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Infancy   Listen
noun
Infancy  n.  
1.
The state or period of being an infant; the first part of life; early childhood. "The babe yet lies in smiling infancy." "Their love in early infancy began."
2.
The first age of anything; the beginning or early period of existence; as, the infancy of an art. "The infancy and the grandeur of Rome."
3.
(Law) The state or condition of one under age, or under the age of twenty-one years; nonage; minority.






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"Infancy" Quotes from Famous Books



... gaps must be filled. Whether on this side or on that, the candidates are first looked for among the sons of Earls and Dukes,—and not unnaturally, as the sons of Earls and Dukes may be educated for such work almost from their infancy. A few rise by the slow process of acknowledged fitness,—men who probably at first have not thought of office but are chosen because they are wanted, and whose careers are grudged them, not by their ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... the rest of my infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I shall pass it over in silence. I find, that, during my nonage, I had the reputation of a very sullen youth, but was always a favourite of my schoolmaster, who used to say, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various

... brought against ancient municipal bodies; and there were few ancient municipal bodies in which some abuse, sufficient to afford a pretext for a penal proceeding, had not grown up in the course of ages. But the corporations now to be attacked were still in the innocence of infancy. The oldest among them had not completed its fifth year. It was impossible that many of them should have committed offences meriting disfranchisement. The Judges themselves were uneasy. They represented that what they were required to do was in direct opposition to the plainest principles of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Church. For thousands upon thousands of these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, "not so much born into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world—I say nothing about the next? Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such differing in detail, but ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... who are raised to the rank of Nobles, for some Valiant Exploit, are called Chevaliers by Favour. None are admitted by the Statutes of the Order under the age of Sixteen; but some are received from their very Infancy on paying a large Sum of Money, or by Dispensation from the Pope. All the Knights oblige themselves to Celibacy, which does not hinder their leading very Disorderly Lives; and indeed Malta is full of Loose Cattle of all kinds. When they are Professed, a Carpet is spread ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... pretended to apprehend, is also a matter of question; yet certain it is, that a proposal to massacre them in cold blood was made in the Privy Council. "But," says O'Connor, "the humanity of the members rejected this barbarous proposal, and crushed in its infancy a conspiracy hatched in Lurgan to extirpate the Catholics of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... to his own resources for continuing his work. His personal means were small, and far too slender to enable him to support a colony in its infancy. The thought of abandoning the settlement was repugnant to him, not only on account of the years of labour he had bestowed upon it, but also because he felt that there was every chance of success with the aid of rich ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne

... other bad habits. Falsehood, caprice, dishonesty, obstinacy, revenge, and all the train of vices which are the consequences of mistaken or neglected education, which are learned by bad example, and which are not inspired by nature, need scarcely be known to children whose minds have from their infancy been happily regulated. Such children should sedulously be kept from contagion. No books should be put into the hands of this happy class of children, but such as present the best models of virtue: there is ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... is still in its infancy. There are many absentee landlords who are still holding out for heavy and extravagant prices as a reward for the poverty and misery which they have often in large part caused by their own neglect. ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... the heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view! The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood, And every loved spot which my infancy knew; The wide-spreading pond, and the mill which stood by it, The bridge and the rock where the cataract fell; The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it, And e'en the rude bucket which hung in the well: The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket. The ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof

... call it a little infant playing in a green meadow; and the flower of thy bosom has given a new flower to the hills of Cromla.'" Since that day the daughters of Morven have consecrated the Daisy to infancy. "It is," said they, "the flower of innocence, the flower of the newborn." Besides these legends, the Daisy is also connected with the legendary history of St. Margaret. The legend is given by Chaucer, but I will tell it to you in the words of a ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... Compared with the English of the country, there is apparently very little difference between them; but still there is a difference, and of no small importance in a moral point of view. The country peculiarity is like the bloom of the plumb, or the down of the peach, which the fingers of infancy cannot touch without injuring; but this felt but not describable quality of the town character, is as the varnish which brings out more vividly the colours of a picture, and which may be freely and even ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... behind nor murmured, but kept well up during the whole forced march. No doubt that youthful enthusiasm to which Captain Trench had referred kept Olly up to the mark, while Osky— as his friend called him—had been inured to hard labour of every kind from infancy. ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne

... by three red wavy lines which indicated his descent from the three youths aforesaid. He was named Lugaidh Sriabhdearg from the three lines [sriabaib] in question, and he was beautiful to behold and of greater bodily strength in infancy than is usual with children of his age. He commenced his reign as king of Ireland the year in which Caius Caesar [Caligula] died and he reigned for twenty-six years. His son was named Criomthan Nianair who reigned but sixteen years. Criomthan's son was named Fearadach Finnfechtnach whose ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous

... not in their class. He weighed thirty or forty pounds more than a first-class creeper should. Besides, creeping is like golf. You can't take it up in the middle forties and expect to compete with those who have been at it from infancy. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... in travelling, has undoubtedly, my Lord, its source in that love of novelty, that delight in acquiring new ideas, which is interwoven in its very frame, which shews itself on every occasion from infancy to age, which is the first passion of the human mind, and ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... peculiar to the United States. It is not exhibited in the mortality statistics of the leading European countries. In those countries the fall in the death rate has not been due solely to a reduction of mortality in infancy and adult life through the conquest of diseases of children, tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. England and Wales, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Prussia show improved ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... them there were, and they were alone, for the old nurse who had brought them all up from their infancy was at present absent from ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre

... Lemuel praise this excellency of woman. Blessed memory! Who does not remember that one form of the old-fashioned mother,—the law of whose life was love; one who was the divinity of our infancy, and the sacred presence in the shrine of our first earthly idolatry; one whose heart was ever green, though the snows of time had gathered in the boughs of her life-tree; one to whom we never grow old, but in the ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... 49, (in the adult body,) occupies the true pelvic region when the organ is collapsed, or only partly distended. It is situated behind the pubic symphysis and in front of the rectum, C,—the latter lies between it and the sacrum, A. In early infancy, when the pelvis is comparatively small, the bladder is situated in the hypogastric region, with its summit pointing towards the umbilicus; as the bladder varies in shape, according to whether it be empty or full, its relations to neighbouring parts, especially ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... at this time fourteen years old, and the handsomest and most engaging youth imaginable. In his infancy he had been placed in the charge of one of the great ladies of the Court, who, according to the prevailing custom, acted first as his head nurse and then as his governess. When he outgrew her care her husband was appointed as his tutor and governor, so that he had never ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang

... and was just in time to feel a pair of arms around his neck and have his poor aching head drawn lovingly upon the bosom of the mother whom he had not known since infancy. ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster

... an explanation with the king, and to open his mind freely to him. "The hatred (says he) which I bear to the Romans, is known to the whole world. I bound myself to it by an oath, from my most tender infancy. It is this hatred that made me draw the sword against Rome during thirty-six years. It is that, which, even in times of peace, has caused me to be driven from my native country, and forced me to seek an asylum in your dominions. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... original both of her Adam Bede and of Caleb Garth in 'Middlemarch,' while her own childish life is partly reproduced in the experiences of Maggie in 'The Mill on the Floss.' Endowed with one of the strongest minds that any woman has ever possessed, from her very infancy she studied and read widely. Her nature, however, was not one-sided; all her life she was passionately fond of music; and from the death of her mother in her eighteenth year she demonstrated her practical capacity in the management of her father's ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... with a very cordial reception, and was duly carried out, with the result that, half an hour later, the four adventurous voyagers were sleeping as calmly in their novel resting-place as though they had been accustomed from their earliest infancy to take their repose at the bottom of ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... is the father of feeble endeavor, The parent of terror and half-hearted work; It weakens the efforts of artisans clever, And makes of the toiler an indolent shirk. It poisons the soul of the man with a vision, It stifles in infancy many a plan; It greets honest toiling with open derision And mocks at the hopes and the ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this became evident to my appalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality," said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; "the science of criminology is in its infancy, and—" ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... maxilla, agnathes or hemiagnathes. Simple atrophy of the inferior maxilla has been seen in man as well as in the lower animals, but is much less frequent than atrophy of the superior maxilla. Langenbeck reports the case of a young man who had the inferior maxilla so atrophied that in infancy it was impossible for him to take milk from the breast. He had also almost complete immobility of the jaws. Boullard reports a deformity of the visage, resulting in a deficiency of the condyles of the lower jaw. Maurice made an observation on a vice of conformation ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... "Lorenzo, a tale of Redemption." In 1816, he married Ann, the youngest daughter of James and Dorothy Bealey, of Derrikens, near Blackburn, by whom he had nine children, three of whom died in their infancy. His next publication was "The Duke of Mantua," a tragedy, which appeared in 1823, passed through three or four editions in a short time, and after being long out of print, was included in the posthumous ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... bodies in their grave, by an earthquake. That which we call life is but hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over; and there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and the rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so, as the phoenix out of the ashes of another phoenix formerly dead, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... scope for the imagination in an asylum—only just in the other orphans. It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them—to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess. I used to lie awake at nights and imagine things like that, because I didn't have time in the day. I guess that's why I'm so thin—I AM dreadful thin, ain't I? There isn't ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... life in our minds. They are not intolerable, because they are provided for by arrangements which make it possible for each to go his or her several way, seeing very little of the other. The son or daughter, which in due time makes its appearance in this menage, is sent out to nurse in infancy, sent to boarding-school in youth, and in maturity portioned and married, to repeat the same process for another generation. Meanwhile, father and mother keep a quiet establishment, and pursue their several pleasures. Such is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... Polytheism to Monotheism through the direct influence of the Positive mode of thought, not yet aspiring to complete speculative ascendancy. But, inasmuch as the belief in the invariability of natural laws was still imperfect even in highly cultivated minds, and in the merest infancy in the uncultivated, it gave rise to the belief in one God, but not in an immovable one. For many centuries the God believed in was flexible by entreaty, was incessantly ordering the affairs of mankind by direct volitions, and continually reversing the course of nature by miraculous ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... of this new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... into the fire, and when the whole of this most inhuman of inhuman men had been entirely consumed, they scattered his ashes to the winds so that not a trace should remain on earth of this monster. If, in his infancy, he had died of croup, the history of the human race would have lost some ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton

... education of her daughters; in preparing them, in fact, for the condition of life into which they would inevitably fall, if they were still unmarried at the dissolution of their father. They were from infancy taught to expect their future means of living from their own honourable exertions, and they grew happier and better for the knowledge. Mildred had retired to a town on the sea-coast, in which this family resided; and, shortly after his arrival, he first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... more great names in the art of piano-forte playing than any other great master. This is partly owing to the fact, it may be, that he began his career in the infancy of the piano-forte as an instrument, and was the first to establish a solid basis for the technique of the instrument. In addition to John Field and J. B. Cramer, previously mentioned, were Zeuner, Dussek, Alex. Kleugel, Ludwig Berger, Kalkbrenner, Charles Mayer, and Meyerbeer. These ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... from legal infancy," returned Mr. Skimpole, "he parted from our conversational friend Kenge and took up, I believe, with Vholes. Indeed, I know he did, because ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... vast sums of money in the erection of a sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which, at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvees) and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... condition of things became altered; and the calling together of an Ecumenical Council—a very simple affair in the infancy of the Church—was becoming daily more and more difficult. Not so much, perhaps, by reason of the enormous distances of the dioceses from the central authority, for modern methods of locomotion have almost annihilated space, but because of the immense increase in the number ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan

... in the navy has been of gratifying proportions and effectiveness. On July 1, 1917, naval aviation was still in its infancy. At that time there were only 45 naval aviators. There were officers of the navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard who had been given special training in and were attached to aviation. There were approximately 200 student officers under training, ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... sacred waves of the Jordan were powerful to wash away all human suffering, either of the soul or body. Faith was necessary to this pious healing. To the Muenchener beer is the river of health. His faith in it dates from his earliest infancy, and he resorts to its beneficent influence at least seven times a day, and drinks his last Kruegl with apparently the same relish as the first. The quantity which Germans drink is something incredible. Bavarian ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis which this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office building by a prolonged committee meeting of the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... over ages and races of men, its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of manhood to the idiosyncrasies of disease and senescence, we have an epitome in miniature of the life of the race; that in primitive tribes, and in those members of our civilized ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... grief—great grief; I would not underrate it; but, believe me, it is as nothing compared to the awful fate, should it ever fall upon you, of finding your children grow up and become that which makes you wish they had died in their infancy. There are times when I am tempted to regret that all my treasures are not in that other world; that they had not gone before me. Yes; sorrow ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... days, when I Shin'd in my angel infancy! Before I understood this place, Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walkt above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... concerned with the proportions of the sexes, not only at birth, but also at maturity, and this adds another element of doubt; for it is a well-ascertained fact that with man the number of males dying before or during birth, and during the first two years of infancy, is considerably larger than that of females. So it almost certainly is with male lambs, and probably with some other animals. The males of some species kill one another by fighting; or they drive one another about until they become greatly emaciated. They must also be ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... about fourteen years of age. He had a brother and a sister, but between them and himself was a gap of four years, as some sisters who had been born after him had died in infancy. Ned adored his father, who was a most kind and genial man, and would have suffered anything in silence rather than have caused him any troubles or annoyance by ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty

... smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing-office without that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city, and he ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... father, met Theodor Smirnoff who was then secretary at the Russian Embassy there. She married him in Carondolet, part of St. Louis, where the family lived, in 1872. They had three children, a boy and a girl, who died in infancy in St. Petersburg, Russia, and another girl, Nelka, who was born in 1878 and was therefore ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff

... orphaned in infancy, parted by adoption and reunited in later life. They fall in love, only to discover the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... supply, and with enlarged competition among the companies engaging in its transmission from the wells to the works. At present the use of natural gas as a substitute for coal in the manufacture of glass, iron, and steel is in its infancy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... Indians. O! how can I part with you my darling? What will become of my sweet little Mary? Oh! how can I think of your being continued in captivity without a hope of your being rescued? O that death had snatched you from my embraces in your infancy; the pain of parting then would have been pleasing to what it now is; and I should have seen the end of your troubles!—Alas, my dear! my heart bleeds at the thoughts of what awaits you; but, if you leave us, remember my child ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver

... Empire transportation was a very valuable punishment, but there ought to be natural limits to it. Transportation was very well in the infancy of a Colony, but as it became more peopled and civilized, it was undesirable to deluge it with a convict population. The subject of abolishing the penalty of transportation was one of very great importance."—Lord ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth

... remained in infancy a guardian was required for the pupil and for the realm. But inasmuch it seemed to most people either invidious or difficult to give the aid that this office needed, it was resolved that a man should be chosen by lot. For the wisest of the Danes, fearing much to make a choice ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... originally so named. His real name was Samuel. He was a Jew, and born in a little village in the neighborhood of Innsprueck. His family, which possessed a considerable fortune, left him, in his early youth, completely free to his own pursuits. From infancy he had shown that these were serious. He loved to be alone and passed his days, and sometimes his nights, wandering among the mountains and valleys in the neighborhood of his birthplace. He would often sit by the brink of torrents, listening to the voice of their waters, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of the imagination contracted in infancy. The devout man is a hypochondriac, who only augments his malady by the application of remedies. The wise man abstains from them entirely; he pays attention to his diet, and in other respects leaves nature ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... since last Season an Actor and Actress returned to Drury-Lane under such Abatements as that Manager thought proper, and such as were in no degree equal to their Merit; and yet, at the beginning of this Season, were dismissed, after having been from their Infancy on the Stage, and having no other Professions to live by, and very ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive

... in her room, arranging a series of photos. There was Denis from infancy until the period when he had left his home—ugly, but smiling from ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... of the first type of home is obvious. Children need a great deal of wise, patient, and kindly care. Even the lower animals require, when domesticated, considerable care from their owners, if they are to be successfully brought from infancy to maturity. Of course children need greater care. No one doubts this. And yet it is certainly true that there are, even in these days of widespread intelligence, many homes where the children obtain too little care and in one way or another are ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... changed. He had worn me out. The love I had given him I lavished upon the child. Will's mother came to live with us—she had been drifting around miserably before—and while she failed me at the time of the divorce, yet she was a tower of strength to me during the baby's infancy. I was very fond of her and I think she sincerely liked me. But Will, her only son, could always make her believe black was white, as I later ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... of their senses. I recollect, when I was a child, hearing such stories, till I have actually been afraid to look behind me. How many persons are frightened at such a little creature as a mouse, because the nature of that little creature has not been explained to them in their infancy. Indeed, children should have all things shewn them, if possible, that they are likely to meet with: and above all, it should be impressed upon their minds, that if they meet with no injury from the living, it is most certain ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin

... the pass was quickly managed, and we had but to spend our time among the shops again. We resisted the seductions of an old man with fifty knives in his belt, who reminded Jo of a horrible nightmare of her infancy. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon

... air of authority which the boy showed, convinced the Swiss guards at the door that these were people of importance. One soldier whispered to another that this was a young German prince traveling with his tutor. They were allowed to enter, and the boy, accustomed from infancy to the life of courts, immediately walked to the Cardinals' table, and placed himself between the chairs of two of those Princes ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... to a sixth sense that nature had endowed us with, to judge the good and the beautiful. They pressed to know what I thought of it. I answered that this sixth sense was a chimaera; that all was the result of experience in us; that we learnt from our earliest infancy what it was in our instinct to hide or to show. When the motives of our actions, our judgments, our demonstrations, are present to us, we have what is called science; when they are not present to our memory, we have only what ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... to contain all the sounds of the language, and these ought to be taught in every family from the earliest infancy. The child who learns his spelling book ought to repeat them to the infant in the cradle, before it is able to pronounce even one of them, so that they may be deeply impressed upon its mind by ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... that place perfectly. It was not necessary to impress by threats or by punishment on the newly enlisted troops the duty of regarding as their head him whom they had regarded as their head ever since they could remember any thing. Every private had, from infancy, respected his corporal much and his Captain more, and had almost adored his Colonel. There was therefore no danger of mutiny. There was as little danger of desertion. Indeed the very feelings which most powerfully impel other soldiers to desert kept the Highlander ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... grieve for her death, but incapable of remembering her precepts. Though my father was doatingly fond of her, yet there were some sentiments in which they materially differed: she had been bred from her infancy in the strictest principles of religion, and took the morality of her conduct from the motives which an adherence to those principles suggested. My father, who had been in the army from his youth, affixed an idea of pusillanimity to that virtue, which was formed by the doctrines, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... neighborhood of two contending powers they are never peaceful. If the strong hand of power does not bend them down they will raise the tomahawk and bare the scalping knife for deeds of blood and horror: The purity of female innocence, the decrepitude of age, the tenderness of infancy afford no security against the murderous steel of a hostile Indian: to guard against the probable incursions of bands of these murderers, I will not call them by the dignified name of warriors, are you called upon to arm: and who in such a cause would refuse to march or to bleed? And who would ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... ingenuity of the people and the ferocity of the cats rendered life precarious indeed. Squeaknibble seemed to inherit many ancestral traits, the most conspicuous of which was a disposition to sneer at some of the most respected dogmas in mousedom. From her very infancy she doubted, for example, the widely accepted theory that the moon was composed of green cheese; and this heresy was the first intimation her parents had of the sceptical turn of her mind. Of course, her parents were vastly annoyed, for their maturer natures saw that this youthful scepticism ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field

... souvenir greatly prized by Americans in town and valley was the flag pole, which in Sonoma's infancy had been hewn from the distant mountain forest, and brought down on pack animals by mission Indians under General Vallejo's direction. It originally stood in the centre of the plaza, where it was planted with sacred ceremonials, and where ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... shambles.' This same gentleman thus compared the foreign with the domestic traffic: 'The trader (African) receives the slave, a stranger in aspect, language and manner, from the merchant who brought him from the interior. But here, sir, individuals whom the master has known from infancy,—whom he has seen sporting in the innocent gambols of childhood,—who have been accustomed to look to him for protection,—he tears from the mother's arms, exiles into a foreign country, among a strange people, subject to cruel task-masters. In my opinion, it is much worse.'—Mr. ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge

... had brought him a son, on whom from his infancy, he doated—and the boy, in riper years, possessing a handsome person and evincing a quickness of parts, gratified the father's darling passion, pride, as well as the ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... wished she could not express, even to herself. Her sensitive nature was keenly alive to every slight impression of kindness or of coldness;—and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... had four children, but the only son died in infancy, so the name disappeared, and the family is represented only by the descendants of their daughter, Jane, who ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... of his day had been and were doing, and they did not want to be bothered with, would not brook, in short, his approaching rivalry. Like the various usurpers of regal powers in ancient days, they thought it best to kill a possible claimant to the throne in his infancy. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... voyage out to Quebec, and the difficulty, delay, and additional outlay of the inland journey put it completely out of the power of the needy agriculturist or artizan to emigrate; the very classes, however, who, from their having been brought up from their infancy to hard labour, and used to all sorts of privations, were the best fitted to cope with the dangers and hardships attending the settlement of a new country. The impossibility of the working hand raising funds for emigration, confined the colonists to ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... regard for her was deep and sincere; and it was one of the tricks of destiny that she was not spared to witness more of his rising fame, being cut off in 1754, when she was only forty-six. Matthias Haydn promptly married again, and had a second family of five children, all of whom died in infancy. The stepmother survived her husband—who died, as the result of an accident, in 1763—and then she too entered a second time into the wedded state. Haydn can never have been very intimate with her, and he appears to have lost sight of her entirely in ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... no pleasant thing to live under such constant surveillance; but it guaranteed the honesty of any success, while fearfully multiplying the penalties had there been a failure. A single mutiny, such as has happened in the infancy of a hundred regiments, a single miniature Bull Run, a stampede of desertions, and it would have been all over with us; the party of distrust would have got the upper hand, and there might not have been, during the whole contest, another effort to ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... gable, balancing one another, but not welded into one pattern; which made relief the mere repetition of one point of view of the round figure, the shadow of the gable group; which, until its decline, knew nothing of the pathos of old age, of the grotesque exquisiteness of infancy, of the endearing awkwardness of adolescence; which knew nothing of the texture of the skin, the silkiness of the hair, the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... serene infancy Perceives not, as the hours content them by, 155 Each in a chain of blossoms, yet enjoys The shapes of this new world, in giant toys Wrought by the busy ... ever new? Remembrance borrows Fancy's glass, to show These ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... man with the neat geometrical pattern of little scars, perpendicular on the forehead, horizontal on the cheeks and in concentric circles on the chest (done with loving care and a knife, in his infancy, by his papa) said only "Ptwack" as he chewed a mouthful of coffee-beans and hide. It may have been a pious ejaculation or a whole speech in his own peculiar vernacular. It was a tremendous smacking of tremendous lips, and the expression which overspread his speaking countenance was of ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... of man! Here a babe was born, who lived his infancy, youth, manhood; who achieved as one in a million; who died: yet the house of his birth—old at the time—still stubbornly stands as if to make mock of our ambitions. A hundred years ago Fairhaven had a dozen men or more who, with an auger, an adz, a broadax and a drawshave, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... been an Eastern slave. With due deference to the makers of idylls and to philanthropists, the inhabitants of the provinces have very little idea of certain virtues; and their scruples are of a kind that is roused by self-interest, and not by any sentiment of the right or the becoming. Raised from infancy with no prospect before them but poverty and ceaseless labor, they are led to consider anything that saves them from the hell of hunger and eternal toil as permissible, particularly if it is not contrary to any law. Exceptions to this rule are rare. Virtue, socially speaking, is the companion ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... the fire and vivacity which illumined it; his face was the mirror of his mind; perhaps no disposition more amiable was ever found amongst the children of Adam, united, however, with no inconsiderable portion of high and dauntless spirit. So great was his beauty in infancy, that people, especially those of the poorer classes, would follow the nurse who carried him about in order to look at and bless his lovely face. At the age of three months an attempt was made to snatch him from his mother's arms in the streets of London, at the moment she ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... added the M. niger, the cuckoos are the only birds which can be called truly parasitical; namely, such as "fasten themselves, as it were, on another living animal, whose animal heat brings their young into life, whose food they live upon, and whose death would cause theirs during the period of infancy." (3/8. "Magazine of Zoology and Botany" volume 1 page 217.) It is remarkable that some of the species, but not all, both of the Cuckoo and Molothrus should agree in this one strange habit of their parasitical propagation, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... words with which we have been familiar from our infancy up, and probably there are few words in the English language that are so often used as this word "GRACE." Many of you at your table "say grace" three times a day. You seldom go into a church without hearing the word mentioned. You seldom read any part of the New Testament, especially ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody

... indicating thereby a special love of oysters but a craving appetite for food of some kind. It was oyster or nothing with them. And in the course of life thus forced upon them, the males who survived the period of infancy may have averaged twenty-five years of wretched, debased, brutal existence, while the females, of more delicate frame and subjected to additional evils, have usually died much younger. But the gallows, the charity hospitals, the prisons, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... sacral harlotry. Analogous customs in Hindostan. The early Portuguese travelers to the East found sacral harlotry in Cochin China. All virgins of noble birth were bound by vows from infancy. Otherwise no honorable man would marry them.[1926] Modern Egyptian dancing girls, Ghowazy or Barmeky, had a tradition that they belonged to a race by themselves. They kept up isolation and peculiar customs. Each was compelled ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... of war, he did not refuse them, nor did they find in him that prejudice which forbids a fair trial and rejects reasonable proof. Of ironclads and rifled guns, both which in his day were still in their infancy, he at times spoke disparagingly; but his objection appears to have arisen not from a doubt of their efficacy—the one for protection, the other for length of range—but from an opinion as to their effect ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan

... saw her on the day when he first took a fancy for her. He had, however, known her from infancy, but never had he been so struck by her as on that morning. They had stopped to talk for a few minutes and then he went away, and as he walked ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... were baptized in infancy,—you were baptized by that good and excellent Bishop Downing, as good a man, and as holy, as ever was consecrated, here or anywhere. He baptized you before you were two months old. That made you ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... betrothed bride Madonna Isabella during the famine at Ferrara. With him they learnt sufficient Latin to read Cicero and Virgil, as well as Greek and Roman history. Music and dancing were taught them almost from infancy. They learnt to play the viol and lute, and sang canzoni and sonnets to the accompaniment of these instruments. Beatrice, we know, was passionately fond of music. She employed the great Pavian Lorenzo Gusnasco to ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... shalt honor thy parents! Thou shalt pay respect and homage to the aged! Thou shalt instruct the young! Thou shalt protect and defend infancy and innocence! ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... the giants Of thought and of science," He said in his positive way: "So weigh them, obey them, Display them, and lay them To heart in your infancy's day!" Jack made no reply, But he said on the sly An eloquent word, that had come From a quite indefensible, Most reprehensible, But ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... love, or ambition, or hope, or fear, or passion, or purpose, than a week-old monkey, and is not half so frisky and funny. In fact, it is a puling, scowling, wretched, dismal, desperate-looking animal. It is only as it grows old that the beast gives way and the angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy and childhood the beast gives way and gives way and the angel-wings bud and bud; and yet we entertain our angel so unawares that we look back regretfully to the time when the angel was in abeyance and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... original suggestive idea that called forth the name, it would bring valuable information about the first openings of the human mind towards Nature; and the merest dream of such a discovery invests with a strange charm the words that could tell, if we could understand, so much of the forgotten infancy ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... Cato's usual habit, I now ascend in my discourse to the "origin of the people," for I like to adopt the expression of Cato. I shall also more easily execute my proposed task if I thus exhibit to you our political constitution in its infancy, progress, and maturity, now so firm and fully established, than if, after the example of Socrates in the books of Plato, I were to delineate a ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... a scheme which, through all the turns of his eventful career, was never abandoned. He would recover the estate which had belonged to his fathers. He would be Hastings of Daylesford. This purpose, formed in infancy and poverty, grew stronger as his intellect expanded and as his fortune rose. He pursued his plan with that calm but indomitable force of will which was the most striking peculiarity of his character. When, under a tropical sun, he ruled fifty millions of Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... annually by not only taking the hoe in hand, but working hard with it on certain public occasions. His Basutos are of the same family with the Makololo to whom I refer. The younger Makololo, who have been accustomed from their infancy to lord it over the conquered Makalaka, have unfortunately no desire to imitate the agricultural tastes of their fathers, and expect their subjects to perform all the manual labor. They are the aristocracy of the country, and once possessed almost unlimited power over their ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... bridge consists of one semicircular arch, of 100 feet span, each of the great ribs consisting of two pieces only. Mr. Robert Stephenson has said of the structure—"If we consider that the manipulation of cast iron was then completely in its infancy, a bridge of such dimensions was doubtless a bold as well as an original undertaking, and the efficiency of the details is worthy of the boldness ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... remarks, of her life-long, most tender devotion to the Blessed Virgin, as well as of the singular favours which that generous Mother reserved for her well-loved child. It was her happiness to be surrounded from earliest infancy with none but holy influences, and to breathe from her very cradle an atmosphere of purity. The first words which she heard, the first she tried to lisp, were the sweet names of Jesus and Mary. The first bent she received was an inclination ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... God of order, and hath ordained order in all the churches of Christ; and for to receive one that holds the baptism he had in his infancy, there is no command nor example for, and by the same rule children will be brought in to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... children thus unnaturally thrown from the arms of a parent into those of a nurse, are, almost without exception, weak and puny; of irrascible tempers and vicious inclinations.—Nor does the attention of the ladies expire with the infancy of their children—they still are unwearied in instructing them as they increase in years, and assiduously endeavour to inculcate principles of virtue into their young minds at a time when they ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... for his little weakness, will cease to complain that his worst enemy is himself. And, in dealing with speculation, the New Republic will have the power of an assured faith and purpose, and the resources of an economic science that is as yet only in its infancy. In such matters the New Republic will entertain no superstition of laissez faire. Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... whose suits were determined by the syndicato were not pleased with the sentence, they had an audience of Paoli, who never failed to convince them that justice had been done them. This appeared to me a necessary indulgence in the infancy of government. The Corsicans having been so long in a state of anarchy, could not all at once submit their minds to the regular authority of justice. They would submit implicitly to Paoli, because ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... watch eagerly for a glimpse of him; but he usually managed to elude them and to slip away unnoticed. His sensitiveness may have been due in part to the fact that his health was delicate and that he was much alone when a child—for all his brothers and sisters died in infancy. Although unfortunate in his father, he was blessed with a devoted mother, who by her exertions enabled him to go to Cambridge University. It is pleasant to know that he warmly returned her love and that he now ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... earth, or to live a {9} stationary or even a deteriorating life. A strong tribe, through internal development and the domination of other groups, finally becomes a great nation in an advanced state of civilization. It passes through the course of infancy, youth, maturity, old age, and death. But the products of its civilization are handed on to other nations. Another rises and, when about to enter an advanced state of progress, perishes on account of internal maladies. It is overshadowed with despotism, oppressed by priestcraft, or lacking ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... grandmothers, but as to why they needed protection, or how many of them there were to protect, but little was known even by the best informed. The culture of this important agricultural product was then in its infancy, and it was hardly recognized as an article ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones

... women of our country are worth looking at during a revolution. The rouge and pearl powder fall off, together with that passive attitude towards the outer world which education, tradition, custom impose upon them from the earliest infancy. I thought of your face, which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears when some political commotion tears down the veil of cosmetics ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... goods turned out would ultimately make such enterprises pay, even in a commercial world. Then, for the people employed and their families, there would be places of recreation and instruction, supplied by the Guild, and intended to give the agricultural labourer or mill-hand, trained from infancy in Guild schools, some insight into Literature, Science and Art—and tastes which his easy position would leave him ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... thoughts of Goethe and his 'Wilhelm Meister' from our minds, it will be possible to pronounce MM. Barbier and Carre's libretto a creditable piece of work. Mignon is a child who was stolen in infancy by a band of gipsies. She travels with them from town to town, dancing in the streets to the delight of the crowd. One day in a German city she refuses to dance, and Jarno the gipsy chief threatens her with his whip. Wilhelm Meister, who happens to be passing, saves her from a beating, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history of their empire in its infancy, is, for the most part, apocryphal, and that the myths of these early writers are only to be considered as such, and are not to ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... of an orphan girl who in infancy is left by her father an officer in India—to the care of an elderly aunt residing near Paris. The accounts of the various persons who have an after influence on the story ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... like a warm ray of sunshine falling across his hand, and he would lure him to linger by letting him try on the great blue goggles which he found it best to wear in public. But no disfigurement or deformity appeared to frighten the little fellow. These had been his playthings from earliest infancy. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... crews of our ships were well worthy of their leaders. There was no better seaman in the world than American Jack; he had been bred to his work from infancy, and had been off in a fishing dory almost as soon as he could walk. When he grew older, he shipped on a merchant-man or whaler, and in those warlike times, when our large merchant-marine was compelled to rely pretty much on itself for ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt



Words linked to "Infancy" :   babyhood, immaturity, immatureness, oral phase, time of life, oral stage, early childhood, infant



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