"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loses the character of life, and is transformed into inanimate units. Man is something different from the sum of the services he may be made to render, and from the sum of enjoyments which may be procured for him. We must not run the risk of lowering him to the level of a living tool; and from the moment that we are ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... well at first, but at length oblivion came. He waked to feel Bouche tugging at his blankets. It was noon. Late Carscallen and Cloud-in-the-Sky were still sleeping—inanimate bundles among the dogs. In an hour they were on their way again, and towards sunset they had reached the foot of Manitou Mountain. Abruptly from the plain rose this mighty mound, blue and white upon a black base. A few straggling ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the fading light while he made random observations on the nature of the sky-line,—one of his cant hobbies. "See how crudely the character of everything is defined up there against the sky," I heard him say, while I continued to search for the path. "Now even a sheep or a cow, or an inanimate thing, like that stone wall, for instance,—see how its character as a wall comes out as it sweeps over the top." At this moment, a little drop of surprise in his voice made me look around. He was walking backwards, one ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... "festival of life" at which even insects sing, a tortoise comes on the scene with certain sacramental Latin words, and even, if I remember aright, a mineral sings about something that is a quite inanimate object. In fact, they all sing continually, or if they converse, it is simply to abuse one another vaguely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. At last the scene is changed again; a wilderness appears, and among the rocks there wanders a civilized ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... said St. Guenole, "one might baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by aspersion or immersion, not only a bird or a quadruped, but also an inanimate object, a statue, a table, a chair, etc. That animal would be Christian, that idol, that table would be Christian! It ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... called him the most original figure of London. The papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things. ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... seen in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. And, at the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and nothing of the sort occurred. At first it made him catch his breath to see the apparent chances they took; but after a little he perceived that seeming luck was in reality a coolness of judgment and a long experience in the peculiar ways of that most erratic of inanimate cussedness—the pine log. The banks grew daily. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... exemplified by uniformity of practice, or theoretically defined. Ship-delineators profess the art as a mystery, and arbitrary forms are assumed as the result of science. These lines ought to be, by an axiom, founded on a law imposed by Infinite Wisdom for the perfect guidance of inanimate matter. Projectiles, thrown obliquely, take their flight in convex parabolic curves, wherein resistance is overcome by a minimum of force; and elastic surfaces obey the converse of that law in opposing certain external influences. It is a property of conic sections ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... scene came before Amelie at this moment. Her vivid recollection conjured up the sight of the inanimate body of her brother as it was brought ashore by the strong arm of Pierre Philibert and laid upon the beach; her long agony of suspense, and her joy, the greatest she had ever felt before or since, at his resuscitation to life, and lastly, her passionate vow which she made when clasping ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to herself, Pollyanna had always found plenty to interest her within the four walls of the house; for, if inanimate things failed, there were yet Mary, Jennie, Bridget, and Perkins. To-day, however, Mary had a headache, Jennie was trimming a new hat, Bridget was making apple pies, and Perkins was nowhere to be found. Moreover it was a particularly beautiful ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... the man to be easily flattened by ponderosity of any kind, and his suppression was a striking proof of the prowess of the widows; who, indeed, went over Mr. Povey like traction- engines, with the sublime unconsciousness of traction-engines, leaving an inanimate object in the road behind them, and scarce aware even of the jolt. Mr. Povey hated Aunt Harriet, but, lying crushed there in the road, how could he rebel? He felt all the time that Aunt Harriet was adding him up, and reporting the result at frequent intervals to Mrs. Baines in the bedroom. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... for to-night?" he muttered; "put it away—I'll come—I'll do it—put it away." So I dropped the weapon back into my pocket while the Postilion, shivering violently, stooped with me above the inanimate figure, and, with our limp burden between us, we staggered and stumbled up the path, and along the lane to where stood ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... loftiest majesty of expression, depicts the pastoral life of the Patriarchs, the marvellous history of the Hebrew nation, the beautiful scenery in which they lived and moved, the stately ceremonial of their liturgy, and the promise of a Messiah. Its chief strength and charm is that it personifies inanimate objects, as in the sixty-fourth Psalm, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... become so critical that I felt it my duty to acquaint Sir Edgar with it forthwith; and I was on my way toward the companion in search of him when he emerged from it and joined me, the two seamen who had conveyed the inanimate body of the mate below following him and making their way forward, dodging the seas as best they might during ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... the powers they had of act or sound arose from the impassioned thoughts and fierce emotions of their forger or their wielder, which, being intense, were magically transferred to them. The Celtic nature is too fond of reality, too impatient of illusion, to believe in an actual living spirit in inanimate things. At least, that is the case in the stories of the Hero and ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... known for years his mastery over the inanimate things of the world. He knew how easy it was to tear a tree from its roots, to jerk a great tree-limb from its socket. He knew that under most conditions he had nothing to fear from the great tigers, although a fight with a tiger is a painful thing ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise rattled gaily along the uneven pavements ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... revelation, to wit, mystery and allegory. The myths state clearly the one tremendous fact that the Gods are; that is what Julian cared about and the Christians denied: what they are the myths reveal only to those who have understanding. 'The world itself is a great myth, in which bodies and inanimate things are visible, souls ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... will exceed the demand for expense, in which the human race will have some surplus capital. The incessant manual labour which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course of time be more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery. Unskilled labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile cunning for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately there will be no unsettled land to fill, no frontier life, no savage races to be ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... philosophy may be discovered. In the lowest and earliest stage everything has life; everything is endowed with personality, will, and design; animals are endowed with all the wonderful attributes of mankind; all inanimate objects are believed to be animate; trees think and speak; stones have loves and hates; hills and mountains, springs and rivers, and all the bright stars, have life—everything discovered objectively ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... day there persisted that sense of complete detachment from all but her whose body they had laid to rest on the windy hill overlooking the broad water. His father, Aunt Barbara, the cousins and relations who thronged the church were no more than inanimate shadows compared with her whose presence had come last night into his room, and had not left him since. The affairs of the world, drums and the torch of war, had passed for those hours from his knowledge, as at the centre of a cyclone there was a windless calm. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... came, in time, to giving his attention to Dorothea. She, too, bore the impress of Diane; and as she bore it more markedly than the inanimate things around, it caused him the greater pain. He could forbid her to hold intercourse with Diane, and to speak of her; but he could not control the blending of French and Irish intonations her voice had caught, or the gestures into which she slipped through ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... think and to speak of gravitation as a law of matter; while every quality of matter, in and of itself, is inert, inanimate, and non-intelligent. The assertion that matter is a law, or a lawgiver, is [25] anomalous. Wherever law is, Mind is; and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... commanded the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell me what you ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... all kinds of dreadful disasters, explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings. Never before, perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the spirit of the times. Fred found a superb placard, the work of Cheret, a pathetic scene in a mine, banners streaming in the air, with the words 'Bazar de Charite' in gold letters on a red ground, and the courtyard of the mansion where the ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... mystery in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... an ejaculation of horror and alarm, and exerting all her strength she dragged the inanimate figure away from its enshrouding coverlet of leaves. The rain beat heavily upon the bloodless, upturned face. "What can I do for you?" she cried in despair, taking his handkerchief and binding tightly the deep wound on his head. He opened his eyes languidly, and murmured scarcely above his breath, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... all beasts were made for an ensample, and served for a type, of the one and only truth. All things, indeed, were types and allegories to this way of thinking; and just as every text in the Bible was an allegory to mediaeval interpretation, so all things in the world of creation, animate and inanimate, the jewel with its 'virtue' as well as the beast with its 'moral', became allegories and parables of heavenly meanings. Thus the world of perception became unreal, that it might be transmuted into the real world of faith; and symbolism like that of Hugh of St. Victor dominated men's thought, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the three bodies [described above], which are impermanent, inanimate (jada), essentially painful and subject ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... under gave this woman new strength. She raised the insensible girl, carried her through the vacant chamber, and laid her on the bed in her own room. She drew the bedclothes over her inanimate form and ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Sicilian mendicant, knows not what wretchedness is,) lay in the corners of the streets, stretched out, doubled up, panting, without strength to stretch out their hand for charity, or voice to ask an alms. Pompeii, which I visited three months afterwards, was not more silent, more solitary, more inanimate. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume his ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... crawl into hollow trees on the banks of the stream, where I once found a female and a nest of eggs. The lazy flapping flight of large blue and black morpho butterflies high in the air, the hum of insects, and many inanimate sounds, contributed their share to the total impression this strange solitude produced. Heavy fruits from the crowns of trees which were mingled together at a giddy height overhead, fell now and then with a startling "plop" into the water. The ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... There is often a perverseness in inanimate things which is beyond endurance. He had started with the highest hopes a few minutes before, confident of finding the Indian canoe without trouble, and now he was baffled and held back when on the very threshold ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... a marked day for Jonah, and he looked forward to it with impatience. It was spring. The temperate rays of the sun fell on budding tree and shrub; the mysterious renewal of life that stirred inanimate nature seemed to touch his pulse to a quicker and lighter beat. He sat for hours in the backyard, once a garden, screened from observation, with the child on his knees. The blood ran pleasantly in his veins; he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... inanimate things outlast The life that used them. Yes. I should like to try This good old friend of his. You'll leave me here An hour or so?" His hands explored the stops; And, while the music breathed what else were mute, His mind through many ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... do its work. And like it all the rest of the natural world, faithful to the law of its Maker, was stamped with the same signet of perfection. Only man, in all the universe, seemed to be at cross purposes with the end of his being. Only man, of all animate or inanimate things, lived an aimless, fruitless, broken life,—or fruitful only in evil. How was this? and whence? and when would be the end? and would this confused mass of warring elements ever be at peace? would ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... little smoking-room in the house in Pemberton Square, three years after Maggie went to live there, on the very sofa where Andre Maggimore had lain, was stretched the inanimate form of another person, stricken down by the same malady. It was Mr. Checkynshaw. The two gentlemen with whom he had been conversing when attacked by the fit had placed him there, and Dr. Fisher had been sent for. From that sofa he was conveyed to his bed, still insensible. His eyes ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... quality Desmond recognized, as he would have recognized a fine painting or a bit of perfect porcelain. All his short life his father had trained him to look for and acclaim quality, whether in things animate or inanimate. He caught hold of ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... unwelcome visitors, and in due course the drink effected its purpose—its victims dropped off one by one, until the whole party lay like logs upon the floor. Mrs. Arthur Jones then crept in, having even to step over the bodies of the inanimate Roundheads, released her husband, and a fresh horse being in readiness, by the time the effects of the wine had worn off the Royalist captain was far beyond ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... near him. Hate and revenge for the moment swayed him, but not for an instant did Joan disbelieve what was burning into her consciousness. Truth rang in every word of the almost unbelievable story. And while she listened and shrank back she was conscious of inanimate things taking on human attributes that pleaded with her. The chair by the hearth where Doris had but recently sat smiling so happily because her ideals had been real to her! Nancy and she, Joan seemed to know, were the ideals—Nancy and she! ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... hitherto happened to him. Over the elegant suit was his winter overcoat, making him bulky, and round what may be called the rim of the overcoat was a white woollen scarf, and the sleeves of the overcoat were finished off with white woollen gloves. Under one arm he carried a vast inanimate form whose extremity just escaped the ground. This form was his violoncello, fragile as a pretty woman, ungainly as a navvy, and precious as honour. Mrs Swann looked down the street, which ended to the east in darkness and a marl pit, and up the street, which ended ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' 'star'd' 'eager-eyed' from ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... things. It is an attempt to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living people into the reports of the day's news. If a man falls and breaks his neck, a bald recital of the facts deals with him only as an animal or an inanimate name. The fact is interesting as one item in the list of human misfortunes, but no more. And yet there are many people to whom this man's accident is more than an interesting incident—it is a very serious matter, perhaps a calamity. To his family he was everything in the ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... itself with my very childhood, fifty years back. The fancy of those who wrote the songs which I was obliged to hear in infancy was a very inanimate and sleepy fancy. I could enumerate a dozen songs at least which all described sleeping shepherds and shepherdesses, and, in one instance, where they both went to sleep: this is not fair certainly; it is not even ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... fill it; individuals, however distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now! Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel is one ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... yet pitying expression of the priest's countenance; but there I lost my identity. Though I was the recipient of these impressions, yet I was not myself separately and distinctively existent and sentient; but my entity was confounded with that of not only the two figures before me, but of the inanimate objects surrounding them. This state of compound existence I can no further describe. While in this state I composed the "Fratricide's Death," or rather it composed itself and forced itself upon my memory without any activity or volition ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... "He fell inanimate in the gallery. It was the same with Grossetti. Andreoli alone remained conscious. After long efforts, he ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... told that his father was not yet back and he resolved to wait for him in the drawing-room. He lit a cigarette, let it go out again and, at first in a spirit of distraction and then with a growing interest, looked around him, as though he were trying to gather from inanimate objects particulars relating to the man who lived in ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... touch my heart as it was touched and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only in moonlit trees or in a flower or serpent, but, in certain exquisite moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature, in "every grass" and in all things, animate and inanimate. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Milburn was unable to articulate a word; Goose B——l, the gourmand, was crammed full, and looked, as he lay in the arms of Morpheus, like a fat citizen on the night of a lord mayor's dinner—a lump of inanimate mortality. In one corner lay a poor little Grecian, papa Chrysanthus Demetriades, whom Tom Echo had plied with bishop till he fell off his chair; Count Dennet was safely deposited beside him; and old Will Stewart,{28} the poacher, was just humming himself ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... "that the more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature." And ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Their virtues were derived either from the material, from the shape, or from the magic rites performed at the time of their preparation. According to a popular belief, which prevailed throughout the East in the earlier centuries of the Christian era, all objects, whether inanimate stones and metals, or brutes and plants, possessed an indwelling spirit or soul, which was the cause of the efficiency of all amulets.[5:1] They were therefore akin to fetishes, in the present acceptation of the term; for a fetish, as defined in the classification of medicines and therapeutic agents ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... rolled back, and his intent mien, one realised why, as a hangman, he had been a success. He left absolutely nothing to chance. When he was through with his experimenting, the possibility of an exhibition of the proneness of inanimate objects to misbehave in emergencies had been reduced ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... when every furrow is a streamlet and the wolves range restlessly abroad, while the birds, numbed to the heart, are silent; or yet again the recluse in his cell, humorously comparing his quest of ideas to the pursuit of the mice by his pet cat. This deep love of inanimate and animate things becomes individualized in those poems in which every tree, every spring, every bird is described with ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... separated and sorted exhaustively, an operation in which Phoebe shows a delicacy of discrimination and a fearlessness of attack amounting to genius, we count the entire number and find several missing. Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we "scoop" one from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by himself in solitary splendour in the ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... raged outside. Occasionally he felt the floor shudder. The windows ran thickly with rain. The door rattled. It was as if all objects inanimate were demanding freedom from bolts and nails. With the tip of his long, slender finger Ling Foo moved the buttons. He counted what his profits would be in Manchurian sables; in the two Ming vases that had come in mysteriously from Kiao-chau—German loot from Peking; counted ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature—that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... beef-tea and the Gloria in Excelsis? This was the thought, inappropriate, unnatural, as he felt it, which came into his mind as he stood by the bed upon which lay that which had been the master of the Warren yesterday, and now was "the body"; a solemn, inanimate thing arranged with dreadful neatness, presently to be taken away and hid out of sight of the living. Tears did not come even when he took his mother into his arms, but only a dumb awe not unmixed with horror, and even that sense of repulsion with which ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... out of its way to attack a human being, but if one should-happen to be in its way, it does not take time to request that individual to stand aside, it simply passes through him, and leaves him or her, as the case may be, a coagulated mass of inanimate tissues." ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha. And, when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood upon his feet." Again, in the case of an inanimate substance, which had touched a living Saint: "And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul; so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Thus to the eve is given the pleasure we derive in looking upon the green fields and forests, the enumerable varieties of flowers, the glowing ruby, jasper, topaz, amethist, and emerald, the brilliant diamond, and all the rich and varied hues of nature, both animate and inanimate. ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... This leave-taking of inanimate things, objects long known and loved, is of frequent occurrence with the dying. It is not in our natures to quit for ever this beautiful world, without casting "one longing, lingering look behind." The hand of its divine Creator was gloriously impressed on the rural loveliness ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... ordinary quickness. In order to prove that there was no mistake respecting the degree of heat indicated by the thermometer, and that the air which they breathed was capable of producing all the well-known effects of such a heat on inanimate matter, they placed some eggs and a beef-steak upon a tin frame near the thermometer, but more distant from the furnace than from the wall of the room. In the space of twenty minutes the eggs were roasted quite hard, and in forty-seven minutes the steak was not only dressed, but almost dry. Another ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... I think that we began to be influenced by this peculiar trait in his character. It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain. It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words. How many persons ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... dolphin that was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." And, as Emil Naumann fancies, there is a moral underlying the myth of the ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Bud, blossom, nourish'd ever by young showers, And moon-distilled dews, until they make Thine utterance odorous. That from thy soul, As from an unseen presence of divinest light, Dartest into the spirit subtle rays That quicken life to blessing, as the breath Of being stirreth the inanimate, Making existence joy, and love, and power. O woods! and rustling forests! Ye that send Soft murmurs ever to the ends of heaven, And from your breast, as from a poet's soul, Issue all sweetest melodies of birds And leafy eloquence. O springs! ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... from the Old Un's bright, piercing eyes. Holding him thus, she loosed Spike's rigid fingers and drew away that clutching hand; then, seeing what that hand had striven to hide, she shrank suddenly away, letting the boy's inanimate form slip from her clasp; and, as she knelt there above him, her shapely body was seized with ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... heavy relaxation, as it were, of all the muscles which are called into action by ordinary emotions: but it is only as if the spirit of love, almost insupportable from its intensity, were brooding over and weighing down the soul, or whatever it is, without which the material frame is inanimate ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... of atomic energy, the discovery of radioactivity, and the recognition of potential and latent energies stored in inanimate matter, throw a brilliant illumination upon the whole problem of sex and the inner energies of mankind. Speaking of the discovery of radium, Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret for which a thousand ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the beams of the morning sun entered my chamber, and forced my visiting companions to fly murmuring to the shades. I cannot say but I was sorry to leave Mannheim, though my acquaintance with it was entirely confined to inanimate objects. The cheerful air and free range of the galleries would be sufficient, for several days, for my amusement; as you know I could people them with phantoms. Not many leagues out of town, lie the famous gardens of Schweidsing. The weather being extremely warm, we were glad to avail ourselves ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... almost entirely by machinery. What we will never be able to replace by machinery is a Man, because man belongs to the level of a dimension above machinery. Engine-power, sun man-power, and capital—mainly the work of the dead—are inanimate; they become productive only when quickened by the time-binding energies of living men and women. Then only are the results proportional to the ever growing magnitude of exponential power. In nature's economy the time-binders are the intelligent forces. There is none else known ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... the time they had come to the conclusion that the house was indeed empty, the fugitives were completely beyond their reach. Characteristically enough, they vented their rage and disappointment on the inanimate objects within their reach. The crash of furniture soon rose above their shouts of fury, and in the end smoke rolled from the windows and poured upwards to the sky as a silent witness to the new spirit that had ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... let mere description (in Pope's phrase) take the place of sense—i.e. of the life which it is the business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840), where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... was something so beautifully calm in her countenance as she lay there like an effigy on a tomb, hardly appearing to breathe; and when I thought of the courage and devotion shown but a few hours before by the present almost inanimate form, I bent over her with admiration, and felt as if I could kneel before the beautiful shrine which contained such an energetic and noble spirit. While this was passing through my mind, Bramble had knelt by the bed-side, and was evidently in prayer. When he rose up he said, "Come away, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Quite prepared to take the "Voices" on trust, and to contribute liberally to the "cause," she attended a number of psychic circles, arranged by Stephen Andrews and other charlatans; listened to mysterious rappings and tappings coming out of the darkness; felt inanimate objects being lifted across the room; heard tambourines rattled by invisible hands; and unquestionably swallowed all the traditional tomfoolery that appears to be part and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... division of Leon Hebreus, dial. 2. betwixt Sophia and Philo, where he speaks of natural, sensible, and rational love, and handleth each apart. Natural love or hatred, is that sympathy or antipathy which is to be seen in animate and inanimate creatures, in the four elements, metals, stones, gravia tendunt deorsum, as a stone to his centre, fire upward, and rivers to the sea. The sun, moon, and stars go still around, [4489]Amantes naturae, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... they are mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases far more distinctly conceived ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... animated by social pleasure, rather saturnine than sprightly. In youth his exterior was rendered agreeable by florid health, and a smile that indicated good-humour. His portrait, by Wright of Derby, gives a very exact, but inanimate, representation of his form and features. In justice to the painter, it must be told, that I believe the likeness to have been ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... almost perpendicular sides of our little cove there was one deserted wigwam, and it alone reminded us that man sometimes wandered into these desolate regions. But it would be difficult to imagine a scene where he seemed to have fewer claims or less authority. The inanimate works of nature — rock, ice, snow, wind, and water — all warring with each other, yet combined against man — here ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did not breed cowardice ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... That merits, in a kind mistake, A pardon for th' offence's sake. Or if it did not, but the cause 125 Were left to th' injury at laws, What tyranny can disapprove There should be equity in love; For laws that are inanimate, And feel no sense of love or hate, 130 That have no passion of their own, Nor pity to be wrought upon, Are only proper to inflict Revenge on criminals as strict But to have power to forgive, 135 Is empire and prerogative; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... by a look, and rushing to the house where the child still lay, seemingly inanimate, on the floor among the soiled clothes, she caught it up eagerly, and hurried away to her own poor garret in a tumble-down tenement at the farthest end of the alley. The infant had been stunned by its fall, but under her tender care, and rocked in the warmth ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... am alone upon the giant rock, with the morning star and the measureless heights of sky. I tremble at the awful silence,—exult fearfully in it. The clouds roll away, and leave the world revealed, lying motionless and inanimate at my feet. Yet I am as far from all sight of humanity as before! Should the whole nation be swarming below the mountain, armies drawn up before armies, with my eyes resting upon them, I should not see them, but sit here in sublime peace. Man's puny form were from this height as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... suit me; he does nothing but shrug his shoulders and roll up his eyes—perhaps it is a Virginia custom. He seems to think Miss Gerard [Julia, daughter of James W. Gerard] his belle ideal or beau ideal of everything lovely, etc. I told him that I thought her awful, that she had such an inanimate sickly expression, and I abused her at a great rate! I expect he thinks ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... around, and feel the chill air damp each ringlet on the pallid brow; know that that hour hath cast a shade on each inanimate thing around us; we feel resigned to our bereavements, and confess, in our heart's humility, that no changes should overwhelm, and that ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Memory, and solid Judgment, who had liv'd in the place of his Nativity, till he had by the help of the rest of his Senses, contracted an acquaintance with a great many in the Neighbourhood, and learn'd the several kinds of Animals, and Things inanimate, and the Streets and Houses of the Town, so as to go any where about it without a Guide, and to know such people as he met, and call them, by their names; and knew the names of Colours[10], and the difference of them by their descriptions and definitions; and after he had ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... and beyond that which she had faced every day: snow and cold and the other inanimate forces of the wild. And she was vastly relieved to hear Bill's voice calling her ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... Hartley's letter, in which both he and his father were mentioned with such marked respect; and never did reprieve come to a shivering, inanimate, and hopeless felon with the hangman's noose neatly settled under his left ear, with a greater sense of relief than did this communication to him. In fact, he had reached that meanness and utter degradation of soul which absolutely feels comfort, and is glad to take refuge, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Inanimate machinery, when it runs sweetly, gives forth a definite tone, the bee-song of work happily consummated. So this great human mechanism seemed, to Harrington Surtaine as he entered the realm of its activities, moving to music ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his face, inanimate and depressed, made him seem worn and old enough. Cromwell was not set to deny it. The King had ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... country-side with their plaintive long-drawn lowing. The strident cocks crowed to each other from farm to farm. There came up the irregular beat of the flails in the barns. The fevered life of myriads of creatures swelled and flowed through the peace of inanimate Nature. Uneasily Olivier would watch the ever hurrying columns of the ants, and the bees big with their booty, buzzing like organ-pipes, and the superb and stupid wasps who know not what they want—the whole world of busy little creatures, all ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... little trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along with them. One feels at once that this road has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but made to pattern; and that, while a model may be academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and cold. The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes like a trodden serpent. Here we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... praise being called for from inanimate things or irrational beings, we must remember that though unfitted, so far as we understand them, for conscious praise, their creation, maintenance, and usefulness give evidence of God's greatness and goodness. As Cornelius à Lapide notes on v. 35 (57) ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... time she became so exhausted that the first physicians of the city declared that there was no more hope. It was not long, in fact, before she was observed to rise in her bed and fall back as if struck with death. "For four hours she appeared to me," says Dr. Pfendler, "completely inanimate. With Messrs. Franck and Schaeffer, I made every possible effort to rekindle the spark of life. Neither mirror, nor burned feather, nor ammonia, nor pricking succeeded in giving us a sign of sensibility. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... melancholy features reminded Corinna of a Byzantine saint. Over her nightgown, she had thrown on a Japanese kimono of ashen blue, embroidered in plum blossoms which looked wilted. Everything about her, Corinna thought, looked wilted, as if each inanimate object that surrounded her had been stricken by the hopelessness of her spirit. To Corinna's energetic temperament, there was something positively immoral in this languid resignation. "Un-happiness like this is contagious," she thought. "And all because one man has ceased to love ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized in "Fifine ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr |
