"Perception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an intuitive perception that danger was approaching, for it turned abruptly round just as the missile left the seaman's hand, and received the butt with full force close to the root ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Why have they made the spaces in the iron gate at Spring Gardens so narrow?" he replied, "O, ma'am, because such very fat people used to go through" (a reply concerning which Tom Moore remarked that "the person who does not relish it can have no perception of real wit"). ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... each other and with the external world through their senses, and by means of their perception, both internal and external, they possess knowledge and apprehension of one another. In the vast organic series of the animal kingdom, some are better provided than others with methods, instruments, and apparatus fit for effecting such communication. The senses of relation ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... beautiful hair that he had ever seen. The grey eyes were demure, with just a suggestion of mirth in them; the lips were made for laughter. It was as if some dainty little actress were masquerading in Salvation garb, only the dress was all priceless lace that touched David's artistic perception. He could imagine the girl as deeply in earnest as going through fire and water for her convictions. Also he could imagine her as Puck or Ariel—there was rippling laughter in every note of ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... step into this hovel decked with gold and jewels as if in mockery?—like a tyrant who should feast at a groaning table and compel the starving to look on at the banquet. Her delicate perception made her feel what trenchant discord her appearance offered to all that surrounded her, and the discord pained her; for she could not conceal from herself that misery and external meanness were here entitled to give the key-note and that her magnificence derived no especial grandeur from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he enters the realm of fiction, represented in the story, by comparison with his personal experience. Every story and every point in the story mean more as that experience widens, and the interest varies, of course, with temperament, quickness of perception, power of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... but for his own. She had watched him fretting for weeks past, like a caged bird, and she had the wisdom to see that her only hope of making him desire the nest again lay in giving him freedom from it. Her pride fortified this perception. As she had said long ago, Mary was ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... hours of demonstrations I had made during the night. "The perception on scanning part of it goes on at some subconscious level, Shari," I said. "But we had evidence that it can be made ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... here every year and spends a good deal of money. But I know old Koppen. He is no fool. By the way, Eames, what do you think of this discover of mine? Of course you have hear of the James-Lange theory of the Emotions, namely, that bodily changes follow directly on the perception of the existing fact and that our feeling of these same changes as they occur is the Emotion. They developed the theory independently, and got great credit for it. Well, I find—what nobody seems to have noticed—that they ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this tragic poem—it has hardly the structure of a play—for the qualities of terror and splendor, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... rhinoceros, sabre-tooth, the monstrous tiger, or the bear, or the hyena, or the loping wolf, or short-bodied and vicious wolverine were to him, even then, but lower creatures. Man felt himself the master of the world, and his children inherited the perception. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... reproduce one of the lessons which gained a prize at a competition of teachers held in Italy. [3] In this, according to the subject or theme, only one primary psychical activity was to be dealt with: viz. sensory perception. (The compositions were distinguished not by the names of the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... all the vitality and life-love of him beaten down in a flashing instant by a shuddering perception of right and wrong, he brought the knife-edge across the rope, saw the strands part, felt himself slide more ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... wonderful musicians, in ways impossible to those otherwise endowed. So "a poet is born, not made." So persons of feeble frame, stimulated by disease or frenzied by passion, have put forth preternatural and prodigious muscular strength. By what we call "clairvoyant" power life calls up in intelligent perception things going on far beyond ocular vision. By what we call "telepathic" power life communicates intelligence with life separated by miles of space. Such are some of the powers that have been discovered, and fully attested, but not explained, as belonging to the world's master ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... faculty which seizes, amidst accumulated materials, those that serve the object for which they are explored,—that faculty which quadruples all force, by concentrating it on one point,—once roused into action, gave purpose to every toil and quickness to each perception. But Norreys did not confine his pupil solely to the mute world of a library; he introduced him to some of the first minds in arts, science, and letters, and active life. "These," said he, "are the living ideas of the present, out of which books for the future will ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its customary significance. In the preceding chapter the point was made that the distinction between isolation and contact is not absolute but relative. Members of a society spatially separate, but socially in contact through sense perception and through communication of ideas, may be thereby mobilized to collective behavior. Sociological interest in this situation lies in the fact that the various kinds of social contacts between persons ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... cast his eyes more than twice in the direction of this tree, when he saw there was something peculiar about it. Caspar was a youth of quick sight and equally quick perception. In the main stem of the tree, and about six feet above its first forking, he perceived an object that at once fixed his attention. It looked like a goat's horn, only that it was more like the curving tusk ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... eminence on the Blue Ridge Mountains, stands a most singular formation of rock, known as 'Washington's Face'; and which, to a casualist void of imaginative powers, is easily recognized if pointed out by a guide; but to a close observer, however, with common discernable perception, it presents at first sight a most striking and correct resemblance of the great original. From midway the bridge which crosses the Potomac, the countenance and contour of the face to me, appeared discriminatingly perfect, ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... but not quite as lightly as I would have liked. We played with it until nearly midnight, by which time she had used what I can only call her sense of perception to feel her way through a good part of my nerves and viscera. Some of it was exquisitely painful, but from observing my flinching when she hurt me, Pheola pretty quickly found out how to ignore the synapses that fired pain ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp
... self-reproach which had attended ever these early weeks in wonderland. Just as Anna's shrewdness had perceived, so was it the truth that an image of perfect womanhood dazzled his imagination and left him without any clear perception whatever. For little Lois of the slums he had a sterling affection, begotten of long association and of mutual sympathy—but the vision of Anna had been the beatification of his love dream, so to speak, deceiving him by its immense promise and leading him to credit Gessner's daughter ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... was a true gentlewoman, characterized by fervent religious feeling, delicacy of perception, and a great love for music. She was reared in the Scottish kirk, and her husband in the Church of England, but they both connected themselves after their marriage with an "Independent" body that held their meetings in York Street, where the Robert ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is described by himself in his Vision of Sudden Death. But his unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception displayed in his Biographical Sketches of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other contemporaries: in his critical papers on Pope, Milton, Lessing, Homer and the Homeridae: his essay on Style; and his Brief ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... persuasion could induce him to stir. I was the more surprised from knowing his generally docile and manageable temper. He seemed immovable, and, moreover, as I thought, in the attitude of listening. I too listened eagerly—intensely; my senses sharpened to the keenest perception ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... True, he had a dim, persistent impulse to action—or why should he be at the station?—but for the clearest expression of his condition it is necessary to borrow a culinary symbol; he was jelling. But the state of shock was slowly dispersing, while a perception of approaching anguish as slowly increased. He was beginning to swallow nothing at intervals and the intervals were ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... makes it. Any one who will think for a moment how far from elevating the action of that collective thought is likely to be at the present time will see little reason to wonder that we reap as we have sown, and that this essence, which has no power of perception, but only blindly receives and reflects what is projected upon it, should usually exhibit unfriendly characteristics. There can be no doubt that in later races or rounds, when mankind as a whole has evolved to a much higher level, ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the foregoing, although often confounded with it—relating to the Perception of a Material World, is the crowning instance of the weakness we are considering. Berkeley has been unceasingly stigmatised as holding that there is no material world, merely because he exposed a self-contradiction in the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the spear, and ran out. I heard my companion, as I thought, shouting some caution after me; but I was too intent upon the chase to pay any attention to what he said. I had at the moment a distinct perception of hunger, and an indistinct idea of ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... Honest perception had told him that this Avice, fairer than her mother in face and form, was her inferior in soul and understanding. Yet the fervour which the first could never kindle in him was, almost to his alarm, burning ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... given to the story of the miracle; all the rest of the chapter to its preface and its issues. It was a great thing to heal a man that was blind from his birth, but the story of the gradual illumination of his spirit until it came to the full light of the perception of Christ as the Son of God, was far more to the Evangelist, and ought to be far more to us than giving the outward eye power to discern the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... of Mathematical Learning"—a scholar, as evinced by his examination of Woodward's "Account of the Deluge," his treatise on "Ancient Coins and Medals," and that on the "Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients"—a wit, whose grave irony, keen perception of the ridiculous, and magical power of turning the lead of learning into the most fine gold of humour, exhibited in his "Martinus Scriblerus," his "Epitaph on the notorious Colonel Chartres," and his "History of John Bull," still extract shouts, screams, and tears of mirth from thousands who scarce ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... mixture. The open doors of the deckhouse companion revealed an interior of ivory paneling touched with gold, and hung with heavy velvet punkahs. The walls were embellished with exactly the right number of art gems to establish the artistic perception of the owner and to whet the expectation for more yet unseen. But, with all this, the Feu Follette housed a discontented master and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... slate of a schoolboy, which can contain only a certain number of characters of a given size, or like a moveable panorama, which places a given scene or landscape before me, and the space assigned, and which comes within the limits marked out to my perception, is full. Many things are therefore almost inevitably shut out, which, had it not been so, might have essentially changed the view of the case, and have taught me that it was a very different conclusion at which I ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... the result reached is the doctrine of two original forces, spirit and nature, from whose reciprocal action and reaction upon each other the union of soul and body is to be explained. Is this union unnatural, then the effort of the wise man should be to free himself, through the perception that the soul is not bound to the body, from the dominion of matter. In this system, there is no room for an infinite being, for, if a material world exist, then must God be limited by its existence, and therefore cease to be infinite, that is God. The ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... something else. The critic is as much to blame as the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to Tennyson, to many a popular ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... battery yet, Comrade Gooch, but who shall predict how long so happy a state of things will last? Do not be deceived by our gay and smiling faces, Comrade Gooch. We mean business. Let me put the whole position of affairs before you; and I am sure a man of your perception will see that there is only one ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... neutrality, to which they were bidden not only by their separate life and their habitual detachment from the politics of Europe but also by a clear perception of international duty, the states of America have become conscious of a new and more vital community of interest and moral partnership in affairs, more clearly conscious of the many common sympathies and interests and duties which bid them ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... Lanyard's entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set of his lips—an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... pleasures they proposed were equalled only by those they declined, and they made their appointments often so expensively that she was left wondering at the nature of the delights to which the mere approaches were so paved with shillings. She quivered on occasion into the perception of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just simply liked to be. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant conviction that she would ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... Don't go—not yet," cried Corey, with an instinctive perception that nothing could be worse for him. "We must wait—we must be patient. I'm afraid it would be painful to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... talent in this case is difficult, and does not lead to any certain or important result. The question is interesting to Biblical scholars and antiquarians, but the solution of it is by no means necessary to the perception or the application of our Lord's meaning in the parable. The sense is completely obtained by taking the ten thousand talents as a vast but indefinite sum. A hundred talents of silver constituted the hire of a great army, 2 Chron. xxv. 6; and notwithstanding the lavish use of gold in ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... had saved me, by her own instinctive perception, a world of painful explanations, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Gives one high moral standpoint, doncha know. Thus, when I want to suggest that THE MARKISS is a mere tool in hands of BISMARCK, I extol honest purposes of OLD MORALITY; hint, you know, that he is not so sharp of perception as he might be; but that gives him the fuller claim upon our sympathy, seeing that he is yoked with a colleague of the natural depravity, and capable of the infinite iniquity, which marks the MARKISS'S relations with public affairs. The great thing, dear TOBY, in public controversy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... him, in spite of his belief to the contrary. I would not for one moment exhibit Newman as an example, or hold him up as a fine character. He had very great faults and many weaknesses. I do not know that he had strength of character. He had an independent spirit in some respects, a clear perception, and considerable talent. His greatly superior education raised him much above the associates among whom ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... forward and his blue eyes, usually so chill, sparkled now with fire. He was speaking of what lay next to his heart. Braxton Wyatt, full of shrewdness and perception, understood ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary's reluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead from Paula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoided giving her such a lead, sheered away whenever ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... great uneasiness in the mind of Alva. Count Louis was known to be as skilful a negotiator as he was valiant and accomplished as a soldier. His frankness and boldness created confidence. The "brave spirit in the loyal breast" inspired all his dealing; his experience and quick perception of character prevented his becoming a dupe of even the most adroit politicians, while his truth of purpose made him incapable either of overreaching an ally or of betraying a trust. His career indicated that diplomacy might be sometimes successful, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... powerful appeal, brought the yet unorganized assembly to a perception of its hazardous position, he submitted a motion requiring the acting Clerk to proceed in calling the roll. This and similar motions had already been made by other members. The difficulty was, that the acting Clerk declined to entertain them. Accordingly, Mr. Adams was immediately ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... weather-stain. Would that this tree of the knowledge of evil—not good and evil—were never transplanted into our New World. 'If ye eat of it,' your love of what is natural and simple 'will surely die;' ye will lose your perception of the sweet odors of the flowers Providence has sown along your path, and the vile exhalations from these fruits of corrupted genius will hide from you the star of duty—perhaps Nature's sternest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this scene of black energy to gold. All late afternoons are beautiful, whatever the day has been—if only there is a gleam of sun. And now a kind of mechanical greatness took the place of mere black disorder in the bishop's perception of his see. It was harsh, it was vast and strong, it was no lamb he had to rule but a dragon. Would it ever be given to him to overcome his dragon, to lead it home, and ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... thinking did not help Stephen. Each day her conviction grew deeper, her perception clearer, her sense of alienation from Stephen profounder. If a moral antagonism had grown up between them in any other shape, it would have been less fatal to her love. There were many species of wrong-doing which would have been less hateful in her sight. It seemed to her sometimes that there ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... annoying to his father as Galileo's experiments were to his parent; as unmeaning to him as Gibbon's History was to George III.,—"Scribble, scribble, scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you are always a-scribbling." No perception of a new power, no sympathy with the abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions, but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed. At last the father yielded, and the son was apprenticed to a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... to those beings only which are endowed with perception, and is in a manner thrown away upon dead matter, any further than it is subservient to beings which are conscious of their existence. Accordingly we find, from the bodies which lie under our observation, that matter ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... idealistic system. He explains it, however, frankly, clearly, and unambiguously: "The Concept or Notion (Begriff) may be always called 'abstract,' if the term 'concrete' must be limited to the mere concrete of sensation and immediate perception; the Notion as such cannot be grasped by the hands, and, when we deal with it, eyes and ears are out of the question. Yet, as was said before, the Notion is the only true concrete." (Encyklopaedie, Werke, VI. 316.) ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... sarcasm the infamies and follies of senatorial favorites. Conscience and patriotism should have alike held him to the reforming party; and political instinct, if vanity had left him the use of his perception, would have led him in the same direction. Possibly before he received the votes of the patricians and their clients he had bound himself with certain engagements to them. Possibly he held the Senate's intellect cheap, and ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... figures than in contemporary wood-carving. It was a period of tentative effort, and was, of course, beneath criticism. English Art has ever been an effort until its one bright burst of genius in the eighteenth century, while the continental nations appear to have breathed artistic perception with life itself. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... of man back upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejecting an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not in contemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perception of something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the group experience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy imparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the Religion of the Semites,[9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... unknown among them. No one may speak to the king but his wives and children, except at a distance by hollow canes, which they apply to his ear, and through which they whisper what they have to say. They think that at death men have no perception as they had none before they were born. Their houses are small, built of wood and earth, covered partly with rubble and partly with palm-leaves. It is ascertained that there are twenty thousand houses in the city of Porne. They marry as many wives as they can afford ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... a world before her, leaving worlds behind her," and "the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed." That union of energy and will which we call the soul is capable of creating a new world every day, and any adequate perception of the life that now is, as well as that which is to come, suggests consolation for the ills of the day and leads one into the atmosphere of ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... lent myself to the old dreamer's whim with a keen perception of the humor of the thing; but by and by I found that I was talking and thinking of Miss Mehetabel's son as though he were a veritable personage. Mr. Jafifrey spoke of the child with such an air of conviction!—as if Andy were playing among his toys ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... indifferent did not escape her awakened perception. She suffered again the pang of losing him that had brought her to her knees on that dreadful night, and fluttered toward him ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... that, unless Mercia, as the centre of the kingdom, be reconciled to thy power, thou wilt stand high indeed—but on the shelf of a precipice. And if, as I suspect, thou lovest some other who now clouds thy perception, and will then check thy ambition, thou wilt break her heart with thy desertion, or gnaw thine own with regret. For love dies in possession—ambition has no fruition, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should be fed; that there should not be that secret attachment to mental illumination, which is the primary source of error, and the basis of the obstinacy of heretics; that all of knowledge should "be referred to God, and that we should in some sense strip ourselves of it to acquire the perception of God alone, and of His holy law. St. Hilary said, speaking in the same sense, that we must always bear in mind that we are men, that we have nothing of our own, not even the use of our senses and faculties; that ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... spot consecrated to purity, unselfishness, and truth. The lovely and beloved Ellen learnt, before a syllable escaped my lips, the secret which those lips would never have disclosed. Her innocent and conscious cheek acknowledged instantly her quick perception, and with maiden modesty she turned aside—not angrily, but timorous as a bird, upon whose leafy covert the heavy fowler's foot has trod too harshly and too suddenly. I thought of nothing then but the pain I had inflicted, and was sensible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... unfortunately, also, the conciliating attitude of the official leaders encouraged on the part of the Abolitionists an outburst of fanaticism. In their devotion to their adopted cause they lost all sense of proportion, all balance of judgment, and all justice of perception; and their narrowness and want of balance is in itself a sufficient indication that they were possessed of a half, instead ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... never changed. He was a luminous example of the truth of the saying that the child is father to the man, so often apparently falsified by experience. Boy and man, the prominent characteristic of his mind was a clear perception of fundamentals and a disregard of non-essentials in the whole domain of life. To reverse a familiar maxim, "Take care of the dollars and the cents will take care of themselves," might describe his plan of mental economy. To the small coin of discussion in any field of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... appropriated to them, except fishes, whose young are nourished by themselves? For neither have they sense who have nothing sensible, nor they appropriation who have nothing proper; for appropriation seems to be the sense and perception of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... glorious episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a deplorable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... know the things of the physical plane through the physical body. For it is all on the same lines: that which enables you to know is not only body—that is the medium between you and the physical world—but the Knower in you is that which enables you to know, the power of perception which is of consciousness, and not of body. When consciousness vanishes, all the organs of consciousness are there, as perfect as ever, but the Knower has left them, and knowledge disappears with him; and so, whether it be in a swoon, in a fainting fit, in ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... never would be able to explain anything so elegantly as this, nor even to understand how ingeniously this conclusion is drawn. The soul, then, perceives itself to have motion, and at the same time that it gets that perception, it is sensible that it derives that motion from its own power, and not from the agency of another; and it is impossible that it should ever forsake itself. And these premises compel you to allow its eternity, unless you have something to say ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... have had a contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling—mark my words—they ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the reverse ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... maintain that the soul of man is material, or that the principle of perception and thought is not a substance distinct from the body, but the result of corporeal organization. There are others called by this name who have maintained that there is nothing but matter in ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... was scrupulous to play only with those gentlemen whom he knew, and always to settle his own debts on the spot. He would have made but a very poor figure at a college examination; though he possessed prudence and fidelity, keen, shrewd perception, great generosity, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hundred and ninety-five are five more—as we allow—who have so little of perception, who are so stolid, so dull of wit and apprehension that they go into battle unmoved, unshaken, unthinking. This leaves nine hundred and ninety who are afraid—sorely and terribly afraid. They are afraid of being killed, afraid of being crippled, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... to be lamented that so many naturalists have entirely overlooked this significant advice of Cuvier's, to combine zooelogical and anatomical studies in order to arrive at a clearer perception of the true affinities among animals. To sum it up in one word, he tells us that the secret of his method is "comparison,"—ever comparing and comparing throughout the enormous range of his knowledge of the organization of animals, and founding upon the differences ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... his hand to hold the little brown one near it, but each time the child floated from his touch, and he smiled at the unconscious dignity, the womanly reserve of the frank and friendly little lady. "Thus far and no farther," he thought, with the quick perception of character that was part of his power. But the Bishop was as unconscious as the child of his own charm, of the magnetism in him that drew hearts his way. Only once had it ever failed, and that was the only time he had cared. But this time ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... sickness, with consumption, for two years and three months, she felt the soothing power of unfaltering Christian hope, which was evidently derived from a very clear perception of the way to be saved through Christ, and complete trust in the promises made ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... and decided he did not like to look at her. She was as surprising as the newly-found Piccadilly, but she gratified no sensuous perception whatsoever. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... heard were new to him. The American contest was known to him before but as a rebellion—a tumultuary affair in a remote transatlantic colony. He now, with a promptness of perception which, even at this distance of time, strikes us as little less than miraculous, addressed a multitude of inquiries to the Duke of Gloucester on the subject of the contest. His imagination was kindled at the idea of a civilized people ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... The Baron, whose perception of humour had been abnormally increased by this time, laughed hilariously at the infection of his new ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... possible to speak of this "a priori" background of all possible perception as a "monad" at all, it is a monad which certainly lacks the essential power of the individual monad which we know as our real self, for this latter can and does contemplate ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... between the sense of disgust and immorality, it is often impossible to determine what is primary and what is secondary. A mutual retroaction occurs: the sense of disgust is increased, because the act is regarded as immoral; and, on the other hand, a strong sense of disgust may increase the perception of immorality. The same mutual relationships with the ideas of morality are found in connexion with the sense of shame. Beyond question, the sentiments of shame and of disgust are closely connected with the ideas of custom and morality; for shame and disgust ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... insinuations, equally false and insidious, with which the desperate emissaries of a party endeavour to poison the minds of his majesty's subjects, in defiance of common honesty and common sense. But he must be blind to all perception, and dead to candour, who does not see and own that we are involved in a just and necessary war, which has been maintained on truly British principles, prosecuted with vigour, and crowned with success; that ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... that he was in his sober senses. There was the dead dog, however, to prove that his conjecture had been correct. It seemed to me that the mists in my own mind were gradually clearing away, and I began to have a dim, vague perception of the truth. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Milton in his blindness, Bunyan in his imprisonment had his spiritual perception made all the brighter by his exclusion from the glare of the outside world. And of the great debt of gratitude we all owe to "the wicked tinker of Elstow" Dean Stanley has spoken so truly that I am fain to quote his words: "We all need to be cheered ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... improvement of the revenue; the defence of extreme rights of the prerogative in the case against Whitelocke; the great question of calling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" way of dealing with it. His confidential advice to the King about calling a parliament was marked by his keen perception of the facts of the situation; it was marked too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods and trust in the look of things; it bears traces also of his bitter feeling against Salisbury, whom he charges with treacherously fomenting the opposition ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... forcibly detained me, though I, of course, was compelled to insist on being treated like the rest of the pirates, and he, not knowing my real wish, thought he was bound to do as I desired. Mary was all the time below, or her keen perception would have saved me, as she would have insisted on keeping me, in spite of myself. I repeated the oath I had taken over and over again, and I did not find that it in any way prevented me from liberating the prize. That any one would ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... intellection is false understanding, not resting on a perception of the true nature ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... former sums up the hope of an entire course or an entire subject. In the teaching of literature we hope to develop a vital interest in reading, a discriminating taste, an enlivened imagination and a quickened perception which enable the student to visualize the situations and to acquire the thought on the printed page. The instructional aim, however, is much more specific; it posits a task that can be accomplished in a very limited time; it ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... credit through any famous continental collection. Smollett aspired to more independence of thought and opinion, though we perceive at every turn how completely the Protestant prejudice of his "moment" and "milieu" had obtained dominion over him. To his perception monks do not chant or intone, they bawl and bellow their litanies. Flagellants are hired peasants who pad themselves to repletion with women's bodices. The image of the Virgin Mary is bejewelled, hooped, painted, patched, curled, and frizzled in the very extremity ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... decisive results. At length Sheridan determined upon an assault by mounted troops supported by those on foot. To Custer was assigned the important duty of leading this assault. It was toward four o'clock when Sergeant Avery who had as quick an intuitive perception in battle as any man I ever knew, and whose judgment was always excellent and his suggestions of great value, called my attention to what appeared to be preparations for a mounted charge over to the right where General Custer was with his colors. "They are going to charge, ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... than the recoil from neglected truths. When, even in the earliest ages of the Church, the Second Commandment was supposed to be a mere enhancing of the first, and therefore curtailed and omitted, there was little perception that this would lead to popular, though not theoretical, idolatry, still less that this law, when again brought forward, would be pushed by scrupulous minds to the most strange and unexpected consequences, to the over-powering ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... is amazing that when heaven is opened to such men and they are told that they are insane, and this is made plain to their very perception by influx and enlightenment, still they angrily shut heaven away from them and look to the earth beneath which is hell. This is done with such men while they are still outside hell. It makes plain ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception already largely developed. The wealth of ready-formed information, and therefore of ready-made powers of perception, with which many newly-born or newly-hatched animals are provided, is so great and so precise that it scarcely requires ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... and State to settle any Church-government over the Kingdom hastily or not." Burton was already in the same mood of hypothetical Voluntaryism (ante, p. 109), and I think it was spreading now among the Independents. Certainly, however, the perception of the necessary identity of the principle of Independency with absolute Voluntaryism, or the doctrine of No State Church, was not universal among them.] It was the Erastians rather than the Independents that were here the clogs upon the thorough-going ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... is a supremely important problem. It is my conviction that you can only do so through literature; and the New Testament itself might well be read simply as literature. The words, the phrases, the ideals which literature offers so lavishly, unconsciously stir the mind to lofty motives and the true perception of the meaning of life. We must not, of course, commit the fatal blunder of making a didactic lesson out of what is read. We take care that it is understood and illustrated, and then leave it to have ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... language, mistook Dunn's deception for friendship, and moved by that extreme French politeness and warmth of feeling, which he thought doing the gentleman par excellence; while the latter, with a quicker perception of right and wrong, and understanding our language, saw the motive and disdained its nefarious object. For when Paul arrived at the jail he was minus a five-dollar gold-piece, which his very amiable official companion took particular care of, lest ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... for greatness of mind. In this, as in all other matters, his opinion was formed with the first glance. His intimacy with every sort of character, in his extended intercourse with the world, seemed so to have educated his faculties and whetted his perception, that he only wanted to look at a man for five minutes to know his inmost nature. Yet he was sometimes deceived, and, ascertaining this, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... unconscious for only a short time, yet while I lay in that condition I seemed as one dead. Upon regaining consciousness, I seemed dazed all the rest of that day; and not until I had had a night's sleep, did I have a clear perception of what was going on around me. Sometimes two or three days would pass before I was ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... awakened also to a new perception of her character, and a kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet so womanly and feminine her manner. Mrs. Callendar was loud in her exclamations of delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion's coolness; and the bookmaker, with his usual impetuosity, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... true; yet he always feels that there is a possibility of their being false. The Stoics themselves admit that the senses are often deceived. Put this admission together with the tenet of Epicurus, and perception becomes impossible (101). It is strange that our Probables do not seem sufficient to you. Hear the account given by Clitomachus (102). He condemns those who say that sensation is swept away by the Academy; nothing is swept away but its necessary certainty (103). There are two modes ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... me, Ronald," she said. Then she turned and talked a little longer to Giles. She saw how weak the child was, and knew, with a woman's perception, what a very little time longer he had to live in this ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... Field distinguishes the understanding from the reason, as experience following perception of sense. But as perception through the mere presence of the object perceived, whether to the outward or inner sense, is not insight which belongs to the 'light of reason,' therefore Field marks it by 'purity' that is unmixed with fleshly sensations ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... orders, which they had never known what it was to dispute, they were so unwearied in their assiduities to their amiable charge, that it was not long before she began once again to exhibit the tokens of renewed perception. She raised by degrees a leaden and inexpressive eye, to the objects that were about her, without having as yet spirit and recollectedness enough to distinguish them. "My mother," cried she, "my venerable Edith, I am not well. My head is quite confused and giddy. Do press ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... useless and only a factor in the degradation, not the uplifting of a man. The boy grew to understand that from that sweet mother, even though the world called her an immoral woman, he had inherited something much more valuable to himself than the Imperial crown—the faculty of perception and balance, physical and moral, to which the family of the Emperor, his father, could lay no claim. From them, both he and his sister had inherited a stubborn, indomitable pride. You can see it, and have already remarked it, in ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... Milton's exquisite Comus in this no less exquisite pastoral Drama! and the imitation is so beautiful, that the perception of the plagiarism rather increases than diminishes the pleasure with which we read either deathless work. Republican although he were, the great poet sits a throned king upon Parnassus, privileged to cull flowers where he listeth in right of ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... reader to cast his hat to the ceiling. No mere print under bold head-lines did Abbott read, but rather the changing lights and shadows in great black eyes. It was marvelous how Fran could project past experiences upon the screen of the listener's perception. At her, "When mother died," Abbott saw the girl weeping beside the death-bed. When she sighed, "I don't belong to anybody," the school-director felt like crying, "Then belong to me!" But it was when she spoke of blowing ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... above, or he sinks below, his usual condition, and the same thing occurs in nations at large. Extreme perils sometimes quench the energy of a people instead of stimulating it; they excite without directing its passions; and instead of clearing, they confuse its powers of perception. The Jews deluged the smoking ruins of their temples with the carnage of the remnant of their host. But it is more common, both in the case of nations and in that of individuals, to find extraordinary virtues arising from the very ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... day of his visit, the heart of the merchant warmed towards the child of his only brother. Her delicate and affectionate attentions increased the interest he felt in her. That interest was not at all lessened by a distinct perception of the fact that she was fitted to adorn the magnificent parlors of his city residence. It was, therefore, his fixed purpose to take her with him on his return. Some objections, he doubted not, would be raised by his sober ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... as soon as Hermann made his appearance, Lizaveta rose from her embroidery, went into the drawing-room, opened the ventilator and threw the letter into the street, trusting that the young officer would have the perception to pick ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... magnificent, and after getting so far I longed to explore the sources of the rivers, but besides the many difficulties the day was far spent. I was also too weak for any energetic undertaking, yet I felt an intuitive perception of the passion and fascination of exploring, and understood how people could give up their lives to it. I turned away from the tufa cones and the glory of the ragged crests very sadly, to ride a tired horse through great difficulties; ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... the general importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... antics! And in all honesty, shipboard conditions became life-threatening. Hearts were pounding hideously, gearing up for futures full of incurable aneurysms. The entire crew suffered from a nervous excitement that it's beyond me to describe. Nobody ate, nobody slept. Twenty times a day some error in perception, or the optical illusions of some sailor perched in the crosstrees, would cause intolerable anguish, and this emotion, repeated twenty times over, kept us in a state of irritability so intense that a reaction ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... It does not depend on books, and it is superior to culture. It is the perception of analogy—the instinct of causation. It guides the savage through trackless forests, and the astronomer through infinite space. It makes the burnt child dread the fire, and a Darwin see in a few obvious facts the solution of a mystery. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... held, and rightly held, to be a man of intellect, less by virtue of rapid perception and flexible thought, than by virtue of a coolly observant vision of the world, incapable of being confused—a certain healthy cynicism which, though it never lost an element of good nature, might yet abash and even chill the ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... is seeing himself, his life, his world, from the viewpoint of Scarborough Square, and what he sees gives neither peace nor pride nor satisfaction. He will never see so clearly as you, perhaps, but certain cynicisms, certain intolerances, certain indifferences and endurances will yield to keener perception of the necessity for new purposes in life." He held out his hand. "He needs you very much. ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... in surprise; but his blunter perception proved less penetrative than the keen insight of the women, and he simply wondered what this rather rough looking stranger could know about it, anyhow. He expressed a hope that it might be as Mr. Gray said. For himself he hadn't much faith. But, if there wasn't something done soon, the new landlord ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... based on a sense of poetry which brought him near to Milton, Addison proved in the 'Spectator' by his eighteen Saturday papers upon 'Paradise Lost'. But it was from the religious side that he first entered into the perception of its grandeur. His sympathy with its high purpose caused him to praise, in the same pages that commended 'Paradise Lost' to his countrymen, another 'epic,' Blackmore's 'Creation', a dull metrical treatise against atheism, as a work ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... resolution, and Mr. Adams abhorred him accordingly. (p. 299) Duncan, of Cincinnati, mentioned as "delivering a dose of balderdash," is described as "the prime bully of the Kinderhook Democracy," without "perception of any moral distinction between truth and falsehood, ... a thorough-going hack-demagogue, coarse, vulgar, and impudent, with a vein of low humor exactly suited to the rabble of a popular city and equally so to the taste of the present House of Representatives." Other similar bits of that pessimism ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... qualities prophesied much of individual achievement. Yet this tendency toward individualism threatened the former social solidarity, though there was a recognition of mutual interests and a readiness to show neighborly kindness in time of stress, and a perception of the social value of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... principally combated was the idea that sympathy with the sufferings of another originated in any way in our imagining what would be our own feelings if we were in the sufferer's place. He contends, on the contrary, that it is excited directly by the perception of the screams, contortions, tears, or other outward signs of the pain that is endured; and that trying to put ourselves in the sufferer's place produces really a self-satisfaction, on account of our own immunity from his troubles, which has the effect not of awakening the feeling ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child. It was the only warship in sight, but far away to the right over the smooth surface of the sea—for that day there was a dead calm—lay a serpent of black ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... down, feeling along the ground for the foreman's hat having the extinguished lamp fixed on it. He was a long time discovering his object, yet the continued effort brought back a large measure of self-control, and gave birth to a certain clearness of perception. He held the recovered lamp in his hands, leaning against the side of the tunnel, listening. The very intensity of silence seemed to press against him from every direction as though it had weight. He was still breathing heavily, but his strained ears could not distinguish the ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish |
