"Contemplative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consequence. With an insatiable thirst for knowledge, I trifled away the years of improvement; with a restless desire of seeing different countries, I have always resided in the same city; with the highest expectation of connubial felicity, I have lived unmarried; and with an unalterable resolution of contemplative retirement, I am going to die within ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... those Wei figures which the Museum had lately the chance of acquiring at a very moderate price, and you will feel the difference between form that impresses by sheer aesthetic rightness and form that reminds you of the late Sir Henry Irving. With all its elaborate quietness, this deep-contemplative Lohan is just a piece of rhetoric: put it beside something first-rate and you will know what to think of it as surely as you know what to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... National lounged in his chair half an hour longer, and then he lit a mild cigar, and went over to Tom Merwin's house. Merwin, a ranchman in brown duck, with a contemplative eye, sat with his feet upon a table, plaiting ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... followed Janet Caird's association with Maggie she felt this truth, though she did not define the feeling to herself. She only realized the comfort of withdrawing from the fretful presence of her aunt to the contemplative, passionless serenity of the Word of God. But even this was an offence. "What are you doing at a', Maggie?" was the certain inquiry if she went to the quiet of her ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... contemplative. She, too, was young. Ardor appealed to her. Life stood before her, beckoning, as to me. What could the girl do ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... principles of revealed religion; a religion which enjoins patience and humility, as well as encourages the spirit of liberty and progress. But whatever may have been their blunders and crimes, and however marked the providence of God in overruling them for the ultimate good of Europe, still, all contemplative men behold in the Revolution the retributive justice of the Almighty, in humiliating a proud family of princes, and punishing a vain and oppressive nobility for the evils they had inflicted ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... concerns grew more and more distasteful to Ximenes, whose naturally austere and contemplative disposition had been deepened, probably, by the melancholy incidents of his life, into stern religious enthusiasm. He determined, therefore, to break at once from the shackles which bound him to the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... though he spoke calmly. His face had resumed its habitual warm pallor. His clear-cut features, something too sharply defined for absolute regularity, with the unassertive effect of his straight auburn hair, his deliberate, contemplative glance, his reserved, high-bred look, the quiet decorum of his manner, were not suggestive of the tumult of his inner consciousness, and the unresponsiveness of his aspect baffled Briscoe. With some inapposite, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... presence of a creation, we recognize perfect harmony (which goes beyond perfect proportion); if the work call forth in us that contemplative ecstasy which gives us the impression and, as it were, the vision of pure beauty, shall we ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... oft-quoted poetry Pope has declared that with words the same rule holds that applies to fashion,—"Alike fantastic if too new or old." Fashion changes, not only the fashions of millinery but of literature also. When the world is tired of the brilliant wit of Byron, it turns in relief to the contemplative verse of Wordsworth; when Longfellow and Tennyson have had their artistic day and a thousand imitators have ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... The valley, a sheer three thousand feet below, is thinly enough populated, though a great river and the line of railway from Manresa to Barcelona run through it. So clear is the atmosphere that at the great distance the contemplative denizens of the monastery may count the number of the railway carriages, while no sound of the train, or indeed of any life in the valley, ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... the others, and the party broke up. A little later Florent returned to Lebigre's, and indeed he became quite attached to the "cabinet," finding a seductive charm in Robine's contemplative silence, Logre's fiery outbursts, and Charvet's cool venom. When he went home, he did not at once retire to bed. He had grown very fond of his attic, that girlish bedroom, where Augustine had left scraps of ribbons, souvenirs, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... amiable young woman, whom he had married for love, and who was quickly followed to the grave by an only child, had also served, even after the lapse of many years, to soften a disposition naturally mild and contemplative. His feelings on the present occasion were therefore likely to differ from those of the severe disciplinarian, strict magistrate, and distrustful ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his bone with the honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more melancholy than mirthful. When you come home you sit down in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perhaps sufficient to discompose a landman's stomach, would not affect that of a sailor, who would probably testify under oath, that the water was "just as smooth as a mill-pond." The pelican, that grave and contemplative bird, sat on the rocks near the water's edge, with his neck coiled up and stowed away in some recess in his capacious crop, the fish forgetting, or sailed on lazy wings across the bay, to seek some sequestered spot to doze ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement. In his dark eyes and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the fulness of contemplative thought—the mind not searching, but beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... all that live Spiritless shapes of nations; though time wait In vain on hope till these have help to give, And faith and love crawl famished from the gate; Canst thou sit shamed and self-contemplative With soulless eyes on thy secluded fate? Though time forgive them, thee shall he forgive, Whose choice was in thine hand to be so great? Who cast out of thy mind The passion of man's kind, And made thee and thine old name separate? Now when time looks to see New names and old and ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... they think) scorn to delight, so much they be content little to move, saving wrangling whether "virtus" be the chief or the only good; whether the contemplative or the active life do excel; which Plato and Boetius well knew; and therefore made mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school- name, and know no other good but "indulgere ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... for himself, was not learned enough or contemplative enough to be troubled with presages of evil afar off, and, having no mental spectacles to assist his vision in this respect, saw nothing but the dull house, which jarred uncomfortably upon his previous thoughts. So, almost wishing that he had not passed it, though hardly knowing why, he ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Escot. I have danced, contrary to my system, as I have done many other things since I have been here, from a motive that you will easily guess. (Mr Jenkison smiled.) I have great objections to dancing. The wild and original man is a calm and contemplative animal. The stings of natural appetite alone rouse him to action. He satisfies his hunger with roots and fruits, unvitiated by the malignant adhibition of fire, and all its diabolical processes of elixion and assation; he slakes his thirst in the mountain-stream, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... practical life is also dependent on Plato's. In the Tenth Book of the Ethics he puts the claims of the Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether he seems far ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... water. Even the Child, usually as restless as the dragonflies themselves or those exponents of perpetual motion, the brown water skippers, was lying on his back, quite still, and staring up with round, contemplative blue eyes through the diaphanous green of the ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect;—for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this Divine Philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the desert; [5] and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which had been instituted by the Essenians, in Palestine and Egypt. The philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary people, who dwelt among the palm-trees near the Dead Sea; who subsisted without money, who were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the way in which the angels trust to their wings, very characteristic of a period of bold and simple conception. Modern science has taught us that a wing cannot be anatomically joined to a shoulder; and in proportion as painters approach more and more to the scientific, as distinguished from the contemplative state of mind, they put the wings of their angels on more timidly, and dwell with greater emphasis upon the human form, and with less upon the wings, until these last become a species of decorative appendage,—a mere sign of an angel. But in Giotto's time an ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... barbarity. At Granada, under the reign of the fierce father of Boabdil,—"that king with the tiger heart,"—the Jews had been literally placed without the pale of humanity; and even under the mild and contemplative Boabdil himself, they had been plundered without mercy, and, if suspected of secreting their treasures, massacred without scruple; the wants of the state continued their unrelenting accusers,—their wealth, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... compared with the Vita Nuova. It is more important to the understanding of Dante as a poet than any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... ideal of a contemplative life which had hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour. Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill repute and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Riddhi, himself entered on the calm flowings of thought, the gate of the true law of eternal life. Leaving his kingly estate and country, lost in meditation, he drank sweet dew. Practising his religious duties in solitude, silent and contemplative he dwelt in his palace, a royal Rishi. Tathagata following a peaceable life, recognized fully by his tribe, repeating the joyful news of religion, gladdened the hearts of all his kinsmen hearing him. And now, it being the right time for ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... of the symbol, it is absurd to suppose that the "ten years' thirst" which the sight of her relieves, "the eyes whence Love once took his weapons," and such-like expressions were intended primarily as references to a neglected study of theology or a previous devotion to a contemplative life. The omission, therefore, of the commentators who interested themselves mainly in the allegory to tell us about the real Beatrice cannot be used as ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... the Elegy was composed were well adapted to soothe and cherish that contemplative sadness which, when the wounds of grief are healing, it is a luxury to indulge, and that the poet did indulge them is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... most across t' Straits. Well, sir, t' wind veered round all of a sudden, just as us was abeam of t' Devil's Table, and t' Gulf ice came out of t' Straits fair roaring"—and Uncle Rube took another contemplative puff ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... them was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him—he so calm and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was standing in the contemplative attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose, and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney. He said now there was a state of things ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... inhabitants, 1 nun to every 1695, 1 priest to every 214. In spite of the vast resources of the Church, the parish priest in 2540 villages received a stipend of less than L20 per year. Not only radicals but many moderate politicians were of opinion that the great number of convents of the contemplative orders formed an actual evil from the fact of their encouraging able-bodied idleness, and the withdrawal of so considerable a fraction of the population from the work and duties of citizenship. In the autumn of 1854, before the Crimean War was thought of, Rattazzi framed a bill by which the ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... trace in these simple words the shadow of all religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit. Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St. Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the followers of Buddhism in ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... first I was not much alarmed. Colden, it is true, was not a faultless or steadfast character. No gross or enormous vices were ascribed to him. His habits, as far as appearances enabled one to judge, were temperate and chaste. He was contemplative and bookish, and was vaguely described as ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Jared Birkdale, with a contemplative eye, looked at his daughter through the haze of his tobacco smoke as if seeing her for the first time. In a way this was so. He was not one to take heed of time or happenings. When he was not obliged to work, he was enjoying himself ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... personal) too often beclouds that power of inner vision which so unerringly penetrates to the inherent truths of incorporeity and the extramundane. Yet this problem, to your eyes, I fear, not essentially novel or peculiarly involute, holds for my contemplative faculties an extraordinary fascination, to wit: wherein does the mind, in itself a muscle, escape from the laws of the physical, and wherein and wherefore do the laws of the physical exercise so inexorable a jurisdiction over the processes of the mind, so that a ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... all this was self-interest," was my pale-visaged and contemplative friend's reply. "But I always regarded M. Helvetius in the light of a well-trained baboon, who thought, when men stared at his tricks, they were admiring his talents. The truth is, that self-interest is the mere creature of society, and is the most active in the basest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... stem of his pipe between his teeth, and again lapsed into a contemplative mood. After a moment he broke ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... by demanding exemplary damages as "the recompense you can award my client. And for these damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of her ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... impression on her heart; and as her soul received each new religious idea, it was cherished and meditated on; so that she gathered materials enough out of these simple elements to build up a life of the highest contemplative prayer. Among all the biographies of the saints which have been preserved to us, there are few which so vividly illustrate the growth of a profound and supernatural devotion in the heart of an uneducated child as that before us. Nor will it be thought that the extreme ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... living on board a little boat for a month at a time without more than three or four nights of usual repose, was to bring the mind and body into a curious condition of subdued life, a sort of contemplative oriental placid state in which both cares and pleasures ceased to be acute, and the flight of time seemed gliding and even, and not marked by the distinct epochs which define our civilised life. Although this passive enjoyment was really ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he had thought, so still sat the contemplative mountaineer, so alluring were the details of the landscape. The enthusiasm of the amateur is always a more urgent motive power than the restrained and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the moment that a noisy acclamation had greeted the rising of the sun, the images of the gods were exposed to the silent adoration of the initiates.[69] Egypt is the country whence contemplative devotion penetrated into Europe. Then, in the afternoon, a second service was held to close ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... resonance to his first notable poem, "War-Song for the Scanian Reserves" (1808). There was a charming, frank ferocity in this patriotic bugle-blast which found an echo in every Swedish heart. The rapid dactylic metres, with the captivating rhymes, alternating with the more contemplative trochees, were admirably adapted for conveying the ebullient indignation and wrath which hurls its gauntlet into the face of fate itself,[28] checked, as it were, and cooled by soberer reflection and retrospective ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... death.[126] Antoninus called Papinianus, who had been long a gallant courtier, to be cut in pieces with his soldiers' swords.[127] Yet they would both have renounced their power, yea Seneca endeavoured to deliver up his riches also to Nero, and to give himself to a contemplative life. But their very greatness drawing them to their destruction, neither of them could compass that which they desired. Wherefore what power is this that the possessors fear, which when thou wilt have, thou art not secure, and when thou wilt ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... cloystered place of ours Is but newe reared; the founder, hee still lyves, A souldier once and eminent in the feild, And after many battayles nowe retyrd In peace to lyve a lyff contemplative. Mongst many other charitable deedes, Unto religion hee hathe vowed this howse, Next to his owne fayre mantion that adjoynes And parted only by a slender wall. Who knwes but that hee neighboring us so neare And havinge doone this unto pious ends, May carry over ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... conversation the meal was pleasantly despatched. The turn of Dick and Mick followed thereon. Dick, the property of Aunt Judith, was a canary of thoughtful temperament. The part he played in the domestic economy of the small household was a contemplative rather than an active one. Mick, Aunt Hester's bird, was of a more lively nature. He had, as a rule, something to say ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... knowest that, as the Platonic ideas are divided into three species, of which one tends to the contemplative or speculative life, one to active morality, and the third to the idle and voluptuous, so are there three species of love, of which one raises itself from the contemplation of bodily form to the consideration of the spiritual and divine; the other only continues in the delight ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... first taken hold of the most active and important part, and if I may be allowed to call it, the heart of this body, from thence was on one side by a quick passage, and in its more refined parts, communicated through the blood to the contemplative, and reasoning, the head, which it inspired with noble thoughts and resolutions; and on the other, to the inferior extremities, which were thereby rendered more expedite and readier to obey the dictates ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... years, but strong and healthy. His extreme corpulency, his hilarity, the interest he took in battles and sieges, ill accorded with the ideas we form in northern countries of the melancholy reveries and the contemplative life of missionaries. Though extremely busy about a cow which was to be killed next day, the old monk received us with kindness, and permitted us to hang up our hammocks in a gallery of his house. Seated, without doing anything, the greater part of the day, in an armchair of red wood, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... though he was connected with almost every prominent transaction of the times, yet he was not a true leader of the revolutionary movement. He was easily the most illustrious man in America, and, since the death of Jonathan Edwards, the most intellectual; but his mind was inquisitive and contemplative rather than aggressive, and rougher hands were now needed at the helm. He acted as postmaster for the colonies, and served on many committees. So, for instance, he went with John Adams and Edward Rutledge to confer with Lord Howe on Staten ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... that this occupation was proof of a reflective and contemplative organization, and he had brought him away without any other recommendation. The noble carriage of this gentleman, for whom he believed himself to be engaged, had won Planchet—that was the name of the Picard. He felt a slight disappointment, however, when he saw that this ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... counterpoised by so little body, incline the spectator to look upon them as ornithological caricatures. After balancing himself upon one foot for an hour, with the other drawn up close to his scanty robe of feathers, and his head poised in a most contemplative attitude, one of these queer birds will suddenly turn a somersault, and, returning to his previous posture, continue his cogitations as though nothing had interrupted his reflections. With wings spread, they slowly winnow the air, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... 'Keezleton road, six-and-twenty miles.' 'You seem to have no stragglers.' 'Never allow straggling.' 'You must teach my people; they straggle badly.' A bow in reply. Just then my Creoles started their band for a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, 'Thoughtless fellows for serious work' came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gaiety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... was tall, shapely, and extremely pretty, with as sweet and even a temper as one could possibly imagine, which eminently fitted her for dreamy, contemplative love-making, such as one reads of in idyls and romances. She would willingly have spent her life in. contemplating the King,—in loving and adoring him without ever opening her mouth; and to her, the sweet silence of a tete-a-tete seemed preferable to any conversation ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... that St. Brendan's legend, with such qualities in prose and verse, made itself at home in many lands and languages, and became for centuries a widespread popular favorite and matter of general belief, also influencing the most permanent literature of a high contemplative cast, which we might suppose to be out of touch with it altogether. Certain of its more unusual incidents are found even in Arab writings of romance founded on fact, as in Edrisi's narrative of the Magrurin explorers of Lisbon and the adventures of Sinbad ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... what fits it to be at once the great support and the great control of government, what makes it of such admirable service to that monarchy which, if it limits, it secures and strengthens, would require a long discourse, belonging to the leisure of a contemplative man, not to one whose duty it is to join in communicating practically to the people the blessings of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which Dr. Johnson calls happiness. Its adaptations in religion, in statesmanship, in legislative and judicial inquiry, are productive of noble and beneficent results. History shows us, that while it has given to the individual man, in all ages, contemplative habits, and high moral tone, it has thus also been a powerful instrument in producing the brilliant civilization of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... interest to us. Those who run have time to remark only the great central picture in a hanging; but, to those who live with it, this added line of exquisite panorama is an unceasing delight for the contemplative hours of solitude. From this rich departure from Gothic simplicity the artists grew into the same fulness of design that ended in decadence. The border became almost obnoxious in its inflated importance and ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... and sacred office whereby the nun became the mystic bride of the Church, and it was no uncommon thing for the sisters, when racked and tortured by the temptations of the world, to fall into these ecstatic contemplative moods wherein they became possessed with powers beyond those of earth. In that age of quite universal ignorance, it is not to be wondered at that the emotional spirit was too strongly developed in all religious observances, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and patient observation of Nature is the secret of his power as a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him. Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study. An insect crawling on a leaf,—a bit of grass bringing the joy of its short life around the stones of the pavement,—a cloud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... pastoral note of the Somersby brooks and flowery hollows, no one can doubt who knows Tennyson's poetry. He had little love for the hardier sports of boys, but was not a retiring child either, nor over-contemplative, although he was described by one of the old Northern Farmers he has immortalized, as a boy who would "sit for hours on a gate gawmin about him!" But this indolence was a trait that he had in common ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency which carries a man toward the contemplative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical sense—the tendency which, in the realm of action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, "droit au defaut," and makes him conscious at once of the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an action. It is another ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reconstruction. And he struck the key-note in such admirable passages as this: "One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence. The universe is dumb; the darkness and silence of the night take possession of it.... It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... little of Schopenhauer's passive and contemplative receptivity here! Rather a mingling of being ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... cast by our author upon the validity of "the principle of the Unconditioned or the Infinite." "Supposing it were conceded that some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds, by what means could they have demonstrated to themselves that he is eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings infinite, objects of sense and objects ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... is, that there is in mountain-fishing an element of excitement: an element which is wholesome enough at times for every one; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up in London air and London work; but which takes away from the angler's most delicate enjoyment, that dreamy contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement to keep his body active, while his mind is quietly taking in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months' prison. The countryman, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately presented itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Augusta frequently, and to see some part, at least, of the letters which she was to write to her brother; he might also hope to be remembered in these letters as her "good friend and tutor;" and to these consolations his quiet, contemplative, and yet enthusiastic disposition, clung as to a secret source of pleasure, the only one which life seemed to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... victim's title or parentage. "Tis a passing fair wench!' said he, with a chuckle.. 'That is all I know concerning her ... a passing fair wench!' Ah!" and Zibya rolled up the whites of his eyes and sighed in a comically contemplative manner.. "If ever a Flamen deserved expulsion from his office, it is surely yon ancient, crafty, carnal-minded soul! ... so keen a glance for a woman's beauty is not a needful qualification for a servant of the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... in the world would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did so ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... is the most delectable," he wrote on another occasion to the same friend. "It is honorable, it is amusing, and, with judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... animate creation on the earth, or in the air, or in the water, pass you unnoticed; especially those which are distinguished for their picturesque beauty, or remarkable for dignity of form or elegance of colour. Fix them distinctly in your sketch-book and in your memory. Observe, with the same contemplative eye, the landscape, the appearance of trees, figures dispersed around, and their aerial distance, as well as lineal forms. In this class of observations, omit not to observe the light and shade, in consequence of the sun's rays being intercepted by ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... went abroad, was to divert myself by seeing the wondrous variety of prospects, beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, with which God has been pleased to enrich the several parts of this globe; a variety which, as it must give great pleasure to a contemplative beholder, so doth it admirably display the power, and wisdom, and goodness of the Creator. Indeed, to say the truth, there is but one work in his whole creation that doth him any dishonour, and with that I have long ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... ignorant and prejudiced writers that the Indian had no religion excepting what they are pleased to call the meaning less mummeries of the medicine man. This is the very reverse of the truth. The Indian is essentially religious and contemplative, and it might almost be said that every act of his life is regulated and determined by his religious belief. It matters not that some may call this superstition. The difference is only relative. The religion of to-day has developed from the cruder superstitions of yesterday, and Christianity ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... his patients; and, when Izaak Walton was not in his house in Clerkenwell (to which neighbourhood he seems to have removed after giving up his shop in Chancery Lane), he was away on some fishing ramble. His Complete Angler, or The Contemplative Man's Recreation had appeared in May 1653, and a second edition of it was ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... moment Lee sat still, his cigarette unlighted, his broad black hat far back upon his close-cropped hair, his eyes serenely contemplative upon the pink of the sky above the pines. Then he slipped from his place and, though each single movement gave an impression of great leisureliness, it was but a flash of time until he stood ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... these things more readily than Agatha did, for her spirits were lighter. Not that Agatha was unhappy, or inattentive to her father; but she was quieter than Marie and of a more contemplative mood. She also had dark hair, but it was a dark brown, and she wore it braided close to her forehead. Her complexion was clear and bright, her forehead was white, and the colour in her cheeks, when she had colour there, was that of the ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... the Reverend Teacher. Father he hight and he was in the parish; a Christianly plainness Clothed from his head to his feet the old man of seventy winters. Friendly was he to behold, and glad as the heralding angel Walked he among the crowds, but still a contemplative grandeur Lay on his forehead as clear as on moss-covered gravestone a sunbeam. As in his inspiration (an evening twilight that faintly Gleams in the human soul, even now, from the day of creation) Th' Artist, the friend of heaven, imagines Saint John when in Patmos, Gray, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... stenographer with an impatient and powerful wave of the hand—as though brushing the man bodily out of the room. Remaining motionless until the door had closed, Mr. Flint turned abruptly and fixed his eyes on the contemplative figure of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... or a moment's loss of poise. But it seemed too much like a Banquo at the feast to go on with our banjo-strumming, and I attempted to bridge the hiatus by none too gracefully inquiring how things were getting along over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie's contemplative eye, I noticed, searched my face to see if there were any secondary significances to that ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... irrational. She was lustrous with lovable qualities, which he genially recognized and appreciated; nay, he might love her, but the love would be a quasi-paternal one, not the love that demands absolute possession and brooks no rivalry. His attitude was contemplative and beneficent, not selfish and exclusive. His greatest pleasure would be to see her married to some one worthy of her. Meantime he might devote himself to her freely ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... the enterprise conducted with a view directly to the most economical and effective use of the means at hand for the initial, material end of the foundation. All concerned, whether their interest is immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only, agree that some considerable share of the expenditure should go to the higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this only goes to say that the canons of emulative and ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... read. As he scanned the copies of directives, reports, operations logs, and procedures the process became automatic, and part of his consciousness turned contemplative. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living Art.' 'What is the end of study? let ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the community and enter a contemplative order. She did not think I should be able to help ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... slavery only amongst the Therapeuts, a communistic association amongst the Jews in the last century before Christ. They were ascetics, each of whom lived in a cell. We first hear of them through Philo Judaeus (The Contemplative Life) about the time of the birth of Christ. They had no slaves. They regarded slavery as absolutely contrary to nature. Nature produced all in a state of freedom, but the greed of some had vested some with power over others.[832] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... this fascinating ruin, which has the best preserved stage of any Greek theatre now in existence. From the top of the hill is one of the most magnificent views in Sicily, and here our travellers sat in contemplative awe until Uncle John declared it was time to return to their hotel ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... at the piano may be said to breathe his phrases. A phrase that is purely contemplative in character is breathed in a tranquil fashion without any suggestion of nervous agitation. If we go through the scale of expression, starting with contemplative tranquillity, to the climax of dramatic intensity, the breath will be emitted progressively ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... mind, they are mapped with an accuracy perfectly astonishing to the uninitiated in the countless indications of nature, of which the eye of man becomes so keenly observant when thrown constantly into her fascinating society. Let a man of a vigorous health, active frame, and contemplative mind once enter, even for a short time, upon the enjoyments of sporting, wild and varied as are those of Le Morvan, it would be difficult to withdraw him from its delights, and persuade him that it is in any way desirable to return to the crowded haunts of men, and condemn ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... theatre, man the chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured hue, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... to Midian march'd adown the hills." Thus near one border coasting, still we heard The sins of gluttony, with woe erewhile Reguerdon'd. Then along the lonely path, Once more at large, full thousand paces on We travel'd, each contemplative and mute. "Why pensive journey thus ye three alone?" Thus suddenly a voice exclaim'd: whereat I shook, as doth a scar'd and paltry beast; Then rais'd my head to look from whence it came. Was ne'er, in furnace, glass, or metal seen So bright and glowing red, as was the shape ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... He was, in turn, a sacristan, a juggler, an apothecary's assistant, and a cicerone, and he got tired of all these callings. Begging was, to his mind, too hard work, and it was more trouble to be a thief than to be an honest man. Finally he decided in favour of contemplative philosophy. He had a passionate preference for the horizontal position, and found the greatest pleasure in the world in watching the shooting of stars. Unfortunately, in the course of his meditations this deserving man came near to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... "faithfully done into the English tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight. Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage "the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort, because God Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the person, the spring and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... asked how many shares of the Communal land he will take, and replies in a slow, contemplative way, "I have two sons, and there is myself, so I'll take three shares, or somewhat less, if it ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... from Memory's tablet, upon this little map, but enough, perchance, to lead the contemplative mind to reflect upon the vicissitudes and changes of its little day, and teach us to prepare for a better ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... sufficiently un- derstood for that. The student of this Science who under- stands it best, is the one least likely to pour into other [10] minds a trifling sense of it as being adequate to make safe and successful practitioners. The simple sense one gains of this Science through careful, unbiased, contemplative reading of my books, is far more advantageous to the sick and to the learner than is or can be the spurious [15] teaching of those who are spiritually unqualified. The sad fact at this early writing ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit, have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the morning. Its literary ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... This convent is a red-brick building with a small chapel attached, erected in 1880 by some French Sisters who had come to London in 1865, and settled at Fulham in 1867 in a house near the site of the present convent. There are eleven nuns, of whom three are lay Sisters. They are devoted to the contemplative life. Just opposite is a large brewery, established 1867. At the east end of Eustace Road is a small brick Wesleyan chapel, hidden away in a corner, which deserves a word of mention, as it is a German chapel and the services ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... little in harmony with Anaxagoras's wisdom; if, indeed, it be true that he, by a kind of divine impulse and greatness of spirit, voluntarily quitted his house, and left his land to lie fallow and to be grazed by sheep like a common. But the life of a contemplative philosopher and that of an active statesman are, I presume, not the same thing; for the one merely employs, upon great and good objects of thought, an intelligence that requires no aid of instruments nor supply of any external materials; whereas the other, who tempers and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... undisciplined fancies in the ordered chamber of his brain. The worst of it was she saw and knew just what she was doing. She was aware before he was, and she made him aware, her face turned to look at him, on her lips a mocking, contemplative smile that was almost a superior sneer. It was this that shocked him into consciousness of the orgy his imagination had been playing him. From the wall above her, the stiff portraits of Isaac and Eliza Travers looked down like reproachful spectres. Infuriated, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... passionate whisper, as if overpowered by the intensity of his contemplative rapture, his anger with the ravening wolves, and his desire to be with those other men, whose souls aspired toward the salvation of the world. Sergei was taken aback. He remained quiet for some time, open-mouthed, holding ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, and Wagner had become a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna — perhaps the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... rushed off, leaving the three elder girls and Dr. Rylance standing in the hall, listlessly contemplative of Sir Tristram's dinted breast-plate, hacked by Roundhead pikes ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... bewildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of destiny itself. He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic lurking somewhere in the results of chance. He thought he had seen its very form. His head swam; his limbs ached; he puffed at his pipe mechanically; a contemplative stupor would soothe the fretfulness of his temper, like the passive bodily quietude procured by a drug, while the intellect remains tensely on the stretch. Nine, nine, aught, four, two. He made a note. The next winning number of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... it to pass that many of the Saints were so perfect, so contemplative of Divine things? Because they steadfastly sought to mortify themselves from all worldly desires, and so were enabled to cling with their whole heart to God, and be free and at leisure for the thought of Him. We are too much occupied with our own affections, and too anxious ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes, but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. This road to the Andes is a paradise to the contemplative man. "There is something in a tropical forest (says Bates) akin to the ocean in its effects on the mind. Man feels so completely his insignificance, and the vastness of nature." The German traveler Burmeister ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... it is a perception or an idea; at another time it perceives a connection, and it is a judgment; at yet another, it perceives connections between connections, and it is an act of reason. But however subtle the object it contemplates may become, it does not depart from its contemplative attitude, and cognition is but ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... upon a serious contemplation of the great attribute of God, his mercy; and did a little cherish it in myself, because I found therein no malice, and a ready weight to sway me from the other extreme of despair, whereunto melancholy and contemplative natures are too easily disposed. A third there is, which I did never positively maintain or practise, but have often wished it had been consonant to truth, and not offensive to my religion; and that is, the prayer for the dead; whereunto I was inclined ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... a man to rule society with dignity; Mr. Watt, to lead the contemplative life of a deeply introverted and patiently observant philosopher. He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward, or leaning on his hand in meditation; his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in; his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... Caesars—stately busts in marble—ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood: ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... a place for eugenics in every type of religion. In practice, it will probably make an impression only on the dynamic religions,—those that are actually accomplishing something. Buddhism, for example, is perhaps too contemplative to do anything. But Christianity, above any other, would seem to be the natural ally of the eugenist. Christianity itself is undergoing a rapid change in ideals at present, and it seems impossible ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Lilith, it is told (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, And her enchanted hair was the first gold. And still she sits, young while the earth is old, And, subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, Till heart and body and life are in its hold. The rose and poppy are her flowers: for where Is he not found, O Lilith! whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... visited Doveton for no other reason than that he had lived there, to find it one of the most charming of the numerous pretty villages in the vale. I looked for the cottage in which he had lived and thought it as perfect a home as a quiet, contemplative man who loved nature could have had: a small, thatched cottage, very old looking, perhaps inconvenient to live in, but situated in the prettiest spot, away from other houses, near and within sight of the old church with old elms and beech-trees growing close to it, and the land about it ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... distinguished strangers visiting the city. At one of the reunions of the club the place of meeting was at Chancellor Kent's. On assembling the chancellor introduced to us Louis Napoleon, a son of the ex-King of Holland, a young man pale and contemplative, somewhat reserved. This reserve we generally attributed to a supposed imperfect acquaintance with our language. At supper he sat on the right of the Chancellor at the head of the table. Mr. Gallatin was opposite the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... there was no one here. My dear Miss Wilder, you look contemplative; but I fancy it wouldn't do to ask the subject of your meditations, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... red sea of clover, and the hyacinths nodding on the banks of the silvery stream. The smell of the hay and the song of the birds and the life of the fields were her ceaseless satisfaction and refreshment. Perhaps, as she wandered about those winding lanes and lonely bridle-paths, she became too contemplative, too introspective, too much addicted to the analysis of frames and feelings. Perhaps, dwelling so exclusively on the abstract and the ideal, her fresh young spirit became unfitted for its rude impact ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... woman lighted another cigarette and blew a contemplative whiff toward the crystal: "No: at best the game is a crooked one, even for the few who have really ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... Plato's notion, this was really a political artifice, with a view to conceal their pre-eminent wisdom. With the jealousy of a petty state, they attempted to confine their renowned sagacity within themselves, and under their military to hide their contemplative character! The philosopher assures those who in other cities imagined they laconised, merely by imitating the severe exercises and the other warlike manners of the Lacedaemonians, that they were grossly deceived; and thus curiously describes ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a contemplative mind," replied the gentleman, resolving that the young lady should not ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... served in the living room, and through the fragrant smoke of Pennington's fifty-cent perfectos a sprightly three-cornered conversation continued for an hour. Then the Colonel, secretly enraged at the calm, mocking, contemplative glances which Bryce ever and anon bestowed upon him, and unable longer to convince himself that he was too apprehensive—that this cool young man knew nothing and would do nothing even if he knew something—rose, pleaded the necessity for looking ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... straggling village of many dogs and swarthy, grimy-faced children, he tarried until well after dark, making his meal of coffee, frijoles, and chili con carne, thereafter smoking a contemplative pipe. Abandoning the little lunch-room to the flies and silence he crossed the road to the saloon kept by Pete Nunez, the brother of the man whom it was Norton's present business to make answer for a crime committed. Pete, a law-abiding citizen nowadays, principally for the reason that he ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... his writings the careful reader will come across pleasant references to foreign manners and customs, betokening the keen humorous observer, and the possession of that wide-eyed faculty that takes a pleasure, half contemplative, half the result of animal spirits, in watching the way of the world wherever you may chance to be. Of another and an earlier traveller, Sir Henry Wotton, we read ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... day in Ultima Thule—they were rare—was an occasion for thankfulness and rejoicing. Directly after luncheon the members of Gunroom and Wardroom made their way on deck to bask in the sun and smoke contemplative post-prandial pipes in the lee of the after superstructure. Forward, in amidships, the band was playing a slow waltz and fifty or so couples from among the ship's company were solemnly revolving to the music with expressions of melancholy ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... joys to the contemplative mind. A slow procession of white ducks, walking delicately, with heads lifted high and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an ecclesiastical procession. The singers go before, the minstrels follow after. There is something liturgical, too, in the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ever the hero and the foreground—hence the dominant study of the nude, and the tendency to thronged compositions, with dramatic motives of effort and conflict. The Chinese artists, weak in the plastic, weak in the architectural sense, paint mostly in a lyric mood, with a contemplative ideal. Hence the value given to space in their designs, the semi-religious passion for nature, and the supremacy of landscape. Beauty is found not only in pleasant prospects, but in wild solitudes, rain, snow and storm. The life of things is contemplated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... plains; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. The natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely, but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation. The seeds of the life of fishes are everywhere disseminated, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... drawing the protesting little lamplighter after him. When he had put perhaps twenty feet between himself and the lamp-post Bill achieved his usual upright attitude and his countenance assumed its habitual contemplative expression, the haunted look faded from his sagacious eye and his flaming nostrils resumed their normal benevolent expression. Taking note of these swift changes, it occurred to Mr. Shrimplin that rather than risk a repetition of his recent experience ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... transient. Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of modern science and mechanical invention. But whether surveyed with contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the same—"the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... and, unstrapping the bag of gold which was attached to the holsters, he placed it by his side on the rock, while he splashed his hands and face in the cool water. By-and-by he drew up the girths, mounted his horse dreamily, for he was a man of contemplative moods, and rode away from the way-side well, forgetful of his treasure, which lay temptingly on the flat rock, ready to the hand of the first comer. Not so his faithful dog, who, having in vain tried to lift the bag, which was too heavy for him, ran swiftly after the rider, whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... ran indoors, the man stood contemplative in the cold, shrugging his uncovered shoulders slightly. The open inner door showed a bright linoleum on the floor, and the end of a brown side-board ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... our readers will have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "The Age of Innocence," by Sir J. Reynolds, representing a young Hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... on us a mood of strange reverence for people and things which in less contemplative hours we hold to be unworthy; and in such moments we may set side by side the head of the Christ and the head of an outcast, and there is an equal radiance around each, which makes of the darker face a shadow and is itself ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Now he was leaning against the rail beside his new acquaintance and looking up at the sky, holding his chin with thumb and forefinger. Without doubt he was in one of those extraordinary and solemnly contemplative moods in which the barriers between men fall away, in which the heart opens even to strangers, and the mouth utters things which would otherwise ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... McQuade's cigar waxed and waned according to his inhalations. These inhalations were not quickly made, as by a man whose heart is beating with excitement; they were slow and regular, it might be said, contemplative. John's gaze never left the end ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... that they are able to give themselves wholly to delight in the glory of heaven and of earth? Is it the case with one man in every fifty thousand? Consider what extraordinary kindness of fate must tend upon one, that not a care, not a preoccupation, should interfere with his contemplative thought for five or six days successively! So rooted in the human mind (and so reasonably rooted) is the belief in an Envious Power, that I ask myself whether I shall not have to pay, by some disaster, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Pythagoras and Plato, and all the philosophers of Greece, and even from the divine Epicurus, who, however, has freed men from the dread of empty terrors. You would greatly oblige me by telling me by what means these three mortals acquired knowledge which had eluded the most contemplative sages. ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... identified them by pointing with their grimy fingers. Each guest looked forward to the fulfilment of some cherished dream and Dr. Emma Harpe saw a picture, too, as she gazed at Symes with speculative, contemplative eyes. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... his mouth, and rubs it off against the bottom of the river. Thus speed of foot, in water or over rocks, is a necessary quality in the angler; at least in the northern angler. By the banks of the Usk a contemplative man who likes to take things easily may find pretty sure footing on grassy slopes, or on a gravelly bottom. But it is a different thing to hook a large salmon where the Tweed foams under the bridge of Yair down to the narrows ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang |
