"Passivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me relax. Is that my chair? See me drop into complete physical and mental passivity—the kef ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to Lion's Head Farm in the tally-hos, "the stage leaves here at two o'clock to get the down train at three. I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Picq, speaking in the abstract, foretold an engagement in which the mistakes of the enemy would be counterbalanced by their energy in the face of French passivity, lack of any control conception. Forty years later in the Ecole de Guerre, Foch explained the reasons why the strategy of Moltke, mistaken in all respects, failed to meet the ruin it deserved, only because at Gravelotte Bazaine ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... hours of labor than formerly; The mental factor growing; The bright side of old-time country life; The larger environment; Games; Inventiveness in rural life; Activity rather than passivity; Child labor; The ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Her passivity angered him. This dignity of submission put him in the wrong. She seemed to be waiting patiently and without anxiety for her release. Why should he give it? How could he give it? Would he deny God in God's ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... who have not worked and suffered may be read, but they will be forgotten. No religion, no Ethical philosophy is worth anything, if the teacher has not lived the "life of an apostle," and been ready to die "the death of a martyr." "Not in passivity (the passive effects) but in activity lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity" (ix. 16). The emperor Antoninus was a practical moralist. From his youth he followed ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity, or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... shake off the masterful old hand, but she would not. A sad passivity became her best unless she relinquished every possible result of the last ten minutes. And it must have had some result. Jeff had, at least, been partly won. Surely there was an implied intimacy in his ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... her child to the farm, but there was this lull between them, an intense calm and passivity like a torpor upon them, so that there was no active change took place. He was almost unaware of the child, yet by his native good humour he gained her confidence, even her affection, setting her on a horse to ride, giving her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... passages as to a sick girl in St. Petersburgh, though his mind dwelt more on the spiritual beauty evinced in her remarks, than on the good she had done to those around her. Indeed, none bless more than those who "only stand and wait." Even if their passivity be enforced by fate, it will become a spiritual activity, if accepted in a faith higher above fate than the Greek gods were supposed to sit enthroned ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... England had wished to kill Ireland's soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so" (M. Paul Dubois). And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise and ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... following morning, when she sat pale and listless over the fire in her sitting-room, he reappeared. He spoke to her gently, but she gave him no answer. She looked at him with blank, languid eyes, and said not a word. He was almost frightened at her passivity. He thought that he had perhaps over-strained matters: that he had sent her out of her mind. But he did not lose hope. Kitty, with weakened powers of body and mind, would still be to him the woman that he loved, and that he had set his heart ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... actual fact, seriously ill, and yet I abandoned myself to my fate, allowing myself to slip without the slightest attempt at resistance, along the easiest way, towards death or idiocy or paralysis, towards anything that meant the indifferent passivity of inaction. I had bad, confused dreams. The silence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to make some sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent in preparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctor prevented me from rising ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... always on the back of these compulsory adventures there followed English bishops, priests, and preachers; whereby to the open-minded, conviction, to all degrees of it, was attainable, while silence and passivity became the duty or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... there had been genuflections and prostrations before him, with prayers for pardon and hymns of praise, especially from the proselytes. Dylks was said to have accepted their adoration with a certain passivity but to have done nothing to prevent it; there was not the more scandalous groveling at his feet which had stirred up the community to his arrest. There was as much decorum as could consist with the sacrilegious rites which were still practised ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... at Cherry's passivity and silence, but Cherry was wrapped in a sick and nervous dream, unable either to interpret the present or face the future with any courage. Before luncheon he had followed her into her room, and had put his arm about her. But she had quietly shaken him off, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the king seems to have been stunned into inaction. The heavy sense of demerit had taken the buoyancy out of him, and, though forgiven, he could never regain the elastic energy of purer days. The psalms which possibly belong to this period show a singular passivity. If we suppose that he was much in the seclusion of his palace, a heavily-burdened and spirit-broken man, we can understand how his condition tempted his heartless, dashing son to grasp at the reins which seemed to be dropping from his slack hands, and how ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... It was the passivity of stupefaction, however, as one marvel after another was revealed to them. The first evening the architect sketched the plans of a picturesque building in the old Norse style, to match the romantic scenery ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... kitchen window swept in its whole fragrance, heady and sensuous. She took long breaths of it, and thought of Reddin's green dress, of the queer look in his eyes when he stared long at her. A curious passivity quite foreign to her came over her now at the thought of Reddin. What would he look like, what would he say, would he hold her roughly, if she went to Hunter's Spinney? An unwilling elation possessed her as she thought of it. It did not occur to her to wonder why Edward ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... practically proposed. She puts herself in a man's way. With her it rests almost entirely whether a man shall think of her as a possible wife or not. She has endless ways of putting herself forward without seeming to do so. As often as not, it's mere passivity that effects the end. She has only to remain seated instead of moving away; to listen with a smile instead of looking bored; to be at home instead of being out,—and she is making love to a man. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... And each day, each hour, demands a further motion and re-adjustment for the soul. A telescope in an observatory follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the line of vision. To "follow Christ" is largely to keep the soul in such position as will allow for the motion of the earth. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... the box, had been shrieking affirmations of his loyalty to King George without the slightest heed being paid to him; but there is a limit to passivity, and as the two men on the wheel struggled which should first gain the desired prize, the squire kicked out twice with his foot in rapid succession, sending both disputants back into the crowd of troopers. Howls of rage arose on all sides; and it would have fared badly with the master ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... piece of paper before me. I am perfectly passive so far as motion on my part is concerned. I may be engaged in any manner of speculation or be in the midst of the so-called active attention to the spot; but I must be and for the present remain motionless. Now, while I am in this condition of passivity, suppose the spot be made to move slowly to one side by some force external to myself. I am immovable all the while, and yet am conscious of this movement of the spot from the first position, which I call A, to the new position, A', ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... close confinement. All at once he loses his illusion of freedom of will. Activity, the thing that in the eyes of the European endows life with its sublimest charm, cannot in the twinkling of an eye turn into absolute passivity. Nevertheless, despite these novel, distressing experiences, despite throbbing pulses, over-stimulated senses, and nerves tautened to the snapping point, the situation is by ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... saw that Leopold would stay his hand until England chose to act, meanwhile alleging her neutrality as an excuse for doing nothing.[13] Thus, the resolve of Catharine to give nothing but fair words being already surmised, the emigres found to their annoyance that Pitt's passivity clogged their efforts—the chief reason why they shrilly upbraided him for his insular egotism. Certainly his attitude was far from romantic; but surely, after the sharp lesson which he had received from the House of Commons in the spring ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... child, and that the value of these as symbols of what is inward and intrinsic must be wholly ignored. Not that the inward results of education would in any case be seriously considered. When education is based on the passivity of the child, nothing matters to him or to his teacher except the accuracy with which he can reproduce what he has been taught,—can repeat what he has been told, or do by himself what he has been told how ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of man is not of such. He is capable not of being influenced merely, but of influencing—and first of all of influencing himself; of taking a share in his own making; of determining actively, not by mere passivity, what he shall be and become; for he never ceases to pay at least a little heed, however poor and intermittent, to the voice of his conscience, and to-day he pays more heed than ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... habit. It was the terrible strength with which the Evil Spirit had possessed her, seizing her channels of speech even while she was still there, hurling her from her seat without waiting for the passivity of sleep. No, her sense of misfortune was not altogether, or even mainly, connected with that last day of hers. Unlike Mildred, she had up till now been without any consciousness of things that had occurred during ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... first tentative steps toward the creation of a real civilization, the task of freeing the spirit of mankind from the bondage of ignorance, prejudice and mental passivity which is more fettering now than ever in the history of humanity, will be facilitated a thousand-fold. The great central problem, and one which must be taken first is the abolition of the shame and fear of sex. We must teach men the overwhelming power of this ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But Tedham's not speaking threw me off my guard. I could not let ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... author defends are rejected at Rome, he either makes his submission, or, if his mind remains unaltered, silently leaves his book to take its chance, and to influence men according to its merits. But such passivity, however right and seemly in the author of a book, is inapplicable to the case of a Review. The periodical iteration of rejected propositions would amount to insult and defiance, and would probably provoke more definite ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... smooth and they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their busy inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of starved and beaten animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more preposterous the idea became. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... some charm was imparted by his instructing me to adopt a superincumbent face-to-face embrace. The beginning of his puberty was enormously attractive to me; had he been less cold-blooded I could have responded passionately to his endearments; but he always insisted on rigorous passivity on my part, and he explained nothing. One day, by a small gratuity, he induced me to offer him my mouth, though I still had no comprehension of the result I was helping to attain. Once the orgasm occurred, and the effect ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... political machinery never ruled the minds of the people, for these political events were like hurricanes or the changes of season, mere phenomena of a natural or physical order which never affected the spiritual integrity of Hindu culture. If after a passivity of some centuries India is again going to become creative it is mainly on account of this fundamental unity of her progress and civilisation and not for anything that she may borrow from other countries. It is therefore indispensably necessary for all those ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... about on a sunny morning in a picturesque foreign town, in that delicious mood when the smallest sights and sounds and incidents have a sharpness and delicacy of flavour which brings back the untroubled and joyful passivity of childhood, when one had no need to do anything in particular, because it was enough to be. It seemed so futile to go on consuming stolidly and grimly the porridge of life, when one might take one's choice of its dainties! I had no temptation to waste my substance in riotous living. I ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with her, and she waited with yearning expectation for the opportunity of confiding everything to him. Her mother called every day at Mr. Deane's to learn how Lucy was; the report was always sad,—nothing had yet roused her from the feeble passivity which had come on with the first shock. But of Philip, Mrs. Tulliver had learned nothing; naturally, no one whom she met would speak to her about what related to her daughter. But at last she summoned courage to go and see sister Glegg, who of course would ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Christmas visit he had made a number of calls there, a rather large number, indeed, considering everything. He had schooled his face and words on those occasions to a passivity he was far from feeling, and had left Louise's presence each time with a greater torment of mind. Now this was the end—of her as of everything so far as he was concerned. To-morrow the project came down in wreckage. Then he should go from ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... chance, he thought, to prove that the Germans, notwithstanding the servility of their pens, were not the spiritless race that foreigners saw in them; 'to show that we too, in spite of our oppressive forms of government, which permit only a condition of passivity, are men who have their passions and can act, no less than a Frenchman or a Briton.' He therefore cautioned any playwright who might try his hand upon the subject to lay the scene not in a foreign ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... however, not to over-emphasize this extremist tendency. In some respects, I am convinced that it is more apparent than real. The appearance is due to the silent passivity even of those who are really opposed to the new departure. It is natural that the advocates of some new policy should be enthusiastic and noisy. To give the impression to an outsider that the new enthusiasm is universal, those who do not share it have simply to keep ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... matter of little importance, and this is better than waiting till he is compelled hastily to cross a river on a narrow plank. It is all a kind of joyous rehearsal of life which we call Play. We can force a child to passivity, to formal repetitions of second-hand knowledge, to the acquisition of that for which he has no apparent need, but we can never educate him by these things. "Children do not play because they are young, they have their youth that they may play," ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards (white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves were water (passivity).—Tr. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... followers, was playing his nightly game of whist in the melancholy shelter of Holyrood, where he was to remain for the next two years, an insipid, sorrowful figure, distinguished by such dignity as unquerulous passivity can lend to the foolish and unfortunate. Meanwhile, Paris was attempting to vamp up some interest in her new King, who walked the streets with an ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... longer evinced toward Julio the resistance of the first few days. Her training as a nurse was giving her a certain passivity. She seemed to be ignoring material attractions, stripping them of the spiritual importance which she had hitherto attributed to them. She wanted to make Julio happy, although her mind was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... feminine beauty so prized by the ancients, a low forehead, and there was a suggestion of the classic in the arrangement of her hair. He found her smile peculiarly winning, and was conscious of the responsiveness of her fingers, so different from the limp passivity of many a feminine greeting. Though not more given to self-importance than the average young man, he was somehow aware that she too remembered their first casual encounter. Her failure to mention it now served only to invest ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the practical affairs of life, and one only, had power to rouse Barty from the dreamy passivity which had excited Great-Aunt Cantwell's contempt. Where Ireland and Irish politics came into question, some deep spring of sentiment and enthusiasm in him was touched, and all the force that he was capable of became manifest. All the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... heaven. Those who retain this notion, despite the revelations of science concerning the universality of sex throughout creation, cannot reason very candidly. When we find in the earth positives but no negatives, light but no heat, strength but no beauty, action but no passivity, wisdom but no love, intellection but no intuition, reflection but no perception, science but no religion, then, at last, may we expect to see in the heavens men but ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... a green light came in the fine blue eyes of Sally. They were her only really fine features, for the nose tilted an engaging trifle, the mouth was a little too generous, the chin so strong that it gave, in moments of passivity, an air of sternness to her face. That sternness was exaggerated as she rose, keeping her glare fixed upon Nash; a thing impossible for him to bear, so he lowered his eyes and engaged in rolling a cigarette. She turned ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the grip of an inelastic system and forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design, and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness of soul under the immovable ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... him was more due to his habitual conscientiousness of his own intention than to any fear that she would not fully respond to it. Indeed, with his conservative ideas of proper feminine self-restraint, Louise's calm passivity and undemonstrative attitude were a proof of her superiority; had she blushed overmuch, cried, or thrown herself into his arms, he would have doubted the wisdom of so easy a selection. It was true he had known her scarcely three ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... principle contained in the sentence: "We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it." But they also wondered whether the passivity of the Government did not in part proceed from the fact that the President could not make up his mind what he wanted to do. They looked upon his handling of the Mexican situation as clear evidence ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Cross is no mere passivity. It is more than simply a revelation of Divine suffering, of the eternal patience of the love of GOD. It is the expression of GOD in action: a deed of Divine self- sacrifice: a voluntary taking upon Himself by ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... it as a matter of course; that's the way it always has been, and always will be; some are born to suffer, others not. You can't have mountains without valleys. The war seemed perfectly idiotic to him, but he would not have lifted a finger to prevent it. He had in his way the fatalist passivity of the people, which hides itself, on Gallic soil, behind a veil of ironic carelessness. The "no use in getting in a sweat about it," of the trenches. Then there is also that false pride of the French, who fear ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister Salandra and his Minister ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... passes in the world of politics, the existence of free public opinion, or indeed of any opinion at all, can hardly be expected; and thus, while no country contains such frantic republicans as Russia, no government is more absolutely secure. Upon that tremendous passivity the utmost efforts of such men as Netchaieff and Bakounin fall like a pellet on the hide of an elephant. The popular cries which madden other races are utterly meaningless to the docile, unemotional "mujik," loyal and conservative ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... based on the idea that matter is wholly inert, and destitute of power either to move itself, or to check itself when moved by anything ab extra. This will not be denied. But is mind equally passive? Is there nothing in existence which rises above this passivity of the material world? If there is not, and such is the evident conclusion of the doctrine in question, then all things flow on in one boundless ocean of passivity, while there is no First Mover, no Self-active ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... present, let it be sufficient to say that no theologian would be prepared to accept his interpretation of the Christian religion. The everlasting conflict of spirit against sense and brutal force, which is the essence of Christianity, is hardly conducive to passivity. It is, on the contrary, a consistent discipline in modern heroism. There is not much meekness about the Jesuits or the warrior Popes. Nor is there much melancholy about St. Francis of Assisi or St. Theresa. The only smiling countenance in a ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea |
