"Purposeful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... group to group like a purposeful humming-bird, but did not lack the supreme gift of a hostess—that of leaving her guests reasonably alone. All the women were inclined to hover about Byrd, who, with Gunther, represented the most attractive male element. As the women were ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... this afternoon that I had no chance to thank you, but the echoes of that discharge penetrated as far as my library. Also, I have viewed the debris. What on earth did you do to poor Sterry? Watching the purposeful set of your shoulders as you strode toward the carriage house, I was filled with sudden compunction. I did not want the man murdered, merely reasoned with. I am afraid you were a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than Mr. Peter Van Degen. Mr. Popple's talk was certainly more brilliant and purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind Mrs. Lipscomb's shoulder; but she remembered how lightly he had been treated at the Fairford dinner, and she wanted—oh, how she wanted!—to have Ralph Marvell see her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... was significant, almost purposeful. She unwound the veil from her motoring turban, took it off altogether and attached it to the cushions of the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unfastened, at a good four-mile swing, she started north. In the purlieus of the university she was frequently hailed by friends of her own sex or the other. But though she waved cheerful responses to their greetings, she made her stride purposeful enough to discourage offers of company. They all seemed young to her to-day. All her student activities seemed young. As if, somehow, she had outgrown them. The feeling was none the less real after she had laughed at ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... such conscientious, intelligent, and purposeful work done for children as in the last ten years; and if an overwhelming flood of trash has been poured into our laps along with the better things, we must accept the inevitable. The legends, myths, and fables of the world, as well as its ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Massachusetts were of the sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... really cares about; still more, if he fails in the economical administration of the funds allowed for the building, will he fail in that which the owner most cares about. Less beauty, less success in producing a novel, an original, a thoughtful, a purposeful design will hurt him but little, but insufficient care as to the circulation of hot-water will ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... voice or sound, but he means by it the entire range of intelligent expression through tone and melody, music and speech, everything in the world, in fact, that gives joy and beauty through purposeful utterance. He even widens his category of "sound" to include colours and smells and tastes, in short, all the sense-qualities by which the world gets revealed in its richness of beauty and harmony to our perception. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... susceptibility, a minimum acuteness, false constructiveness, untrained capacity for inference; in the same way, again, the most cruel hardness depends on properties which, taken in themselves, are good: determination, energy, purposeful action, clear conception of one's fellows, healthy egotism, etc. Every man is the result of his nature and nurture, i. e. of countless individual conditions, and every one of his expressions, again, is the result ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... impression of it. For Diana's face had come curiously near the expression on the face of her own little child. Innocent, tender, pure,—something like that. Grave, but with no clouds at all; strong and purposeful, yet with an utter absence of self-will or self-consciousness. It had always been, to a certain degree, innocent and pure, but that was negative; and this was positive,—the refined gold that had ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... exhibition] is a display of purposeful portraiture that helps one to realise the effect which Theotokopoulos produced upon his watchful contemporaries, and to understand why the Cretan continued to walk alone on his way. If some insist on finding modern El Greco versions of Inspectors and Inquisitors-general in this John gathering, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... laughed, disclosing greenish teeth. "Of a sort... Perhaps high priest would be nearer the truth. There's a certain purposeful cruelty about that term which appeals to me. I'm a bit of a fanatic, you know... But I like to get my recruits when they're bleeding raw. I like them when the salt of truth can sting deep... Wounds heal so quickly ... so ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the scientist, the minister and the reformer, were all combined in this one purposeful man. The people believed him to be a wizard, and even credited him with power to raise the dead. Heathen, sick and curious, crowded about his wagon, but not an article was stolen. One day the chief ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... grapes, some six persons were scatteringly grouped in and about the narrow road near the March residence. One was Garnet, one was Ravenel, two others John and his father, and two were strangers in Dixie. One of these was a very refined-looking man, gray, slender, and with a reticent, purposeful mouth. His traveling suit was too warm for the latitude, and his silk hat slightly neglected. The other was fat and large, and stayed in the carryall in which Garnet had driven them up from Rosemont. He was of looser ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... to speak when a grasshopper went by like an airplane, zooming in a twenty-foot leap. A bee sagged along heavily in an irregular zig-zag, and a caterpillar, more agile and purposeful than any caterpillar they had ever seen, staggered swiftly across ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... second ball with the same purposeful air, and Walton swept at it as before. There was a click, and Jimmy Silver, who was keeping wicket, took the ball comfortably on a level with ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... rules and it has power. The club has put its rules into form and it knows what it can do and what it wants to do. In other words, the gang is a casual, random group that drifts about in the village or in the city, subject to every passing influence, whereas the club is a deliberate, purposeful organization with definite aims and developments. Both meet the needs of the growing boy for association; both give the social instincts and ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... had each in turn fallen short of complete success. We have now to consider a series of plays, less distinguished on the whole, though varying greatly in individual merit, which, amid the luxuriant growth of the romantic drama, tended, in a more spontaneous and less purposeful manner, towards the creation of something of a pastoral tradition. We shall find in these plays a considerable traditional influence, a groundwork, as it were, borrowed from the Arcadian drama of Italy, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... two other dots, larger and more clearly defined as horsemen. From mere objects that stood higher than any animal and moved with a purposeful directness, they presently became men who rode with the easy swing of habit which has become a second nature. They must have seen her sitting still upon her horse in the midst of that high, sunny plateau, for they turned and rode up the ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... and places became visualized as Joan spoke. Sylvia Reed with her strong, purposeful face and eyes of a young prophet; the new nest of genius where the brave creature, believing in herself, waited for another in whom she trusted and for whom she held a deep-founded affection. Doris felt her way in silence—relinquishing, loving, fearing, ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... and Kosnovia is already becoming a myth in my mind. I am rejoicing in my new name, Alexander Talbot. I hope you like it. My mother tells me that my father was one of the strong men of the West. I am called after him, it seems, and although my own name sounds strange to me I like the purposeful ring ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... disappear with age, until a man is left with few or none. But it seems to me that enthusiasm, if real, should not die out, and leave cynicism behind, but rather should become stronger and more purposeful with age. The young children coming straight out of the heaven-world have brought with them a feeling of unity, and this feeling should be strengthened in them, so that it may last on through life. Anger and irritability ...
— Education as Service • J. Krishnamurti
... When you have a positive life-purpose, your tone of mind shall be dominant and positive and your thoughts shall match. All-strength shall come to you. Bad health, fear, worry and the whole array of disintegrating forces are set into active motion by a purposeless life. The Purposeful Man has no time to bother about them. Understand clearly, spirituality is not laziness, whatever else ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... process—cell-multiplication—may be induced to go on and on, blindly, aimlessly, for an almost indefinite time. The cells multiply, but they do not organize themselves into a constructive community and build an organ or any purposeful part. They may be likened to a lot of blind masons piling up brick and mortar without any architect to direct their work or furnish them a plan. A living body of the higher type is not merely an association of cells; it is an association ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... empty optimism that moves me to a strong hope in the coming year. We can, if we will, make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress. Beyond the material recovery, I sense a spiritual recovery as well. The people of America are turning as never before to those permanent values that are not limited to the physical objectives of life. There are growing signs of this ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
