"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident—but not reckless—of the future. Many Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of political thinking has been ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne Bradstreet's life; an inspiration and then a warning. There are hints that Anne resented the limitations that hedged her in, and had small love of the mutual criticism, which made the corner stone of Puritan life. That she cared to write had already excited the wonder ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... "The formative stage of inebriety continues for a longer or shorter period, when, as is well known, more frequent repetitions of the practice of drinking are to be observed. The impulse to drink grows stronger and stronger, the will-power is overthrown and the entire organism becomes subject to the fearful demands ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... 50: 'prowl, proll, to seek for prey, from Fr. proie by the addition of a formative l, as kneel ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... head. Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life—her father's melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reasoning. But our children have their knowing also to attain to, their discoveries to make, their logic of proof, on occasions, to employ. Shall we lavish all the treasures of method on those who have passed the formative stage of mind, and acquired the bent of its activities? Rather, we think, the true intellectual method—combining both Baconian induction and Aristotelian deduction—yet waits to realize some of the best of the application and work for which its joint originators ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the House of Chou is not to be disposed of in a few paragraphs, like the accounts of the preceding dynasties, because it was preeminently the formative period of ancient China; the age of her greatest sages, and the birthday of poetry and philosophy. I shall therefore devote a chapter to the sages and another to the reign of anarchy before closing ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... not old, but he's bald. His eyes screw into you. His nose," another formative gesture, "is like that. A nawful big nose. He didn't ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... presents, in a veto message, to the Senate of the United States as the equals of the States it represents; informs that body that he is constitutionally the President of the States he has made, as well as the President of the States which have not enjoyed the advantage of his formative hand; and unmistakably hints that Congress, unless it admits the representatives of the States he has reconstructed, is not a complete and competent legislative body for the whole Union,—is, in plain words, a Rump. The President, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... illustrated by an observation he made to me one spring morning in 1919 when the Republican attitude toward the League of Nations was still in the formative process. Borah was "convinced" that Elihu Root and Will H. Hays were conspiring to induce the Republicans to accept the League and he said, quite seriously, that he had about come to the conclusion that it would be necessary to wreck the Republican Party to save ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... new book by the venerable Dr. Ryerson is the most important literary work of his life. It fitly crowns a career of unusual intellectual activity with a standard history of the formative period of Anglo-American civilization. The range and scope of the work are much wider than most persons would suppose from the announcement. Most people looked for a work that would be mainly made up of biographical sketches of the U. E. Loyalist pioneer ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the conquered Saxon's conception of justice, rejected the claims of divine right by the Stewarts, established capacity for self-government upon the independence of individual character that knows no superior but the law, and supplied the amazing formative power which has molded, according to the course and practice of the common law, the thought and custom of the hundred millions of men drawn from all lands and all races who inhabit this continent north of the ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... is profitless to study the formative periods of English literature before trying to get acquainted with it in its present condition. One should work backwards, and not forwards, in this study. The practice of beginning with Anglo-Saxon writers, and studying down to nineteenth-century authors, is to be utterly condemned. ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... of the phenomena of structure and metamorphosis, which are still passing before our eyes. Rocks of eruption, sedimentary rocks, changed (metamorphosed) rocks, conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative condition; rocks of eruption, p 20 endogenous (granite, sienite, porphyry, greenstone, hyperathene, rock, euphotide, melaphyre, basalt, and phonolithe); sedimentary rocks (silurian schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... all things to the truth. The wise man belongs to that rare class who neither deceive nor are deceived; others are either deceivers or deceived, or both. In his theory of nature, Cardanus advances two principles: one passive, matter (the three cold and moist elements), and an active, formative one, the world-soul, which, pervading the All and bringing it into unity, appears as warmth and light. The causes of motion are attraction and repulsion, which in higher beings become love and hate. Even ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of the Deity, in the masonic system, connects him with his creative and formative power. God is, to the Freemason, Al Gabil, as the Arabians called him, that is, The Builder; or, as expressed in his masonic title, the Grand Architect of the Universe, by common consent abbreviated in the formula G.A.O.T.U. Now, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... elaborated by Thucydides, it must yet be maintained that they were not foreign to the character of the speaker. In the orations in question, these men proclaim the maxims adopted by their countrymen and formative of their own character; they record their views of their political relations and of their moral and spiritual nature, and publish the principles of their designs and conduct. What the historian puts into their mouths is no supposititious ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... "It is indeed a brilliant effort, worthy of the human mind, to comprise in one organic whole, the entire science of nature, from the laws of gravity to the formative impulse in animated bodies;" but the preoccupation of his vast mind, and the hold of pre-existing ideas, offered difficulties to the solution of the problem. But, note the approximation of his ideas to those herein expressed, he said: "The sun, as the main source of light and heat, must ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... although they doubtless watched his antics with a fearful joy. From the accounts which survive, life in the nursery of the young Roosevelts must have been a perpetual play-time, but through it all ran the invisible formative influence of their parents, who had the art of shaping the minds and characters of the little people without seeming ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... nations. A work appealing on common lines to a New World audience would be worse than banal, and a conscientious American writer is compelled to describe not alone what he saw, but in clarion notes tell of some things he failed of seeing for our country, emerging but now from the formative period, and destined to permanently lead the universe in material affairs, is entitled to be better known in the East ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... De Tocqueville's able "Democracy in America," Mr. John T. Morgan thus describes the formative period of the American Republic, a period in which the name of Thomas Jefferson must, if justice be meted out to him, appear in every chapter, and in every important achievement ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... that all mixt Bodies spring from one Element; and that Vegetables, Animals, Marchasites, Stones, Metalls, &c. are Materially but simple Water disguis'd into these Various Formes, by the plastick or Formative Virtue of their seeds. And as for his Reasons you may find divers of them scatter'd up and down his writings; the considerabl'st of which seem to be these three; The Ultimate Reduction of mixt Bodies into Insipid Water, the Vicissitude ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending—the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, more ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... modern side the example of Wordsworth was most formative, and in fact it is common to describe Arnold as a Wordsworthian: and so, in his contemplative attitude to nature, and in his habitual recourse to her, he was; but both nature herself as she appeared ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of about half a century with which these volumes are concerned may properly be regarded as the formative age of the Huguenots of France. It included the first planting of the reformed doctrines, and the steady growth of the Reformation in spite of obloquy and persecution, whether exercised under the forms of law or vented in lawless violence. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... the simple or primitive verbs, not the compound forms, are here taken into consideration. The proportionate loss, therefore, is really much greater. O.E. abounded in formative prefixes. "Thus from the Anglo-Saxon flwan, to flow, ten new compounds were formed by the addition of various prefixes, of which ten, only one, oferflwan, to overflow, survives with us. In a similar manner, from the verb sittan, to sit, thirteen new verbs were formed, of which not ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... groups along the road, eyeing one another in dull wonderment across the forbidden space through the long summer day. This kind of discipline, unless when really necessary, is open to the objection that it eliminates from the education of life, especially during the formative years, an essential of culture—the mutual understanding of the sexes. The evil of grafting upon secular life a quasi-monasticism which, not being voluntary, has no real effect upon the character, may perhaps involve moral consequences little dreamed of by ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... therefore even more true to-day than when they were first published. The problem of the future is plainly the problem of China and no thoughtful person can afford to be indifferent to the vast transformation which is taking place as the result of the operation of the great formative ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... throughout her vicissitudes did not show a bolder, more determined front to the foe than did her great citizen his own enemies and detractors. Dominique Ingres and his life-story favour those physicists who discern in native soil and surroundings the formative influences of aptitudes and character. The man and his birthplace matched each other. Indomitableness characterized both, and to understand both we must know something of their respective histories. To Montauban Henri Martin's great history ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only the habit of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a Power beyond sense—a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires of ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... the begetting of man, the mother supplies the formless matter of the body; and the latter receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father. And though this power cannot create the rational soul, yet it disposes the matter of the body to receive ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... for several years. The plan for this fund, as finally approved in 1920, provides for an incorporated board of nine directors, the first members of which were appointed by the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association. This project, while still in its formative stage, has great possibilities for the future of the University, judged by the success of similar funds in other institutions. This is particularly true at Yale, where the alumni fund amounts to nearly $2,000,000 in addition to some ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... for many years was in charge of a church at Berkeley. This youth was sensitive, delicate, and far from strong. His faith in human nature received a shock, and his disposition was warped at the most receptive and formative period of his life, by the terrible scenes of suffering on the one hand, and relentless cruelty on the other, that he witnessed in that fatal place. He wrote, in his memoir many years after: "I have since found that the whole world is but one great prison-house of guilty, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... great corporations were in their formative period, effort was concentrated on making them successful, but with success came thoughts of other things. It began to be seen, for example, that whereas the old small employer of labor came into personal contact with his ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... be that Calvinism is eclectic as regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon individual character, certain it is that the Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other—the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... being renewed. Although the great formative movements occurred ages ago, yet earthquakes, volcanic action, wind, frost and water are working continual changes. Hills and mountains have been thrown up, and nature has gone to work at once to shave down the mountains and fill up the valleys. The whole earth is as carefully adjusted ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... nineteen is the formative period, when the cosmic cement sets, if ever. During those years George Peabody had emerged from a clerkship into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... even the nearest of her neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in its material and technic elements, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... workers. It is only through the intelligent use of the tool and consequent love of work which follows that we can look forward to supplying the skilled machine workers of the future. This training must be given while the girls are in the formative period, to develop habits of thought and action which will counteract the bad effects upon the worker that follow division and subdivision of work, with consequent subdivision of ability, which takes place in all factories today. When a pupil has been thoroughly trained in the ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... proportion of that essential formative of character, east wind, it has at once the hottest sun, the coldest blizzards, the wettest rain, of any place of its size in the "three kingdoms." It tends—in advance even of the City of London—to the nurture and improvement of individualism, to that desirable "I'll see you d—-d" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... force. The rehearsal of war and strife, the superficial view of history which sees only the smoke of battles and the monuments of military heroes, give place to an insight which traces the advancing welfare of the common people. The minister will inspire his formative citizens with good portrayals of statesmen, educators, inventors, reformers, discoverers, pioneers, and philanthropists. He will charm them into greatness at the very time when a ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... are the creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote! We see in this similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according to the formative pressure of external circumstances. The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.' And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... of as possessing any attribute at all—not even that of existence. A system a little less abstract is that of the Eleatics, who believed in the absolute as existing. Then that of Giordano Bruno, who made soul and matter the formative principle and the principal recipient of forces—to be the ground of the universe. Then Spinoza, who postulated thought as the representative of the spiritual, and extension as that of the material principle; and these together are his originaux. From thence sprang the spiritual pantheists—such ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... habit which keeps continually cutting for itself a deeper and deeper channel, until in the end it leaves indelible traces whether in the individual or in the race, or it is expressly called into being by the unconscious formative principle in generation, so as to facilitate action in a given direction. This last will be the case more frequently in respect of exterior organisation—as, for example, with the weapons or working organs of animals—while to the former must be referred ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good deal ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature; and that the second in like manner comprises various {25} aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorganised element or principle; the first, to adopt a later method of expression, is Form, the second Matter. How this antithesis was worked out by Plato ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... object, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the spring when the floods ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... work we did together is now become vain. It may not be so in future; but the architecture we endeavoured to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions of the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety; and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, with toil, decipher its floral carvings choked with soot. I felt ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... in a country school and boarding 'round, and he had discovered that long before this the child had been learning by observing and playing, and that these were formative influences, quite ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... assurance, and she readily finds employment as a saleslady. Her influence afterwards, among girls comparatively innocent and without her experience, cannot but be pernicious, and at the same time must exert a certain formative and shaping process in determing the peculiar character of the whole class ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... to a thankful acceptance of his limitation; and his continuing interest in people "made the latter years of his ministry," to quote Bishop Lawrence, "as fruitful as the more active ones." His devoted wife, who was Hortense Chew Lewis of New London, Connecticut, guided the children through their formative years with skill and understanding. She was an intelligent mother, discriminating in taste and judgment. Because of her abounding love of good literature, the family passed many delightful evenings in listening to her readings from Scott, Milton, Shakespeare and many other great writers. ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... by D. Giuseppe Antonini and is entitled "The German Madness." Its subject, full of quotations from Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi, is not new to Americans. For Italians it may come as a revelation. It demonstrates the formative influences which have found expression in what is called "Prussian Militarism," as an attitude of mind which believes in the supremacy of force over all things—over goodness, virtue, kindness, and all else that make life worth living. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... learning and study, as a means for the attainment of this higher end. Discipline and guidance were in his view still more prominently the business of a schoolmaster than the impartation of knowledge. His influence was stimulative rather than formative, the secret of his power consisting not so much in the novelty of his ideas or methods as in his commanding and magnetic personality. —From Thomas Arnold, by SIR ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... remarkable existence; his experience has been eminently formative," replied Desprez. "If I had had to choose an education for my son, I should have chosen such another. Beginning life with mountebanks and thieves, passing onward to the society and friendship of philosophers, he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... incandescent at the surface—and, therefore, unsuited to contain life. It is hardly worth while to speculate about any solid nucleus within, because, even if such a thing were possible, or probable, it must lie forever hidden from our eyes. But if we accept the theory that Saturn is in an early formative stage, and that, millions of years hence, it may become an incrusted and habitable globe, we shall, at least, follow the analogy of what we believe to have been the history of the earth, except that Saturn's immense distance from the sun will always prevent it from receiving ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the contrary, the steady pressure of hardship and misfortune, during a period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein to those which, under more favoring conditions, might ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... presence of any danger, but he retained all his caution as he knelt down to drink, a caution become nature through all the formative years of practice and necessity. His knees made no noise as they touched the earth. Not a leaf moved. Not a blade of grass rustled. The rifle remained upon his shoulder, his right hand grasping it around the stock, just below the hammer, the barrel projecting into the air. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ancestors had been in America for nearly three centuries, he was continually finding how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most formative element ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... most highly generalized philosophical terms. Consider for instance, "Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo." No complete translation can be found for them in English; "Ri" and "Ki" may be best translated as the rational and the formative principles in the universe, while "In" and "Yo" signify the active and the passive, the male and the female, the light and the darkness; in a word, the poles of a positive and negative. It is true that ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, and the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain.—"It ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... more truly fathered by what is formative and expansive in his country and times than was Whitman. Not by the literature of his country was he begotten, but by the spirit that lies back of all, and that begat America itself,—the America that Europe loves and fears, that she comes to this country to see, and looks expectantly, but ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... brave heart beat for Tennyson; I think my father's did not, though his head applauded. My mother, for her part, was entranced by the goldsmith's work of the noble poet, and by the gems enclasped in its perfection of formative art,—perfections within the pale of convention and fashion and romantic beauty which make lovely Tennyson's baronial domain. Henry Bright wrote verses, too; and he was beginning to be successful in a certain profound interest which customarily ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... spell out from that which nature presents to us, the DESIRED word, the congenial. Men find what the artist brings intelligible and to their taste, stimulating and alluring, genial and friendly, spiritually nourishing, formative and elevating. Thus the artist, grateful to the nature that made him, weaves a second nature—but a conscious, a fuller, a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... cultivated man who knows his Tropics—and more particularly one who has known his Tropics during the formative period of mental development, say from eighteen to thirty—I feel instinctively that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain clues to the problems of the world we live in, not possessed in anything ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... to be said about her? Well, she does not leave; she stays here to complete the picture of the woman Torsen, child of the middle class who has read schoolbooks all through her formative years, who has learned all about Artemis cotula, but undernourished her soul. That is ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... labor of being comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of a great work and ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... Owen's life and teaching, including his own voluminous writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... respectabilities in his serious dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet refers to him as one of the formative ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of the situation concerning the management ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... intensely for a definite creed found that expression for it was lacking, even if this creed (as in France) were that of a very large majority in the State. The "organs of opinion" professed a genteel ignorance of that idea which was most widespread, most intense, and most formative. Nor could it be otherwise with a Capitalist enterprise whose directing motive was not conversion or even expression, but mere gain. There was nothing to distinguish a large daily paper owned by a Jew from one owned by an Agnostic or a Catholic. ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... the Princess Sophie Zobraska. Paul, who prided himself on his knowledge of feminine subtlety, was at fault; but who was he to appreciate the repressive influence of a practical-minded convent friend, quickly formative and loudly assertive of opinions, on an impressionable lady awakening to curiosities? He was just a dunderhead, like any one of us—just as much as the most eminent feminine psychologist alive—which is saying a good deal. So he drove away disappointed, the sobriety of the chestnut's ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of this important period of Church history—the formative period—has here a clear narrative, packed with information drawn from authentic sources and elucidated with the most recent results of investigation. We do not know of any other work on Church history in which so much learned ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally combustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because they come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in which it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in its formative stage. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the activities of life, such as digesting, growing, studying, playing, working, and the like, are replaced by others of better quality and larger number. At least, such is the case where metamorphosis is permitted to go on normally. The result is growth and development. This growing period or formative epoch extends from birth to the age of twenty or twenty-five years. Its duration is shorter for a girl than for a boy. She ripens quicker than he. In the four years from fourteen to eighteen, she accomplishes an amount of physiological ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... the lads who had spent within its comfortable walls such an eventful year. They had grown much, not only physically, but there had been development mentally and morally that would tell for good in the oncoming years. To have been under the guidance of such a couple as Mr and Mr Ross in such a formative period of their young lives was of incalculable value. Happy are the boys who have such guardians; happier still if their own parents are of this ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... Semitic tongues, and included it in the Turanian group. It is said to possess all the characteristics of the Turanian family being agglutinated, that is to say, maintaining its roots in their integrity without formative prefixes, poor in conjunctions, and copious in the use of participles. It is uncertain when alphabetical characters were introduced into Japan, but it is believed to have happened when intercourse ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... scheme of redemption and a moral surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of these contrasts are not obscure. We must suppose that a self-sufficing community might at one time, as well as at another, be drawn together by formative beliefs. But that it may take root somewhere and, by protecting itself against destructive external influences, succeed for a relatively long time in maintaining its integrity and its solidarity, it must enjoy a relative isolation. In a literal sense it must be beyond easy reach of those antagonistic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the comparative neglect of this transitory and imperfect world for the sake of some dream-world far off, which shall subsist without sin or corruption, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. These four are the really significant and formative periods of Greek religious thought; but we may well cast our eyes also on a fifth stage, not historically influential perhaps, but at least romantic and interesting and worthy of considerable respect, when the old religion in the time of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... to eat and sleep are all that may reasonably be expected of him, and that he must depend upon his family for everything, he will grow up helpless, selfish and awkward, and no amount of later training will entirely counteract the pernicious effect produced in these early, formative years. When placed in school with other children, he will be very sensitive to correction, and may become morbid and unhappy, thus giving a wrong impression of the blind in general. If, on the other hand, the child is taught to be self-helpful, permitted to join in the work and ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... philosophy along with him, i. e. transplanted it there, but being banished thence for impiety to the gods, settled in Lampsacus, was the first to assign to the nous, conceived of "as a purely immaterial principle, a formative power in the origin and organisation of things"; d. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of 1852-3, when a student at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., while the spot on which we now stand was Indian country as yet untouched by the formative power of national legislation, I listened to Miss Susan B. Anthony, Miss Antoinette Brown and others in the advocacy of the rights of women. It seems a strange fortune that brings now, nearly thirty years after, one of those speakers, crowned with a national reputation, into a State carved ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum—the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... dismission for some sort of a college frolic, and even while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have been one of the formative ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... a variegated leaved shoot below the graft. This can easily be explained. The growth of the trunk or stem of all exogenous plants, or those which increase in size on the outside of the stem, is brought about by the descent of certain formative tissue called cambium, elaborated by the leaves and descending between the old wood and the bark, where it is formed into alburnum or woody matter. Some think that it is also formed by the roots and ascends from them as well as descending ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... vast bosom of Erebus (or chaotic darkness) winged Night brought forth first of all the egg, from which in after revolving periods sprang Eros (Love) the much desired, glittering with golden wings; and Eros again, in union with Chaos, produced the brood of the human race." Here the formative process is a birth, not a creation; it is evolution pure and simple. "According to the ancient view," says Professor Lewis, "the present world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent, not merely as ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... been ascertained that the legend of Arthur was familiar among the Normans before Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his books, and it certainly had an incalculable formative influence on European literature, much of which can be "traced back directly or indirectly to these legends." It was also a vehicle for that element which we call chivalry, which the church infused into it to fashion and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... way," she went on. "A man may make a thing—circumstance included—but he is not a sort of moral spider; he can't spin it out of his own inside. He wants something to make it of. The formative force comes from within, but he must have material, just as much as a sculptor must have his marble before he can shape his statue. There is a subtle relation between character and conditions, and it is this relation that determines ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... will be devoted to man as moral subject, and will analyse the capacities of the soul which respond to the calls and claims of the new Life. The third Section will involve a consideration of the formative Principles of Character, the moulding of the soul, the Ideals, Motives and Forces by means of which the 'New Man' is 'recreated' and fashioned. Finally, under Conduct, the Virtues, Duties and Rights of man will be discussed; and the various spheres of service and institutions ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... is, into the matrix, it bears with it the virtue or power of the generative Soul, and the virtue or power of Heaven, and the virtue or power of the aliments united or bound together, that is the involution or complex nature of the seed. It matures and prepares the material for the formative power or virtue which the generating Soul bestows; and the formative power or virtue prepares the organs for the celestial virtue or power, which produces, from the power of the seed, the Soul in life; which, as soon as produced, receives from the power ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... general agreement among the writers as to principles, the greatest freedom as to treatment is allowed to writers in this series. The volumes, for example, will not be of the same length. Volume II., which deals with the formative period of the Church, is, not unnaturally, longer in proportion than the others. To Volume VI., which deals with the Reformation, will be allotted a similar extension. The authors, again, use their own discretion in such matters as footnotes and lists of ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... capable of seeing in it something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible—granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... formative principles [forms] of things bare of their coverings; the purposes of actions; consider what pain is, what pleasure is, and death, and fame; who is to himself the cause of his uneasiness; how no man is hindered by another; that ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... this formative period Bell had adhered to and introduced the magneto form of telephone, now used only as a receiver, and very poorly adapted for the vital function of a speech-transmitter. From August, 1877, the Western Union ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... analyzed, prove that the woman principal was right; many schools are so built or so conducted, many school courses are so devised or so executed, that children are inevitably injured by the environment in which the compulsory education law forces them to spend their formative years. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... an allusion to the seven activities or changes which water goes through to produce form; Water being the formative power which Fire, itself formless and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... of these towns, however, are of such a heterogeneous blend that it is difficult to assign any tribal place to them. It may be said, in general, that these towns are still passing through a formative period, the result of which will probably be their complete adoption of Mandya culture and language, if they are left free ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the world's ways with them. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley |
