"Inborn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... artificial society, to follow blindly the doctrines of a faith, or to be an obedient subject of a king. Instead he conceived the function of education to be to evolve the natural powers, cultivate the human side, unfold the inborn capacities of every human being, and to develop a reasoning individual, capable of intelligently directing his life under diverse conditions and in any form of society. A book setting forth such ideas naturally ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... appearance of a gallows body, in one of those rapid flashes of spontaneous veri-similitude which spring of an inborn horror painting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The whole neighbourhood was invited. How Gertrude's heart had beat with anticipation, and with what trepidation she had overhauled her scant wardrobe in order to appear not unworthy in Lord Ronald's eyes. Her resources were poor indeed, yet the inborn genius for dress that she inherited from her French mother stood her in good stead. She twined a single rose in her hair and contrived herself a dress out of a few old newspapers and the inside of an umbrella that would have graced a court. Round her waist she bound a single braid of bagstring, ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... was supernatural just as was man's. Her creation was to provide for man a helpful companionship so that his development and happiness might be complete. Her creation out of a part of man's body and to meet an inborn need provides the eternal grounds of marriage and the basis upon which they are in marriage to become one flesh and by reason of which man must "love his wife as his own flesh." Man is created in the image of God and like the Creator has intelligence and will and is given ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... expected of them. What! Jump, run, and be tied up in bags and climb poles? Was this the way that they were going to amuse themselves on this hot day? Were soiling their clothes, perspiring, and suffering tortures in their tight boots the delightful, reposeful feast they had been invited to? Their inborn politeness would not allow them to do otherwise than obey the wishes of their host. They tried their best to perform the feats put down ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... we could give boys and girls the same surroundings, the same social requirements, the same treatment from babyhood, there would be no difference in the resulting natures. Training undoubtedly accentuates inborn sex differences, and it is true that a reversal of training does lessen this difference; however, the weight of opinion at present is that differences in intellect and character do exist because of differences of sex, but that these have been unduly magnified. H.B. Thompson, ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... a functional hermaphrodite, exists first as a congenital entity, with an inborn distribution of endocrine predominances that make for masculinity. There are also numerous acquired forms. The infections of childhood, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and above all mumps, may so damage the hormone system that an inversion of sex type ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... a heart That Heaven itself took up his people's part; And when he faltered, helped him ere he fell, Eking his efforts out by miracle. No king this man, by grace of God's intent; No, something better, freeman,—President! A nature, modeled on a higher plan, Lord of himself, an inborn gentleman! ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... "Madam, honour is inborn with you, for your lineage is such that no title, whether of queen or empress, could be an increase of nobility; yet your beauty, grace, and virtue are well deserving of pleasure, and she who robs you of what is yours does a greater wrong to herself than to you, seeing that for ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaping when his first rattler disputed the trail with him, but he mustered courage to attack it with his club. After its head had been crushed, he mastered an Irishman's inborn repugnance for snakes sufficiently to cut off its rattles to show Duncan. With this victory, his greatest ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... that you may lose your life; and the King, who lets this odious creature put the pack-saddle on him, orders you, like a castaway, to endanger your person, which is his own flesh and blood and a shoot of his stem. But the wretched man does not know you, though the inborn affection he bears you should have betrayed your kindred. Moreover, the services you have rendered the King, and the gain to himself of so handsome a son and heir, ought to obtain favour for unhappy Porziella, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it was to his sisters. He expressed once, and but once in my hearing, a strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection for the dark roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; and never did he seem to roam the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... returned to Russia. Soon after that he gave evidence that strong emotions were required to subdue the inborn prejudice in favor of autocracy. Russia, of necessity, had acquired an overwhelming influence in Europe. This showed at the several Congresses, at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, at Carlsbad in 1819, at Troppau in 1820, and at Verona in 1822. The crowned heads of ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... are most likely to excel in the lighter arts—to design (for furniture or fabrics), to embroider, to carve, to engrave, to etch, to model, to paint. Here also success depends largely upon that which was inborn, though girls of moderate talent in art, by patience, may become skilled in many kinds of art work. Schools for this instruction are schools of art (elementary, decorative, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... is the inborn pugnacity of the bete humaine. Our species is the most cruel and destructive of all that inhabit this planet. If the lower animals, as we call them, were able to formulate a religion, they might differ greatly as to the shape of the beneficent Creator, but they would ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... young man spoke with a touch of the schoolmaster, but his audience, who had an inborn passion for fine words, were impressed. Lincoln sat squatted on his heels on a bit of sacking, staring into the open door ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... his own. He did not want the Police to know far enough ahead to nip the whole affair in the bud. Blue Pete loved a scrap; he had also certain definite debts to pay to Koppy, and the thought of a lot of bohunks within range of a licensed rifle made him smile happily. An inborn decency craved to teach these brutes decency in the only ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... face toward me, and I felt an old longing increase. It was the inborn love of a fertile soil—and that wide sunlit country seemed to call me, for my father had been the last of a long family to hold one of the extensive farms which with their crumbling feudal halls may yet be found in the remoter corners of Lancashire. Then, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... was so plainly created to be deceived. His inborn uprightness, the implicit confidence in men and things, which was the foundation of his transparent nature, had been intensified of late by preoccupation resulting from his pursuit of the Risler Press, an invention destined to revolutionize the wall-paper ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... had grown hopeless of saving him, he had met this fine, sensible Gabriella, who looked so strong, so competent, and there had come an end to the disturbing stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was proof of her son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of girlhood he should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly alike hope for their sons, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol' clo'es man. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... seven and nine is usually hungering for true stories, and some mothers and teachers try to meet the demand by reading and telling "true" stories to them. This is well and good, but it is clear that if this inborn craving could be met by books framed in language of such limited vocabulary and construction that so young a child would constantly be invited to the story, how valuable it would be. This book is designated ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... masters, Mr. Luke Fraser, and Dr. Adam, were erudite and pains-taking teachers; but, to borrow a phrase from Montaigne, they could neither lodge it with him, nor make him espouse it, and Chambers illustratively relates, "apparently, neither the care of the master, nor the inborn genius of the pupil, availed much in this case; for it is said that the twenty-fifth place was no uncommon situation in the class for the future Author of the Waverley Novels." Perhaps the only anecdote of any early indication of talent that can be relied on is that related by Mr. Cunningham, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... Urvasi, who also was seated at ease, saying, 'Let it be known, O thou of fair hips, that I come hither despatched by the one sole lord of heaven who asketh of thee a favour. He who is known amongst gods and men for his many inborn virtues, for his grace, behaviour, beauty of person, vows and self-control; who is noted for might and prowess, and respected by the virtuous, and ready-witted; who is endued with genius and splendid energy, is of a forgiving temper and without ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... upon himself this office: the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem, inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not familiar to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his capacity of simple Academician, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... indeed to lose the beloved at the beginning of life, it is even more terrible later on when the springs of life are running dry. Olivier was young: and, in spite of his inborn pessimism, in spite of his misfortune, he had to live his life. As often seems to happen after the loss of those dear to us, it was as though when Antoinette passed away she had breathed part of her soul into her brother's life. And he believed it was so. Though ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... before himself is the realization of the oneness of existence, and the practice of morality is the most powerful means to that end, as we proceed to show. The principal obstacle to the realization of this oneness is the inborn habit of man of always placing himself at the centre of the Universe. Whatever a man might act, think, or feel, the irrepressible personality is sure to be the central figure. This, as will appear on reflection, is that which prevents every individual ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... spaces untrodden by man, this corsair of five-and-twenty drank deep of the innocent pleasures of untamed nature, when not occupied in fighting by land or sea, with equal fortune; or rather, perhaps, with greater fortune and greater proof of inborn genius as commander of the naval campaign of the Paran[a] than as defender of Monte Video. No adventures were wanting to him; he was even imprisoned and tortured. In South America he found the one woman worthy to bear his name, the lion-hearted Anita, whom he carried off, she consenting, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... that he, who, by the consent of all men, bears so eminent a character, will out of his inborn nobleness forgive the presumption of this address. It is an unfinished picture, I confess, but the lines and features are so like, that it cannot be mistaken for any other; and without writing any ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... severe blows. His face was even now covered with blood, and his nose ached from the flattening it had received. He could not feel that he had done a very wicked deed. He had only defended himself, which is the inborn right of man or boy when unjustly assailed. He had been invited, nay, pressed, to strike the blow which ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... mysterious something, is neither conformity to an abstract idea, nor conformity to actual reality, nor conformity to the typical, nor conformity to the individual; it is, I take it, simply conformity to man's requirements, to man's inborn and peremptory demand for greater harmony, for more perfect co-ordination and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... you should have said, voicing the inborn principles and sentiments of the Spanish woman. I should be interested to know what your individual sentiments are. But you misunderstand me. I said that you were too good for the average lot of woman. You are a woman, not a doll; ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... factory. Motive is largely a matter of instinct with the child, and he may, indeed, be perfectly satisfied with a school task just as it stands. For example, we all know that children enjoy the right kind of drill. Repetition, especially rhythmic repetition, is instinctive,—it satisfies an inborn need. Where such a condition exists, it is an obvious waste of time to search about for more indirect motives. The economical thing to do is to turn the ready energy of the child into the channel that is already open to it, so long as this procedure fits in with the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... and "breathing grandeur upon the very humblest face of human life." This twofold and conjoint performance, consciously and expressly—perhaps only too consciously—undertaken by a man of strong inborn sensibility to natural impressions, and systematically carried out in a lifetime of brooding meditation and active composition, is Wordsworth's distinguishing title to fame and gratitude. In "words that speak of nothing more than ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... while earth is being richly fed from heaven, the fresh green from the hidden seed first springs, and take and turn it back again, [12] this sprouting germ will serve as food for earth: as from manure an inborn strength will presently be added to the soil. But if you suffer earth to feed the seed of corn within it and to bring forth fruit in an endless round, at last [13] it will be hard for the weakened soil to yield large corn crops, even as a weak sow ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... unscrupulous male—capable, if he has not free way at home, of going and doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even without her potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might not still have played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her inborn energy of egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to what she might say or do. However, she had the charm, and those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Honor?"—Master Pothier shook his head to express disapproval, and smiled to express his inborn sympathy with feasting and good-fellowship—"that, your Honor, is the heel of the hunt, the hanging up of the antlers of the stag by the gay chasseurs who ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... this manifestation of delight, I thought that the animal had been taught the accomplishment; his master assured me, however, that such was not the case, that both the smile and the chuckle were natural and inborn traits of ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Helot race. He was of the ordinary stature, and his frame was not characterised by any appearance of unusual strength; but he trod the earth, with a firm step and an erect crest, as if the curse of the slave had not yet destroyed the inborn dignity of the human being. There was a certain delicacy and refinement, rather of thought than beauty, in his clear, sharp, and singularly intelligent features. In contradistinction from the free-born Spartans, his hair was short, and curled ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... her sense of his inferiority was such that she regarded his presence no more than that of a dog, or, possibly, she was tempted to put his behaviour to the test. He, on his part, stood quietly regarding the operation, either that, with the instinct of an inborn refinement, he was aware he ought not to manifest more shamefacedness than the lady herself, or that he was hardly more accustomed to the sight of gleaming fish than the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... A well-nourished mother, free from care and disease, may have a finer child than a half-starved woman, crushed by worry and work, but neither starvation nor nourishment alter the inborn character of ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... inborn power that could Consist with homage to the good Flamed from his martial eye; He who seemed a soldier born, He should have the helmet worn, All friends to fend, all foes defy, Fronting foes of God and man, Frowning down the evil-doer, Battling for the weak and poor. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... were ever worrying about how to properly provide for their family, had—as nowadays so many other parents do—entirely overlooked the fact that growing boys should be permitted to travel, even if only upon an excursion, to curb within them the inborn and almost irresistible desire to roam, which all have inherited from ancestors, who attired in wooden shoes and coarse apparel, and carrying gunny sacks, had landed not so many years ago at Castle Garden, after having crossed the stormy Atlantic in the steerage of ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... they may render that service to the community. If all our educational expenditure did nothing but pick one man of scientific or inventive genius, each year, from amidst the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and give him the chance of making the best of his inborn faculties, it would be a very good investment. If there is one such child among the hundreds of thousands of our annual increase, it would be worth any money to drag him either from the slough of misery, or from the hotbed of wealth, and teach him to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... inborn common sense, which only needed development. With that and the beauty which Heaven had given her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the blood when it came and listened and answered. He came to America with strange enthusiasm. He took with quite simple and unconscious grace the conventional congratulations of the musical world. He was used to that. But to his own people—to the sad sweetness of their voices, their inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,—he leapt with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to give voice and being to this human thing. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Here Addison could be found almost every afternoon and evening, along with Steele, Davenant, Carey, Philips, and other kindred minds. Pope was a member of the same coffee house club for a year, but his inborn irascibility eventually led him to drop ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... The brinded lioness led forth her young, That she might teach them how they should forego Their inborn thirst of death; the pard unstrung His sinews at her feet, and sought to know 100 With looks whose motions spoke without a tongue How he might be as gentle as the doe. The magic circle of her voice and eyes All ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and inborn villain, would have respected her at that moment. I put her hand on my arm and led her away gently past the ruined chapel, and down the slope of ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... was Norman's luck superior to most men's more splendidly than in that his inborn tendency to arrogant and extravagant desires was matched by an inborn capacity to get the necessary money. His luxurious tastes were certainly not moderated by his associations—enormously rich people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... prejudices on this point have not therefore been abandoned. For it was much easier for a man to place these things aside with others of the use of which he was ignorant, and thus retain his present and inborn state of ignorance, than to destroy the whole superstructure and think out a new one. Hence it was looked upon as indisputable that the judgments of the gods far surpass our comprehension; and this opinion alone ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... would have been far simpler had Bernie lacked that particular inborn pride which forbade him to seek employment. Not that he felt himself above work, but he recoiled from any occupation which did not carry with it a dignity matching that of his name. Since the name he bore was as highly honored as any in the State, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... composition, even successive, can be found. Undoubtedly it is the idea of the perfect and supreme unity that makes me so inquisitive after some unity in spirits, and even in bodies. This idea, ever present within me, is innate or inborn with me; it is the perfect model by which I seek everywhere some imperfect copy of the unity. This idea of what is one, simple, and indivisible by excellence can be no other than the idea of God. I, therefore, know God with such clearness and evidence, that it is by knowing ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... means wise after the manner of a Franklin or a Humboldt or a Herschel; but he did possess the deep sapiency of the serpent or the fox. He owned inborn traits to steal and creep upon his prey of money. Being in Washington, and looking up and down, he was quick to note the strategic propriety of an alliance with Mr. Harley. Mr. Harley had connections with American millionaires; most of all, he ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... freedom is an inborn sentiment, which the God of nature has planted deep in the heart. Long may it be kept under by the arbitrary institutions of society; but, at the first favorable moment, it springs forth with a power which defies all check. This celestial spark, which fires the breast of the savage, which ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... phrase has been invented by our mutual enemy. When the Hindus and Mahomedans fought against one another, they certainly spoke in that strain. They have long since ceased to fight. How, then, can there be any inborn enmity? Pray remember this, too, that we did not cease to fight only after British occupation. The Hindus flourished under Moslem sovereigns, and Moslems under the Hindu. Each party recognised that mutual fighting was suicidal, ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life—and now, at last, so pathetic ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... does is the result of an inborn instinct acted upon by an outward stimulus. The margin wherein intelligent choice plays a part is very small.... Instinct is undoubtedly often modified by intelligence, and intelligence is as often guided or prompted by instinct, but one need not hesitate long as to which side of the line any ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... white fan. And while he looked, she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread—a slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women. The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and, remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of Vice and Woe Leaps Man at once with headlong throw? Him inborn Truth and Virtue guide, Whose guards are Shame and conscious Pride. In some gay hour Vice steals into the breast; 5 Perchance she wears some softer Virtue's vest. By unperceiv'd degrees she tempts to stray, Till far from Virtue's path she leads the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... literary training. If he can see drama in real life and feels how it can be turned into a coherent, satisfying story, he can learn how to apply that story to the peculiar requirements of vaudeville. But no amount of instruction can supply this inborn ability. The writer himself must be the master of his fate, the captain ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... own part, if I were only assured that I was as clever and brave as the average man about me, I should be well satisfied. Men of their hands have thought well of my brains, and men of brains of my hands, and that is the best that I can say of myself. Save in the one matter of having an inborn readiness for music, so that the mastery of any instrument comes very easily and naturally to me, I cannot recall any single advantage which I can boast over my fellows. In all things I have been a half-way man, for I am of middle ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "nature"? If such had been the case, there would have been no occasion for the present notice. His fame would long since have been buried under the rubbish he had himself piled up. The fact is very different. "Natural fluency"—that is to say, the inborn capacity of the writer—he undoubtedly possessed; but "acquired difficulty,"—this was the school in which he had practised, this was the discipline which enabled him, when the need arose, to carry on a campaign of forced marches, brilliant and incessant skirmishes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... her surroundings, did not perceive her grandparents. Her face was turned from them and she was addressing an unseen auditor in passionate denunciation. She spoke, moved, posed, gesticulated, with an inborn genius shining through every motion and tone ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for speculation. Why is it that all men, regardless of race, creed or color, have an inborn craving to inscribe their names on walls and trees and rocks, especially on walls other than those of their own home? Wherever you go, all over the world, you will find the carved or written record stating that, at such and such a date, John Doe, of Oskaloosa, Iowa, honored the place with his ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... to be. It was, however, rather difficult for Mrs. Brown, with her money, house, negroes, and all, to patronize Mrs. Katy Scudder, who was one of those women whose natures seem to sit on thrones, and who dispense patronage and favor by an inborn right and aptitude, whatever be their social advantages. It was one of Mrs. Brown's trials of life, this secret, strange quality in her neighbor, who stood apparently so far below her in worldly goods. Even the quiet, positive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Liddell and Scott definition of physis: "the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Inborn curiosity compelled her to take a hairpin and rip open a bit of the seam. To her amazement she pulled out a tangle ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the article for the Gaulois and, in cooperation with his friends, he worded it in the terms with which we are familiar, amplifying and embellishing it, yielding to an inborn taste for mystification which his youth rendered excusable. The essential point, he ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... first shall hear the sound, And foremost from the tomb shall bound, For they are cover'd with the lightest ground; And straight, with inborn vigour, on the wing, Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing. There thou, sweet saint, before the quire shalt go, As harbinger of heaven, the way to show, The way which thou so well ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... had been slightly curdled for Mr. Joe by sundry college-tribulations; and having been "suspended," he very naturally vibrated between the inborn jollity of his temperament and the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we meet, I shall ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of intelligence can be improved by education, but there appears to be a limit to the capacity of development of each individual. Lower intelligence, therefore, is not only due to lack of opportunity, but to an inborn ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... and complying with an inborn instinct of fear, he made his first attempt to rise and follow, and although unsuccessful it caused his mother to return and by her gentle nosings and lickings to calm him. Then in an effort to rise he struggled to his knees, only to collapse like a limp rag. But ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... when he had first admitted, welcomed, her claim on him, he had felt a sudden energy in which he had recognized a play of the traits of a black Penny. Here was a satisfactory, if necessarily private, exercise of his inborn contempt for the evident hypocrisy, the cowardice, of perfunctory inhibitions and safe morals. That, however, had been speedily lost in his rocketing passion, flaring out of a quiet continence into giddy spaces of unrestraint. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tendency was to keep it wholly concentrated round self. Had he remained idly at home, he would have sunk, perhaps, into a querulous satirist. But, as his views opened on a freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with their enlargement; and this inborn sadness, mingling itself with the effusions of his genius, became one of the chief constituent charms not only of their pathos, but their grandeur. For, when did ever a sublime thought spring up in the soul, that melancholy ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that nothing I can say is worthy to detain you longer from the perusal of this book, in which all things are excellent, excepting only the meanness of my performance in the translation. Such as it is, be pleased, with your inborn goodness, to accept it, with the offer of my unworthy prayers for the lasting happiness of my gracious sovereign, for your own life and prosperity, together with the preservation of the son of prayers, and the farther ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... disregarded; but its validity cannot be questioned. Whether those who practice "birth control" are influenced by economic, selfishly personal or other reasons, they are offending in a threefold manner: against the inborn wish and desire which is a priceless possession of even the least of God's creatures, that of living anew in its offspring; against the law of the state, which after all, stands for the crystallization of the best feeling of the community; and against ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... no thing we cannot overcome; Say not thy evil instinct is inherited, Or that some trait inborn makes thy whole life forlorn, And calls down punishment ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... knowledge of the world, an undeniably powerful mentality, and a decided skill in the art of pleasing. If the tone of his talk was cynical, it found, for that very reason, all the clearer echo in Bettina's heart. A certain tendency to cynicism was inborn in her, and the bitterness she felt at the loss of her mother had accentuated this. What was the use of loving, she asked herself, when love must end like this? In her heart she passionately hoped that she might never love again. And she had also ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... his own dignity; as in weighing with scales, in order to learn our own weight, we must put some one in the opposite pan. And worthy of your especial attention is the courtesy that young men owe to the fair sex, above all when the distinction of family, and the generosity of fortune heighten inborn charms and talents. Through courtesy is the path to the affections, and by it houses are joined in splendid union—thus thought our ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... my lord?' faltered Amanda, betaking herself by the force of inborn propensity and habit, even when hopeless of success in concealment, to the falsehood she carried with her like an atmosphere; 'I know not what your lordship means. Of what sort ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... all this money and machinery if the race of godlike men is to die out, or indeed if the result is not to be some nobler and better sort of man than the one with whom we have all along been familiar. Is not the yearning for divine men inborn? In the heroic ages such men were worshiped as gods, and one of the calamities of times of degeneracy is the dying out of faith in the worth of true manhood caused by the disappearance of superior men. Such men alone ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example, and did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an experiment and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not his frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of his view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the position of money, and thought ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom was illustrated to the highest degree the solid strength attainable by a man not brilliant, but most able, who gives himself heart and soul to professional acquirement. In him, profound and extensive professional knowledge, which is not inborn but gained, was joined to great natural staying powers; and the combination eminently fitted him for the part we have seen him play in Delaware Bay, at New York, before Rhode Island, in the Channel, and now at Gibraltar. The utmost of ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... one Henry Needler, a pupil of Purcell, and also Gostling, the son of the singer of the same name for whom Purcell wrote; but neither acquaintance seems to have profited him aught. His anecdotes are the product of inborn wickedness and an uncouth, boorish imagination. When we have cleared away his garbage, there remains only a skeleton life, but at any rate we have the satisfaction of knowing that ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... against nature, and we must all observe the canons of God and the regulations of the law; but at least a dozen times in my wrestles with the exasperating, grinding, hell-generating machine, it was only my inborn reverence for God's law and man's that prevented me from—well, shall I ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... seemed to be more nearly human, were even more variegated in their features and make-up. They were not all blondes, for some of them were distinctively dark of hair and skin, though I was puzzled to tell how much of this was inborn and how much the work of art. Another thing that astonished me was the wide range of bodily form, as evidently determined by nutrition. Clearly there was no weight-control here, for the figures varied ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... influence may be detected in some of the greatest Christian poetry of our own country, especially in that of Wordsworth and Tennyson. For Plato believes, in common with the greatest of every age, in 'that inborn passion for perfection,' that innate though often unconscious yearning after the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... at him from time to time she reflected, with some pride, that no one could have taken him for anything but what he was—a rising young New York banker of some hereditary line. As in certain English portraits there is an inborn aptitude for statesmanship, so in Derek Pruyn there was that air, almost inseparable from the Van Tromp kinship, of one accustomed to possess money, to make money, to spend money, and to support moneyed responsibilities. The face, slightly stern by nature, slightly ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... nothing of lapses of memory, of inborn defects of observational power—though the suspiciously precise recollection of dates and events possessed by ordinary witnesses in important trials taking place years after the occurrences involved, is one ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... be reformed and abused. He was a dark, bright-eyed young artist with a silky moustache. He had lived much in Paris, where he studied impressionism and perfected his natural talent for causerie and his inborn preference for the hedonistic view of life. Fortunately he had plenty of money, for he was a cousin of Raphael Leon on the mother's side, and the remotest twigs of the Leon genealogical tree bear apples of gold. His real name was Abrahams, which is a shade too Semitic. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... blood also. As Leslie turned and warmed the water, watching her, the thought was strong in his mind: what a woman her mother must have been! Each day he was with Leslie, he saw her do things that no amount of culture could instil. Instinct and tact are inborn; careful rearing may produce a good imitation, they are genuine only with blood. Leslie had always filled his ideal of a true woman. To ignore him for his gift would have piqued many a man; ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.' ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... of his very being by virtue of the lives of ten, nay, twenty generations. He himself had not waged the hard-fought war against the soil, but he had as a matter of course understood everything that had to do with tilling the soil ever since he could crawl, and his hands had an inborn aptitude for spade and rake and plough. But he had not inherited his father's joy in the soil; his thoughts had struck out in a new direction. Yet this endless bondage to the soil lay rooted in him, like a hatred, which gave him a survey unknown to his father. He was reasonable; ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... essential, indwelling, inseparable, natural, immanent, infixed, internal, subjective. inborn, ingrained, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... method—unless you want to call purely natural lines of development, based on natural principles, a method—and so, of course, there is no secret about my teaching. The one great point I lay stress on in teaching is never to kill the individuality of my various pupils. Each pupil has his own inborn aptitudes, his own personal qualities as regards tone and interpretation. I always have made an individual study of each pupil, and given each pupil individual treatment. And always, always I have encouraged ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... his academical career at Bardstown in 1850, when he was nineteen years of age. Although very fond of music and endowered by Nature with exceptional powers for its cultivation, Professor Hughes had, in addition, an inborn liking and fitness for physical science and mechanical invention. This duality of taste and genius may seem at first sight strange; but experience shows that there are many men of science and inventors who are also votaries of music and art. The ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the fruition of every earthly good. The virtues, the muses, and the charities were the chosen guests at his abundant table. Poverty could not veil genius from his penetration, nor misfortune obscure the inborn light of its integrity. Though exiled from his native land, where his birth gave him dominion over rich territories, now in the hands of strangers, and a numerous happy people, now no more, he had not ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... wrestler, there is first required some measure of force, a well-knit body and active limbs, without which all instruction would be vain; yet, these being granted, if he want the skill which is necessary to a wrestler, he shall make but small advantage of his natural robustuousness: so, in a poet, his inborn vehemence and force of spirit will only run him out of breath the sooner, if it be not supported by the help of art. The roar of passion, indeed, may please an audience, three parts of which are ignorant enough ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Some inborn superstition of her native mountains worked upon her. In his absence the things which had prejudiced her against him faded while the smooth efficiency and ease of her journey to this distant land was recalled, with the realization that that comfort and speed must have been ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... would like that," queried Pauline, who, in spite of an inborn loyalty to the absent, was not ill-pleased ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... after Follet had followed Ching Po out of his warehouse. He never told me just how things had stood between French Eva and him, but I am sure that he believed Ching Po at once, and that, from the moment Ching Po spoke, it was all over. It was no longer even real to him, so surely had his inborn prejudice worked. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the first English poet after Shakespeare, and is followed by the leading critics of France, Italy, and Spain. All concur in the admission that Byron was as proud of his race as of his verse, and that in unexampled measure the good and evil of his nature were inherited and inborn. His genealogy is, therefore, a matter of no ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... beauty, occupies the position of pet of the camp, wears a profusion of beads and trinkets, decorates herself with wild flowers, and is permitted to do no manner of drudgery. Some of these gypsy maidens are really quite beautiful in spite of their very dark complexions. Their eyes glisten with inborn avarice as I sweep past on my "silver" bicycle, and in their astonishment at my strange appearance and my evidently enormous wealth they almost forget their plaintive wail of "kreuzer! kreuzer!" a cry which readily bespeaks ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... with homes and property at stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... possessed to a very remarkable extent that delicate art of seamanship which consists in so handling a ship as to make her do just what you want, and to put her just where she should be; making her, to use a common sea expression, do everything but talk. This is a faculty probably inborn, like most others that reach any great degree of perfection, and, while a very desirable gift, it is by no means indispensable to the highest order of naval excellence. Nelson did not at all equal Pellew in this ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... theological disputes about an abstract and insoluble problem of casuistry were digging an abyss in which the Republic might be swallowed up for ever. If ever man worked steadily with the best lights of experience and inborn sagacity for the good of his country and in defence of a constitutional government, horribly defective certainly, but the only legal one, and on the whole a more liberal polity than any then existing, it was Barneveld. Courageously, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... there catch the first glimpses of his glorious mind. His deep passion for solitude grew to full power; the varied excitement of his travels invigorated his character and stored his imagination with impressions, and his inborn sadness rose from a querulous bitterness to the grandeur of his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... their sympathies, to cramp their expansive energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life. All this the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness. But that belief, with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days, necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of your own inborn sense of right called into action by me. You knew it was not right to leave our blind Alice in the dark woods alone. If I were cruel enough to desert her, and refuse to seek her, her claim on your kindness and care was not the less commanding. You could not have laid your head upon your ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... call the human element. One remembers their stout hand-grip; they look frankly in one's face, and the heart is apt to go out to them more spontaneously than to the smooth-faced Jacobs. Such a man was Samson, whose hair was his strength,—the strength of inborn truth and goodness, whereby he was enabled to smite the lying Philistines. And although they once, by their sophistries, managed to get the better of him for a while, they forgot that good inborn is too vigorous a matter for any mere razor finally to subdue. See, again, what a great beard ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... is feminine wiles and feminine graces that rule our world. Man is but a poor mortal at best, easily moved to sympathy by a woman's tears, and as easily misled by the touch of a soft hand or a passionate caress upon the lips. Diplomacy is inborn in woman, and although every woman is not an adventuress, yet one and all are clever actresses when the game of love ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... There was much to be done before the actual outbreak of hostilities. England's history is the story of her struggles for nationality, for religious, civil, and political liberty, and for mercantile ascendancy. Her inborn longings for the highest civilization were not inconsistent with her grim determination to resist a system that stood on the Continent for progress, but which she had come to believe meant national ruin for her. Prussia, with a new vigor ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the Invisible—that night before her catastrophe, when she wound her wonderful hair round her throat and drew it tighter and tighter, and had cried out to the beloved mother she had never known. But her inborn, her cultivated, her almost invincible egoism, had not even then been scattered by the bitter helplessness of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Tact was inborn in Cunningham, as it had been in his father. He realized that he ought at once to show his appreciation of the high plane of the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... else he can do? As well might we say that, after the body and the mind of a boy have been trained, he should be deprived of all those associations with his fellows which make life worth living, and to which every child has an inborn right. Life is something more than a matter of business. No man can make his life what it ought to be by living it merely on a business basis. There are things higher than business. What is the reason for the enormous movement from the farms into the cities? Not simply that the business ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... from the whole tone of his mind, Chaucer could not but sympathise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination—though, as a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for endless blame and satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's academical ally had recognised the most formidable obstacles ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... premiere communion in their church. In the course of a few years she became a remarkable girl, the source of many anxieties to the nuns. For she was not only too clever for their teaching, and an inborn sceptic, but wherever she appeared she produced parties and the passions of parties. And though, as she grew older, she showed much adroitness in managing those who were hostile to her, she was never without enemies, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... intelligence, but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms. The existence of the Supreme Being might be, (probably was) so he feared, but "a fond thing vainly imagined". Yet such is the constitution of the human ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... no doubt of its having existed, and there seems to have been, even through those troubled years, an inborn spirit of loyalty to the Crown as being the symbol of the State and of public order. Its wearer might make mistakes and be personally unpopular, but he represented the nation as a whole and must consequently be respected. This powerful feeling has often in English history made the bravest ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... hereditary factor, the race. Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticity has to be counted in as part of their very nature. Even in the bee, with its highly definite instincts, there is a certain flexibility bound up with each of these; so that, for instance, the inborn faculty of building up the comb regularly is modified if the hive happens to be of an awkward shape. Yet, as compared with what remains over, the characters that we are able to distinguish as racial ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... "yes, what a difference between this monster, nay, between the other girls and Eva! She was, doubtless, born in the same poverty, in similar circumstances, and yet they are like day and night. What a soul has been given to Eva! what inborn nobility! It must be, really, more than a ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... head-dress, likened to a slanting roof. Assembled in the same hall, they presented a variety of costumes and complexions scarcely to be witnessed except at a fancy ball." Now and again, we may add, a speaker expresses himself in a vernacular, and with the inborn Indian courtesy and patience the assembly will listen; but the language of the motley gathering is English; the address of the president and his rulings are in English; the protests, claims, and resolutions of the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... ladyship, and thus be an example. Only the uncertain are impolite; fear is their ruler. Those who own strength and power are always those who are gentle because they are sure of their life position. Real politeness is only an outward expression of the generous impulses of the heart; it is inborn. Politeness may be cultivated until it ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... thoughts; he had helped it on by the special weight of name he had won in arms fighting side by side with the proud generals and troops of Britain confident of victory, but saved from annihilation by his inborn fearlessness and superiority, when death was all around him and dismay everywhere in Braddock's disastrous fight—their silent homage crowning the head of their deliverer; his triumphant sword at Yorktown ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... the way to a ball, pull off his coat, and go up a burning ladder to save a woman's pet canary, and then, when the crowd hurrahed him, I've laughed because I knew he deserved nothing of the kind. With him it wasn't courage so much as his inborn love of violent action—it cleared his head, he used to say." Christopher stopped cutting, straightened himself, and held his knife loosely in his hand. "That's about it, I reckon," he returned. "I know I'm not a bit of a ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... mirrors, that her bed was hung with light blue silk, that she had a silver bath surrounded by mirror screens. How had the Mecklemburg Fraeulein learnt such things? they asked. How indeed, but in her inborn genius for luxury! The favourite's servants were magnificently attired in ducal liveries. The lady had her own carriage with painted panels and yellow satin cushions. She gave rich entertainments, and the invitations were coveted, of course, by the good people who were so horrified ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... displeasure against her friend. So this was Philip's famous temper, in which she had never quite believed! In truth, that sudden outburst of inexplicable rage on the part of the grave, quiet, young clergyman had appealed strongly to the love of brute force that is inborn ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... normal brain might be brought by an emotional overstrain to a state of exhaustion and disability, we may claim on the other side that a brain which nature has poorly provided may yet be protected against damage and injury. The inborn factor does not alone decide the fate. Psychophysical prophylaxis may secure steadiness of equilibrium to a system which inherited little resistance. Yet this large borderland region, where an ill-adjusted brain may be saved or lost in ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is here that we of the old European stocks, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... literature of her own country, yet she possessed that consummate American froth by which she could convince the average person that she was brilliant to the point of scintillation. I fancy that any keen, well-educated woman must have seen that I was laughing at her, yet so inborn was her belief that a Chinaman must be an imbecile that she was ever joking at my expense. The last story she told me illustrates the peculiar fancy for joking these women possess. I had been describing a storm at Manchester-by-the-Sea and the splendor of the ocean. "Did ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned by climate and landscape, and pronounced in his mythology, found both an obstacle and a support in Christianity—an obstacle in its transcendentalism, and a support ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... the special aroma of the Celtic imagination. For the rest, he had had as good an education as Scotland could in those days afford him, one of whose best features was the negative one that it did not at all interfere with the natural course of his inborn tendencies, and merely developed the power of expressing himself in what manner he might think fit. Let me add that he had a good conscience—I mean, a conscience ready to give him warning of the least tendency to overstep any line of prohibition; and that, as yet, he had never consciously ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... then, and thoughtless to obtain So great a bliss, but led by sense of good, Inborn to all, I sought my needful food: Then, on that heavenly tree my sight I cast; The colour urged my eye, the scent my taste. Not to detain thee long,—I took, did eat: Scarce had my palate touched the immortal ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... greatness in every kind, of intellect, of perception, as well as of character. And especially it destroys art, that reflection of life without which we cannot be said to live. For the artist is the rarest, the most choice of men. His senses, his perception, his intelligence have a natural and inborn fineness and distinction. He belongs to a class, a very small, a very exclusive one. And he needs a class to appreciate and support him. No democracy has ever produced or understood art. The case of Athens is wrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... shrilly. Gulls flit suddenly into sight and out of sight again, uttering sorrowful wails. Now and again cormorants, low flying with a rushing noise, break the oily surface of the water with every swift downward flapping of their wings. Then the boatman needs something more than skill, must rely upon an inborn instinct for locality if he is not to find himself embayed and aground in some strange land-locked corner far from his home. Or, in the splendid summer days the islands seem poised a foot or two above ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... venomous hatred. If, as may well be the case, it was written by the murderer of Mr. Blair, and with an intent to throw suspicion on Mr. Thorpe, then we must look for a criminal of great cleverness and of patience and perseverance in the workings of his nefarious plans. I mean a nature of inborn evil, capable of premeditated wrong. This murder of Gilbert Blair was no impulsive or suddenly brought about job. It was carefully planned and carefully carried out. If you will show me some of Mr. Thorpe's writing I will tell you if he forged ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... reach a point where you do not recognize a "Veronese" without the dog—then you are grateful for the dog, and surely would scorn a "Veronese" minus the canine attachment. We demand at least one dog, as our legal and inborn right, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... exalted realism which appears in the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, and which he had learned from the inspirations of a slave. Yet such was the inborn, almost supernatural, loftiness of Aurelius, that, had he been the slave and Epictetus the emperor, the same moral wisdom would have shone in the teachings and life of each; for they both were God's witnesses of truth in an age of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... even battered dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and groceries—a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use, such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc. With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... spent in the country—although quite near to Copenhagen—meant to me rich impressions of nature that I never forgot, a long chain of the most exquisite Spring memories. I understood as I had never done before the inborn affection felt by every human being for the virgin, the fresh, the untouched, the not quite full-blown, just as it is about to pass over into its maturity. It was in the latter half of May. I was looking for anemones and violets, which had not yet gone to seed. The budding beech ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... screaming girls as were piled up five or six deep in the bottom of it may never be seen again. Some had been dumped overboard outright, and were floundering about in the snow, which, happily, had saved them from serious harm. With the inborn chivalry of his race, Michael's first thoughts said: "Fly to the rescue of the demoiselles," but stern duty said: "Sthick to yer horses, Moik, or they'll smash things to smithereens, and, bedad, I sthuck wid all me moight, or the Lord only knows where we'd all have fetched ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Mrs. Eddy's inborn disposition to copyright everything, charter everything, secure the rightful and proper credit to herself for everything she does, and everything she thinks she does, and everything she thinks, and everything she thinks she thinks or has thought or intends to think, is illustrated in Sec. 5 of Art. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him. For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow—had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... happen as it takes to describe, even in outline, it would not be of much use to the earthworm. But the motor answer follows the sensory stimulus almost instantaneously. The great advantage of establishing or enregistering these reflex chains is that the answers are practically ready-made or inborn, not requiring to be learned. It is not necessary that the brain should be stimulated if there is a brain; nor does the animal will to act, though in certain cases it may by means of higher controlling nerve-centres keep the natural reflex response from being given, as ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... been for the hope of bringing out a characteristic of our great national poet that is rather unobtrusive than obscure. I mean a singular unworldliness of thought and feeling; a cherished idealism; an inborn magnanimity. Not the unworldliness of the study and the cloister, or the other-worldliness of such poets as Dante and Milton, but the unworldliness of a man of the world, the idealism that is closely allied with humour. And it is in this union and not ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... continued Jurgen, smoothly, "that, whatever the first impulse of the moment, it was apparent to any reflective person that in the past of each of these ladies there was much to suggest inborn inaptitude for domestic life. And I am a peace-loving fellow, sir; nor do I hold with moral laxity, now that I am forty-odd, except, of course, in talk when it promotes sociability, and in verse-making wherein it is esteemed as a conventional ornament. Still, Prince, the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... May, 1840, I returned with my mother from Paris to her house in York Street. Life had been very pleasant there to her I believe, and certainly to me during those periods of it which my inborn love of rambling allowed me to pass there. But in the following June it was determined that the house in York Street should be given up. Probably the causa causans of this determination was the fact of my sister's removal to far Penrith. But I think too, that there was a certain ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the pure populus Romanus had an inborn aversion to Kings and diadems, and could not patiently bear their neighborhood, so the genuine American Democrat, one by principles and not by a party name or by a party organization, such a Democrat feels it to be ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... together; it was again as if he were struggling with a laugh. He wore his tall square cap well off his forehead, and looked what he really was—a strong man tired, but not yet tired out, of kindness. The benevolence seemed inborn, seemed fighting through every seam of the pompous face. "Madonna! his generous motions work him into creases, as if he were volcanic soil," thought Angioletto. Watching him narrowly as he came, he decided that this was a master to be loved if not admired, respected but not feared. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... children travelling for their amusement and instruction. In our case we were put in the carriage because my mother would not leave us behind, and wanted to give our grandparents pleasure by our presence. She was right, but in spite of my inborn love of travel the month we spent on the journey seemed a period of very uncomfortable restlessness. A child realizes only a single detail of beauty—a flower, a radiant star, a human face. Any individual recollection of the journey ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... But if that divinely bestowed willing or spark of faith kindled by the Spirit is considered, then this imparted willing and this spark is not purely passive. But the Adamic will does not only not operate or cooperate, but, according to the inborn malice of the heart, even operates contrarily (verum etiam pro nativa malitia cordis sui contra operatur)." (Planck 4, 697.) Thus Flacius clearly distinguished between cooperation before conversion (which he rejected absolutely) and cooperation ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... that we know so little, were it not that with each fresh discovery we are so ready to fancy anew that now, at last, we know all about it. We have neither humility enough to be faithful, nor faith enough to be humble. Unfit to grasp any whole, yet with an inborn idea of wholeness which ought to be our safety in urging us ever on towards the Unity, we are constantly calling each new part the whole, saying we have found the idea, and casting ourselves on the couch of self-glorification. Thus the very need of unity is by our pride perverted to ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... sheen of freezing sea. Out on the infinite horizon float icebergs in a mirage of mobile gold. The Barrier, curving to east and west, is a wall of delicate pink overlaid with a wondrous mauve—the rising plateau. A cold picture—yet it awakens the throb of inborn divinity. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... a pleasure to believe that the average man is a gentleman, and his inborn respect for his own mother, if nothing else, will usually compel an outward show of politeness to every woman, even though she may be a constant source of irritation. Grey hair has its own claims upon a young man's deference, and, in the business ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... an orator born, and has developed this inborn power by the hardest of study and thought and practice. He is one of those rare men who always seize and hold the attention. When he speaks, men listen. It is quality, temperament, control—the word is immaterial, but the fact is ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... can understand the inborn feminine joy in the feel of fine smooth fabric, nor the blending of delicate colours, the dainty ruffling of lace. To the rich these things come as a matter of course, and the working classes are satisfied ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey |
