility. It has been said, too, that the addition of his sons is no improvement in the picture. We think otherwise: they are well grouped; by their various attitudes they give the greater desperate fixedness to Ugolino, and they do tell the story well, and are good in themselves. The power of the picture is very great, and it is not overpowered by glazing. On the whole, we think it his most vigorous work, and one upon which his fame as a painter may fairly rest. We have a word ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Negro porter passing through a coach set apart for white passengers noted the fixedness with which a young woman with a pretty face and a pair of beautiful blue eyes was regarding him. Her head was inclined to one side, her hand so supporting her face that a prettily shaped ear peeped out from between her fingers. In the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... of the Constitution intended that the supreme law of the land, when once agreed to, should have within it a principle of fixedness almost invincible. At any rate, the process by which alone alterations can be made, involves so wide an area of territory, so many distinct groups of population, and is withal, in itself, so manifold and complex, so slow, and ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up and stirring by rights—trading, organising, inventing, building new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying new railroads, going in for ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... once, however, that he looked through a temporary break in the crowding people and saw a dark strong-featured and remarkably intent boy's face, whose vivid scrutiny of him caught his eye. There was something in the fixedness of its attention which caused him to look at it curiously for a few seconds, and Marco ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a clatter against his waistcoat, threw the card into his finger-glass, raised his pale eyes, and stared at Sir Gilbert with all the fixedness they were capable of. He had already drunk a good deal of wine, and it was plain he had, although he was far from being overcome by it. Gibbie answered by drawing from the breast-pocket of his coat the paper he had written, and presenting it like ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... says Mr. Bancroft, "still acknowledged the fixedness of the divine decrees, and the resistless certainty from all eternity of election and of reprobation, there were not wanting, even among the clergy, some who had modified the sternness of the ancient doctrine by ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... consisted its reality; even as in a river the water is ever changing, and the river exists as a river only in virtue of this continual change; or as in a living body, wherein while there is life there is no stability or fixedness; stability and fixedness are the attributes of the unreal image of life, not of life itself. Thus, as will be observed, from the material basis of being as conceived by Thales, with only a very vague conception of the counter-principle of movement, philosophy has wheeled round in Heraclitus to ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... industrious sectaries who own and till the soil, and who are taught to count them aliens and persecutors. Irrigation is here the only means of successful agriculture. It involves great outlay of capital and labor, and creates great fixedness of tenure. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... world last night, I heard the slow beat of the Winter rain— Poor foolish drops, down-dripping all in vain; The ice-bound Earth but mocked their puny might, Far better had the fixedness of white And uncomplaining snows—which make no sign, But coldly smile, when pitying moonbeams shine— Concealed its sorrow from all human sight. Long, long ago, in blurred and burdened years, I learned the uselessness of uttered woe. Though sinewy Fate deals her most skillful ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the story, is utterly choked amidst a mass of subordinate interests. No representation is attempted of the growth of his opinions, or of their action upon his character: he is marked by the same singular rigidity of outline and fixedness of posture which characterized Adam Bede,—except, perhaps, that there is a certain inclination towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But if the general outline is timid and undecided in "Felix Holt," the different parts are even richer than in former works. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... path, which was now lined on both sides by Cuban soldiers standing about a yard apart and presenting arms. The scene made a strong impression on all in the party, there seemed to be such an earnestness and fixedness of purpose displayed that all felt these soldiers to be a power. About fifty per cent. were blacks, and the rest mulattoes, with a small number of whites. They were very poorly clad, many without shirts or shoes, but every man had his gun ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... then 'changed hands,' received a new owner, who also consented to his buying himself, at about the price previously agreed on. Nothing discouraged, he went to work again. Night and day, he toiled, and it surprised every one to see so much energy and fixedness of purpose in a negro. At last, after four more years of labor, he accomplished his purpose, and received his free-papers. He had worked seven years—as long as Jacob toiled for Rachel—for his freedom, and like the old patriarch found himself cheated at last. I was present when ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the fixedness of her ideas, the rigidity of her type of mind, the relentlessness of her will; and that independence on my part survived was due to sturdy stubbornness, to a refusal to be dominated, and an incapacity for subjection. But this, too, ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... time, so there is room here for astronomical ages, cycle upon cycle. There was time enough in that beginning for the present system of planets to be arranged from a single nebulous mass. In it we have a picture of matter in a crude condition, without fixedness of form, surrounded with darkness. Then comes the commencement of the great work of preparing our planet for the home of man, by the spirit of God moving over the chaos. There is nothing in this statement that should ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... a principle from which it proceeds. Fluctuating opinions and feelings produce fickleness of conduct; while settled convictions, stability of affections, and fixedness of purpose, give birth to persevering and methodical action. A system of beneficence must be founded on abiding principles ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... a while, some of her friends, who stood near her, observed a more than ordinary earnestness and fixedness in her countenance; they said one to another, "Look how earnestly she looks, surely ...
— Stories of Boys and Girls Who Loved the Saviour - A Token for Children • John Wesley
... of the nerves though it was evident, by his attitude of thought and the momentary fixedness of his eye, that he foresaw danger was near. Moving to the window, he looked out on the water, and instantly drew back, like one who wanted no ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... root-division, only seven or eight produced striped flowers. See also on striped Pelargoniums 'Gardener's Chronicle' 1867 page 1000.); but this latter plant may have originated as a variegated seedling, which would account for its greater fixedness of character. The Barberry (Berberis vulgaris) offers an analogous case; there is a well-known variety with seedless fruit, which can be propagated by cuttings or layers; but suckers always revert to the common form, which produces fruit containing seeds. (11/71. Anderson 'Recreations ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression of the bitter melancholy that oppresses him, in the fixedness of misery with which he looks upon the faded dreams of former years, or the fierce ebullitions and dreary pauses of resolution, which now prompts him to retrieve what he has lost, now withers into ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... knows. But when the sudden stress Of passion is resistlessness, It drags the flood that sweeps away, For anchorage, or hold, or stay, Or saving rock of stableness, And there is none,— No underlying fixedness to fasten on: Unsounded depths; unsteadfast seas; Wavering, yielding, bottomless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... around him. In the car, the doctor, completely overwhelmed, sat with his arms folded on his breast, gazing with idiotic fixedness upon some imaginary point in space. Kennedy was frightful to behold. He was rolling his head from right to left like a wild ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Polly was seated in a secluded spot whence all but her had fled; her grave demeanour, her discarded sun-bonnet, her corrugated brow, all bespoke more than common fixedness of purpose, the cause of which will ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Cod would remain precisely the same, as to depth of water, after the lapse of two hundred and fifty years. Nevertheless, the discrepancy is so slight in this case, that it would seem to be accidental, rather than to arise from the solidity or fixedness of the harbor-bed. The channel of Barnstable Harbor, according to the Coast Survey Charts, varies in depth at low tide, for two miles outside of Sandy Neck Point, from seven to ten feet for the first mile, and for ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... devilish?—raised the veil which, till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still existing in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her flowers had never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic language, she looked into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness that was almost ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... head, saw Therese mute and motionless opposite, gazing at him with ardent fixedness. Her dull black eyes seemed like two fathomless holes, and through her parted lips could be perceived the rosy tint of the inside of her mouth. She seemed as if overpowered by what she heard, and lost in thought. She ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... out in fine relief the beauty of the baroness. Mademoiselle Zephirine, being deprived of sight, was not aware of the changes which eighty years had wrought in her features. Her pale, hollow face, to which the fixedness of the white and sightless eyes gave almost the appearance of death, and three or four solitary and projecting teeth made menacing, was framed by a little hood of brown printed cotton, quilted like a petticoat, trimmed with a cotton ruche, and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... brain, integrity, lofty ambition, and indomitable purpose. Let it never be forgotten that the man of whom I speak possessed an integrity that could know no temptation, a purity of life that was never questioned, a patriotism that no sectional lines could limit, and a fixedness of purpose that knew ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... had occasion (Vol. I. Chap. XIII. Sec. VII.) to note some manifestations of this energy or fixedness; but it must be still more attentively considered here, as it shows itself throughout the whole structure and decoration of Gothic work. Egyptian and Greek buildings stand, for the most part, by their own weight and mass, one stone passively incumbent on another: but ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... ceased to be mobile and became fixed, but even so it was none the less impossible to render; it was a drill sounding the heart of whosoever he looked upon, the deepest, the most secret thought of which he meant to sound. Marble or painting might render the fixedness of that look, but neither the one nor the other could portray its life—that is to say, its penetrating and magnetic action. Troubled hearts have ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... If the knowledge of all were necessary to the knowledge of any one of them, the mind would sink under the load of thought. Again, in every process of reflection we seem to require a standing ground, and in the attempt to obtain a complete analysis we lose all fixedness. If, for example, the mind is viewed as the complex of ideas, or the difference between things and persons denied, such an analysis may be justified from the point of view of Hegel: but we shall find that in the attempt to criticize thought we have lost the power ...
— Sophist • Plato
... his consciousness of the difference in himself between the possible and the actual, the hoped-for and the existent. He feels that duty is the highest law of his own being; and knowing how it bids the waves be stilled into an icy fixedness and grandeur, he trusts (but with a boundless inward misgiving) that there is a principle of order which will reduce all confusion to shape and clearness. But wanting peace himself, his fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... varieties there is given opportunity for crosses that nature occasionally delves into, and in the additional eccentric types getting mixed, tending to offer in rare instances special merit. We have then through mixture, not that fixedness that usually stands in the way, but a getting away from set types where once in thousands of offerings a more useful specimen is made, one nature herself cannot handle to our advantage, but for which we should have our eyes open, and make use of when ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... went to the door to open it for her, and she, as she gave him her hand, told him that she came up to speak to him. There was no hesitation in her manner, nor any look of anger in her face. But there was in her gait and form, in her voice and countenance, a fixedness of purpose which he had never seen before, or at any rate had ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... of great worth to other scientific points of view. They are especially useful in enabling us to form a correct opinion as to the merits of the works that have lately appeared on China; and everyone must acknowledge his rare talent, must value his immovable fixedness of purpose, and must admire his zealous perseverance in the cause of science, and his unshaken belief in the principles of his religion. (Dr. Gutzlaff ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... arrangements, modes of life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the population. It is ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... be established.' That follows, as a matter of course. The only way to make light things stable is to fasten them to something that is stable. And the only way to put any kind of calmness and fixedness, and yet progress—stability in the midst of progress, and progress in the midst of stability—into our lives, is by keeping firm hold of God. If we grasp His hand, then a calm serenity will be ours. In the midst of changes, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... There was a fixedness in her look and a recklessness in her step that showed anger and determination. It struck Lizette with a sort of awe, so that, for once, she did not dare to accost her young mistress with her usual freedom. The maid opened ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... is an inspiration to tens of thousands of the choicest youth of the nation. Joseph Neesima was such a personality. The transparency of his purpose, the simplicity of his personal aim, his unflinching courage, fixedness of belief, lofty plans, and far-reaching ambitions for his people, impressed all who came into contact with him. No one mingles much with the Japanese, freely speaking with them in their own language, but perceives here and there men of "strong personality" in the sense of the above-quoted ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... as they are. They have wanted Luther's substitute for superstition—a fervently religious spirit. They have had only worldly and political motives, for wishing to see the old imposition done away; and these have been powerless against natural apathy, and the fixedness of old establishment. Infidelity and indifferentism prove poor ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... sat in the absolutest quiet, of face and figure both; looking into the fire that played in the chimney, with a fixedness that perhaps told—in the beginning—of some doubtfulness of self command. But the happy look of the face ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... a clinging, self-effacing, timid soul. Within three years she became a determined and calculating little person who lacked nothing but a certain fixedness to be a ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... him, with a quiet fixedness. I no longer feel the slightest embarrassment in his presence; it no longer disquiets me, that he ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... by any merely "personal" considerations. We behold the Almighty's use of power for the advance of a moral kingdom. The Almighty is set before us as exerting all his power for the relief of men. The cross makes the profoundest revelation of the moral fixedness and self- control of God so long as we hold to the scriptural representation. It is to be regretted that many theological theories break away from the Scripture basis and build upon assumptions which are artificial, ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... that neither could measure, growing very pale, while at the same time the lines on lip and brow gradually took a firmer and firmer set. Motionless as an iron statue, and assuming more and more the fixedness of one, he stood, while minute after minute slipped by. To Wych Hazel the time probably seemed measureless and endless; while to Rollo, in the struggle and tumultuous whirl of feeling, it was only a single sharp point of existence. He stood with his eyes cast down; and without raising them, ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... doctrine of the two principles leads to the theory that for the production of gold it was necessary to get from metals the purest possible sulphur and mercury, in order to produce gold by the union of both. Paracelsus now adds to the two principles a third, salt, as the element of fixedness or palpability, as he terms it. According to my notion, Paracelsus has not introduced an essential innovation, but only used in a new systematic terminology what others said before him, even if they did not follow it out so consistently. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... knew that. She had been feverish and ill for several days and Dowie had kept her in bed saying that she had caught cold. Neither of the two women had felt it possible to talk to her. She had lain staring with a deadly quiet fixedness straight before her, saying next to nothing. Now and then she shuddered, and once she broke into a mad, heart-broken fit of crying which ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... present time, however, Rutherford's only troubles were his immediate surroundings, and the problem of how to pass the next three hours. The loungers, who by this time had changed to a sitting posture, and who were staring at him with an unwinking fixedness which made him rather nervous, did not seem very congenial companions. The town consisted of merely a few, straggling, unpainted buildings, while in every direction extended the apparently interminable stretches of undulating ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... What a grisly spectacle it must have been! Imagine it: Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy complexions and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table in the constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that distinguish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled, smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side, mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... potations of the Chinese leaf the night before. She told me quite frankly that she 'declined being lectured on the food or beverage she saw fit to take;' which was but reasonable in one who had arrived at her maturity of intellect and fixedness of habits. So the subject was thenceforth tacitly avoided between us; but, though words were suppressed, looks and involuntary gestures could not so well be; and an utter divergency of views on this and kindred themes created a perceptible ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... McArthur, with a grim fixedness of countenance, saw to the priming of his rifle for the fiftieth time; and Rosalind, with her father's courage, examined her own weapon, which she had resolved to take with her for safety if ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... seasons are known in the life of nations. An easy-going traditionalism can be overturned in a single blast. Conventional standards, which seemed to have the fixedness of the stars are blown to the winds. Political and economic safeguards go down like wooden fences before an angry sea. The customary foundations of society are shaken. We must surely have had such experiences as these during the past weeks and months. What was unthinkable ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... gone! Oh, never more to cheer The mariner who holds his course alone On the Atlantic, through the weary night, When the stars turn to watchers, and do sleep, Shall it appear, With the sweet fixedness of certain light, Down-shining on the shut ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... again. So bruised and bloodless of skin were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally, too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... nature, two essential laws, which produce, by counterbalancing each other, the universal equilibrium of things. These are fixedness and movement, analogous, in philosophy, to Truth and Fiction, and, in Absolute Conception, to Necessity and Liberty, which are the very essence of Deity. The Hermetic philosophers gave the name fixed to everything ponderable, to everything that tends by its natural to central ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and when compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self- control could desire. I derived benefit from the task: it had kept my head and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the branches and boughs began to sway and beckon to each other. The tops, and finally the stems rocked forward and backward, as if they contemplated starting on a march. It was as if their eternal fixedness grieved them, and they were setting out in a tumultuous crowd to the ends of the world. Sometimes they became motionless near the sledge, as though they did not wish to betray their secret to a human being. Then ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... while it equally indicates energy and positiveness, it does so as in accordance with predetermination and reflection. Radical stress denotes, as it were, an involuntary state of energy; final stress, the energy or fixedness of resolve. Hence, final stress is appropriate to the expression of resolution, of obstinacy, of earnest conviction, of passionate resolve. It emphasizes the characteristics of wide intervals, giving to rising intonations a more decidedly interrogatory character, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... theory also is not entirely without support in the realm of observed facts. How simply it explains the fixedness of the differences of closely related species arising from their geographical and climatical home! how simply the similarity of the color of many animals from the color of their abode, through which they have protection against persecution! how simply the so-called ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... It is this fixedness and placidity, conveying the impression of fate, death, repose, or immortality, which render sculpture so congenial as commemorative of the departed. Even quaint wooden effigies, like those in St. Mary's Church at Chester, with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." We see the lying down, the fixedness of the posture, the utter disregard, in the cold remains, of every thing which passes before them; and these remains are like the channels of a river, or the flats of the sea, when the tide has utterly forsaken them. The soul is like those vanished waters, as to ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... power of the school is but in its beginning when the presence of a pupil is recognized. The constancy and punctuality of attendance required by all judicious parents and faithful teachers are important moral lessons, whose influence can never be destroyed. The fixedness of purpose that is required, and is essential in school, remains as though it were a part of the nature of the child and the man. School-life strengthens habits of industry when they exist, and creates them when they do not. It is, indeed, the only means, of universal application, that is ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... opinion, but rather studied to move forward compactly, exposing no detachment in front or rear; so that the course of his administration might have been explained as the calculating policy of a shrewd and watchful politician, had there not been seen behind it a fixedness of principle which from the first determined his purpose, and grew more intense with every year, consuming his life by its energy. Yet his sensibilities were not acute; he had no vividness of imagination to picture to his mind the horrors of the battle-field ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... began very early to move him, there being such a delightful gravity in his young conversation, that what Gregory Nazianzen once said of the great Bazil, might be applied to him,—"That he held forth learning beyond his age, and fixedness of manners ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... laughed and said, "I know your name—I know my name." Then she would not answer any more questions but remained immobile, with fixed gaze. When her going home was mentioned, however, she flushed and tears ran down her cheek, though no change in the fixedness of her attitude or in her ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... there was a livid, unnatural redness, resembling that of a dried and lifeless skin. His eye was fearless and steady, but it was also artful and audacious, glaring upon the beholder with an unpleasant fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal gloating on its prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the natural protection of thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness, uncombed and matted, gave evidence of long exposure to the rudest visitations ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... world that do this, bringing that image with them, and clothing it with the forms of uses of the vegetable kingdom. The heat, light, and atmospheres of the natural world simply open the seeds, keep their products in a state of expansion, and clothe them with the matters that give them fixedness. And this is done not by any forces from their own sun (which viewed in themselves are null), but by forces from the spiritual sun, by which the natural forces are unceasingly impelled to these services. Natural forces contribute nothing whatever towards forming ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... suspicion—or rather, perhaps, an intuition—of the true state of things when she heard him speak, and at the same time noticed the abnormal flush on his face, and his rolling eyes. There was a certain want of fixedness of purpose which she had certainly not noticed before—a quick, spasmodic utterance which belongs rather to the insane than to those of intellectual equilibrium. She was a little frightened, not only by his thoughts, but by his ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... for many centuries more, his ancestors lived on a small freehold at Ecton in Northamptonshire, and so far back as record or tradition ran the eldest son in each generation had been bred a blacksmith. But after the strange British fashion there was intertwined with this singular fixedness of ideas a stubborn independence in thinking, courageously exercised in times of peril. The Franklins were among the early Protestants, and held their faith unshaken by the terrors of the reign of Bloody Mary. By the end of Charles the Second's ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... made a companion of a dog, honouring it with his own food, so as the better to think on spirit. He practiced all the five operations connected with the vital air, or air collected in the body. He attended much to Pranayama, or the gradual suppression of breathing, and he secured fixedness of mind as follows. By placing his sight and thoughts on the tip of his nose he perceived smell; on the tip of his tongue he realized taste, on the root of his tongue he knew sound, and so forth. He practiced the eighty-four ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... through all his outburst, a certain independence and a fearlessness and a certain fixedness of purpose that sent an exultant thrill through her even when her heart was burdened with the thought of this new danger that threatened him. She had sent him away for the fault of instability, and he ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... staring at?" the girl asked, presently, growing uneasy over the fixedness of his gaze. "Do you see ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... her, were he at once to walk off, leaving his friend behind him. And he knew that she had seen him, and had recognised him, and was now suffering from his presence. He could not but perceive that it was so from the fixedness of her face, and from the constrained manner in which she gazed before her. His friend Fowler Pratt had never seen Miss Dale, though he knew very much of her history. Siph Dunn knew nothing of the history of Crosbie and his love, and was unaware that he and Lily had ever seen each ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... take root and firmly cling, Thought fixedness the only thing; Why Nature made the butterflies, (Those dreams of wings that float and hover 10 At noon the slumberous poppies over,) Was something hidden from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... him with a moment's fixedness while he polished the palette; and for that moment he felt the temptation to reply: "There's a way you could do that, to a considerable extent—I think you guess it—which wouldn't be intrinsically ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... look at herself in a glass which hung over the kitchen-table, and she hardly knew her own face, it had gathered such a strange fixedness of secret purpose. That had altered it more than her pallor. Maria tried to smile and say again that nothing ailed her, but she could not. Suddenly a tremendous pity for her aunt came over her. She had not thought so much about ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tea-kettles in the Vale of Wrington, North Somersetshire, are filled by rhabdomancy. But it must be admitted that the phenomena of the divining-rod and table-turning are of precisely the same character, both being referable to an involuntary muscular action resulting from a fixedness of idea. Moreover, it should be remembered that experiments with the divining-rod are generally made in a district known to be metalliferous, and therefore the chances are greatly in favour of its bending over or near a mineral lode. On the other hand, it is surprising how many people of culture ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... face more gross and sensual in its lines, and the look of low admiration and eagerness which it now wore, was well calculated to bring out the sensuality in its most repulsive form. Marcia felt her cheeks burning under the fixedness of the man's gaze, and, looking down, she struggled to compose herself by a close study of the gorgeous coverlid of the couch,—a fine Campanian texture, dyed scarlet, and heavily embroidered with figures of birds and beasts and flowers, worked ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... and sin. Where is there such a demonstration of the awful truth that 'the wages of sin is death' as on that Cross on which the Son of God died for us and for all 'His banished ones'? Where is there such a demonstration of the fixedness of the divine law as in that death to which the Son of God submitted Himself for us all? Where do we learn the hideousness of sin, the endless antagonism between God and it, and the fatal consequences of it, as we learn them in the sacrifice of our Lord ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the inspiration that is radiated. Much as we regret it we cannot refuse to face the fact that grows upon us daily—the fact that there are too many Negro youths to-day, who seem lacking in ambition, in aspiration, in either fixedness or firmness of purpose. We have too many dudes whose ideal does not rise above the possession of a new suit, a cane, a silk hat, patent leather shoes, a cigarette and a good time—too many in every sense ...
— The Educated Negro and His Mission - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 8 • W. S. Scarborough
... this ineradicableness need have no terrors if we have formed good habits. Indeed, as will be pointed out in the next paragraph, habit may be a great asset. Nevertheless, it may work positive harm, or at best, may lead to stagnation. The fixedness of habit tends to make us move in ruts unless we exert continuous effort to learn new things. If we permit ourselves to move in old grooves we cease to ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... lawn, faultlessly trimmed by a time-serving gardener; the floral borders, the hedges; the two stately trees; the neat walk, the wide verandah, the dim, mysterious hall; the rooms, heavily shaded to save the rich carpets; the order, the precision, the fixedness, the this-sits-here and that-stands-thereness—the flatness and emptiness and formality of it all, and she turned again to the Elden kitchen and laughed—a soft, rippling, irrepressible laugh, as ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... of grief that they became more expressive than if they had been distorted by passionate emotions; and over his brow collected cloud upon cloud, which deepened and darkened every instant till they overshadowed all; and his face in its statuesque fixedness resembled nothing so much as that which the artist gives to Napoleon at the crisis hour of Waterloo, when the Guard has recoiled from its last charge, and from that Imperial face in its fixed agony the soul itself seems ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... of Rowe," as the item in the local paper put it. He was a young man, younger than his cousin, but he looked older. He had a handsome face, under the most complete control as to its muscles. When he laughed he gave the impression of the fixedness of merriment of a mask. He looked keenly at Nahum Beals with that immovable laugh on his face, and spoke with perfectly good-natured sarcasm. "All very well for the string-pieces of the bridge from oppression to freedom," he said, "but ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... firm accent, trying to fascinate her with the impassioned fixedness of her eyes, drawing near her, as if to caress her with the music of his words. And how about him? What did Margalida think of him? What if he should present himself to Pep some day, telling him that he wished ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pass with such primitive people, and was glad of what she might otherwise have counted barely endurable. For Mr. Raymount, he would not leave what he counted his work for any goddess in creation: Hester had got her fixedness of purpose through him, and its direction through her mother. But it was well he did not give Miss Vavasor much of his company: if they had been alone together for a quarter of an hour, they would have parted sworn foes, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... not only removes the hindrances of reason, but positively helps reason. It makes even the speculative notions the more lively. It engages the attention of the mind, with the more fixedness and intenseness to that kind of objects; which causes it to have a clearer view of them, and enables it more clearly to see their mutual relations, and occasions it to take more notice of them. The ideas themselves that otherwise ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... our own decked all over with a row of curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy face at every one. Once we encountered a boat of rude construction, painted all in gloomy black, and manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these three alone, among the ancient possessors of the land, had attempted to derive benefit from the white mail's mighty projects and float along the current of his enterprise. Not long after, in the ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dignified old personages, or dried up, shriveled, wrinkled-like parchment, and blackened with naphtha and bitumen. On their heads they wore pschents of gold, and their breastplates and gorgets scintillated with precious stones; their eyes had the fixedness of the sphinx, and their long beards were whitened by the snows of centuries. Behind them stood their embalmed subjects, in the rigid and constrained postures of Egyptian art, preserving eternally the attitudes prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind the subjects, the cats, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the groans of death, heart-piercing sound, That mournful rose in peals on peals around; Child after child by heav'nly darts expires, And frequent corses feed the gloomy pyres. Aghast she stands!—now here in wild amaze— Now there the mother casts her madd'ning gaze: In fixedness of grief, in dumb despair, Her looks, her mien, her inmost soul declare: Her looks, her mien, her deep-sunk anguish show With all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... just appreciation of the enormity of the offence which he believed to have been committed, he consecrated his vast energies to the detection of crime. His whole soul was fired almost to frenzy with the greatness of his work, and he pursued it with a firmness of principle and fixedness of purpose that seemed almost madness, till he exposed to the world the most stupendous league of robbers ever dreamed of, extending into every State and Territory of the Union, and numbering, to his personal knowledge, over seven hundred men of influence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... comforted heart will be a stable heart. Our fixedness and stability are not natural immobility, but communicated steadfastness. There must be, first, the consolation of Christ before there can be the calmness of a settled heart. We all know how vacillating, how driven to and fro ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Nelson's flagship, the "Vanguard," dismasted at sea Indications of character elicited by the accident He is joined by ten ships-of-the-line, raising his squadron to thirteen Pursuit of the expedition under Bonaparte Nelson's fixedness of purpose Attitude of Naples Perplexities of the pursuit The light of the single eye Embarrassment from the want of frigates Squadron reaches Alexandria before the French Renewed perplexity Nelson returns to the westward Anchors ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... they preached, not with fear and trembling, but rather even with excess of boldness, the saving Name of God, and naught but Christ was on their lips, as they plainly proclaimed to all men the transitory and fading nature of this present time, and the fixedness and incorruptibility of the life to come, and sowed in men the first seeds, as it were, towards their becoming of the household of God, and winning that life which is hid in Christ. Wherefore many, profiting by this most pleasant teaching, turned away from the bitter darkness of error, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... an accent of supreme determination, in a voice become suddenly vibrant with new energy. "But I won't go!" Her face, too, had lost the delicate, yielding lines of the woman wooed and won, rejoicing in submission; it was again alert, set to fixedness of plan that would brook no denial. At sight of the change in her, Hamilton stared in dismay. He could not understand this development in her. He had humiliated himself in vain. He had offered the abandonment of all that could offend her, yet she remained ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... subject with a full acknowledgment, and would offer any gradual settlement within my power. He paid his bill (doing what was right by attendance) with his eye rolling about him to the last for any tokens of his Luggage. One only time our gaze then met, with the lustrous fixedness (I believe I am correct in imputing that character to it?) of the well-known Basilisk. ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... conducive to the maintenance of health, we find, first, remarkable regularity of habits, which is largely due to the fixedness, or caste state of society, that keeps people in the same grade of life into which they are born; that is, in conditions where they have no occasion to change their habits, and where they have little opportunity ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... career—to render home the all-powerful magnet of attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment—to make my welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude—and to demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago plighted to me.... Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life than ourselves." For twelve years after that sad December night the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... whether, in the utterance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there; but with the light we had, which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness and fixedness ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle |
