"Fixity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his whitening face to help me to a decision. The look in his eyes was both sad and savage—an expression I could not fathom. For all it said to me, he might be thinking wholly of his wound, or of nothing whatever. The speechless fixity of this gaze embarrassed me. For relief I turned to Enoch, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... nobody denies it. What they really have to do, if they would upset the necessarian argument, is to prove that they are free to associate any emotion whatever with any idea whatever; to like pain as much as pleasure; vice as much as virtue; in short, to prove, that, whatever may be the fixity of order of the universe of things, that of thought ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... institution the seeds of numberless lifelong friendships. These friendships are being made over the quilting frames to-day just as they were in the pioneer times when a "quilting" was almost the only social diversion. Content with life, fixity of purpose, development of individuality, all are brought forth in every woman who plans and pieces a quilt. The reward of her work lies, not only in the pleasure of doing, but also in the joy of possession—which ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... his will; for almost unlimited power was surrendered to him of dispensing with formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening or lengthening the periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career. Ideal fixity of type, qualified by the utmost elasticity in practice, formed the essence of the system. And we shall see that this principle pervaded the Jesuit treatment of morality. The General resided at Rome, consecrated solely to the government of the Society, holding the threads ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... have listened to his admirable lectures on the Canal at the late Paris Exposition cannot fail to remember. What is perhaps most remarkable in a man so bred and constituted, is that with great gentleness of speech and suavity of manner he combines a strength of will and fixity of purpose worthy of Napoleon or Caesar himself. Beneath that calm exterior lay a power which needed but the stimulus of a great ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... was that of their minds. The one, slight, wiry, and ever in motion, seemed as though it might be blown hither and thither by any strong current. The other, solid almost to portliness, was suggestive of fixity—of self-dependence, and unsusceptibility to outside influences. The one was suggestive of being in a great measure the creature of circumstances; the other of being a law unto himself—one who would be more likely to influence circumstances than to be ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... become a place of rendezvous and holiday for the idlers and upstarts of the whole world. The modern spirit encompasses the old desert of the Sphinx on every side. It is true that up to the present no one has dared to profane it by building in the immediate neighbourhood of the great statue. Its fixity and calm disdain still hold some sway, perhaps. But little more than a mile away there ends a road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway cars, and noisy with the delectable hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the pyramid ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... at last she stopped and looked at him and could not turn her eyes away, or did not want to do so. His black orbs stared with a disquieting fixity—a sort of inhuman power—from out of his foreign-looking face. That stare was his chief weapon in the subjugation of women—they called it magnetic, and no doubt it was so. It increased the fascination of his ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... entrusted to merely intellectual instruction. The process is one of assimilation, largely by imitation and under direction and control. The result is a growing understanding of what is done, a choice of it for its own sake, a fixity and steadiness of purpose. Right acts and feelings become, through habit, easier and more pleasant, and the doing of them a "second nature." The agent acquires the power of doing them freely, willingly, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... his story had relieved Dorn. The strain relaxed in his white face and it lost a little of its stern fixity. He got up and, opening his bag, he ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... came over me at the thought of all this eternal restlessness, this turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much greater to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, somehow, into something big and new; than to be this Promethean sort of thing, a giant ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the other side. Justin quotes the Old Testament rather as Scripture, the New Testament rather as history. I think it will be felt that he has permitted his own style a freer play in regard to the latter than the former. The New Testament record had not yet acquired the same degree of fixity as the Old. The 'many' compositions of which St. Luke speaks in his preface were still in circulation, and were only gradually dying out. One important step had been taken in the regular reading of the 'Memoirs of the Apostles' at the Christian assemblies. ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... is now conceded, except at the points of contact of the natural and the supernatural. In spite of the wide separation of the two worlds—the world of fact and the world of imagination,—we cannot conceive the second except in terms of the first; and if the shaping of the supernatural acquires fixity and consecration, the natural facts made use of in the fabric acquire a corresponding fixity, even although the rendering is found to be inaccurate. The prevailing conception of a future life needs a view of the separate and independent ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... off, and a curious grey rigidity stole over his features, as if some invisible hand were turning him into stone. His eyes sparkled feverishly, but otherwise his face was the lace of the dead. The horrible fixity of his aspect at that moment, so terrified Varillo that he gave a loud cry, and almost before he knew he had uttered it, another monk entered the cell. Varillo gazed at him affrightedly, and pointed to Ambrosio. The monk said nothing, but merely took the rigid figure by ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to go abroad to the university of Zurich or Jena. The young man was still undecided. He was thoughtful and absent-minded. He was nice-looking, strongly built, and rather tall. There was a strange fixity in his gaze at times. Like all very absent-minded people he would sometimes stare at a person without seeing him. He was silent and rather awkward, but sometimes, when he was alone with any one, he became ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... apt to speak of the rigidity and fixity of Byzantine work, but the method is germane in the strictest sense to the result desired, and we should ask ourselves how far it is possible to represent such a serious and moving drama except by dealing with more ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... thrown back from her beautiful face,—stood laughing with her husband. There was no fixity in the soft flush of those delicately rounded cheeks. Even Lady Harriet realized that, though she had never seen so much colour in the girl's face before. She advanced stiffly, and Ralph Dacre with smiling grace took his wife's arm and ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... of the stars from our earth. Their seeming unchangeableness of position was, as we have seen, largely responsible for the idea that the earth was immovable in space. It is a wonder that the Copernican system ever gained the day in the face of this apparent fixity of the stars. As time went on, it became indeed necessary to accord to these objects an almost inconceivable distance, in order to account for the fact that they remained apparently quite undisplaced, notwithstanding the journey of millions of miles which the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... it, of dysentery, famine, toil and despair, as they cannonaded day and night,—Metz could not be taken. "Impossible!" said the Generals with one voice, after trying it for a couple of months. "Try it one other ten days," said the Kaiser with a gloomy fixity; "let us all die, or else do it!" They tried, with double desperation, another ten days; cannon booming through the winter midnight far and wide, four score miles round: "Cannot be done, your Majesty! Cannot,—the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... what you said just now that Mr. Hurst was contemplating some action of the kind. No doubt you had your information from a reliable quarter." This answer Mr. Jellicoe delivered without moving a muscle, regarding me with the fixity of a ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram—"he said true ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, 'It was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... thought to tell me that Cagnotte, tired of waiting for us, was coming that very day by the stage-coach. Children accept the improbable with artless faith; nothing strikes them as impossible; only, they must not be deceived, for there is no impairing the fixity of a settled idea in their brains. I kept asking, every fifteen minutes, whether Cagnotte had not yet come. To quiet me, Josephine bought on the Pont-Neuf a little dog not unlike the Tarbes specimen. I did not feel sure of its identity, ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... quite a minute before Tom Bodger opened his eyes again, to lie staring blankly up at the dazzling blue sky. He looked, for a mahogany and red sun-tanned individual, particularly unwholesome and strange with his fixity of expression, and in his anxiety Aleck forbore to speak to him, but watched for the complete return of his senses, wondering the while that so sturdy a fellow could be affected in a way which he had always understood was ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... the mobility of an unwritten constitution is the fixity of a constitution written out, like that of the United States or Switzerland, in one authoritative code. The constitution of the United States, drawn up at Philadelphia in 1787, is contained in a code of articles. It was ratified separately by each state, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... been so from the first, each species having sprung in its complete form from the creative hand of God. In later life he came to show some evidence of the belief in development, but his great work is all built on the idea of the entire fixity of species. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... him with the fixity and the lustre of those of a child who is entertained and absorbed by an elder's jovial wiles. A flash of laughter broke over her face, and the low, gurgling, half-dreamy sound was pleasant to hear. She was evidently no more than a child to these ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... screamed Mrs. Gourlay, leaping to her feet. With a hunted cry young Gourlay sprang to the door. So great had been the fixity of Gourlay's wrath, so tense had he been in one direction, as he moved slowly on his prey, that he could not leap to prevent him. As John plunged into the cool, soft darkness, his mother's "Thank God!" rang past him ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... utter silence. Rufus, with huge hands loosely clasped between his knees, appeared to be engrossed in watching the progress of the boat as she drifted gently on the rising tide. His face was utterly blank of expression, unless a certain grim fixity ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... succeeds above his fellows is the one who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Thus, indeed, even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... hypnosis, indeed, the thought suggested is strong enough to modify organic life and bring about hematic extravasion (stigmata), burnings, vomiting, etc.... In certain ecstatic cases, fixity of thought produces analogous effects. No one who has studied these questions can have the slightest doubt that mind ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... chafes and calls and brings her back to consciousness. She is the Kundry of the first act, but so changed,—pale with the strained pallor of one lately exorcised; the wildness and roughness all gone out of her face, and in its place a strange rapt fixity; in her bearing an unknown humility. In silence she recovers remembrance of the facts of her existence; mechanically orders her hair and garments, and without a word leaves Gurnemanz to set about the work of a servant. As she is ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... apparently partly leaves its natural place, which will be seen by an examination of the left hand, and completely rises as it were to the Line of Heart (5-5, Plate V.), the person will develop an enormous fixity of purpose for some one desire. He will apparently and deliberately control the affectionate side of his nature by his will power, and will stick at nothing to obtain the realisation of whatever his desire may be. If this mark is found on a square thick-set material looking hand, it ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... a thrashing, however, the student must cultivate as best he can an intense fixity of perception upon every fact or word or date that he wishes to make permanently his own. It is easy. It is a matter of habit. If you will, you can photograph an idea upon your cerebral gelatine so ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture that we left London, and the slight and occasional but always extremely salutary personal intercourse with men of scientific leading which my Father had enjoyed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... seductions and fierce trials of the heart of genius who shall estimate? * * * What does an ordinary mind know of the inner storm and whirlwind, as it were, of restlessness; the craving after excitement and high action; the inability to calm the breast and repose in fixity; the wild beatings and widowed longings after sympathy? * * * It is the severe lot of genius that its blessedness should be its bane; that that wherein its heavenly franchise gives it to excel mankind is the point wherein it should be cursed ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... probably not extend to Victoria because the quantity of land there is limited, and its character for the most part superior. In South Australia the solution will probably be in superior facilities for opening up the interior or unoccupied lands, greater fixity of tenure to the leaseholders, restriction of the land open to the operation of the system of selection, easier terms to the selector, and greater encouragement to both selector and leaseholder to improve their holdings. In New South Wales the change must be more radical, because, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... tomfoolery," John answered with fixity of purpose. "You don't need a thing that you haven't already got—except," he added slowly, "except what mother could help you to. But that isn't the point. I shall need you. It's time for me to get down to business and raise some money. Between ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... magistracies were utterly powerless and themselves in complete disorder. The efforts of Charlemagne, either to establish them on a firm footing or to make them act with regularity, were continual but unavailing. In spite of the fixity of his purpose and the energy of his action the disorder around him was measureless and insurmountable. He might check it for a moment at one point; but the evil existed wherever his terrible will did not reach, and wherever it did the evil broke out again ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... taken—was, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus—as a hint of his recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous at the foot of his was hardly enough to account for the fixity with which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years later, a motive in the (as it turned out) hardly generous fear that Eva had already made the great investigation "on her own." Her very regular breathing presently reassured him that, ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... and narrow head, with its dark grizzled hair, which thought had not yet loosened on his forehead. His clean-shorn face, so thin and oblong, was remarkable only for the eyes: dark-browed and lashed, and coloured like bright steel, they had a fixity in them, a sort of absence, on one couldn't tell what business. They made me think of torture. And his mouth always gently smiling, as if its pinched curly sweetness had been commanded, was the mouth of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... character he himself must have been ignorant. Perhaps it was the unspeakable anguish of it that struck through Kimberlin's sympathies. The young man came to an uncertain halt and stared at the stranger. At first he was unseen, for the stranger looked straight out into the street with singular fixity, and the death-like pallor of his face added a weirdness to the immobility of his gaze. Then he took ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... plains are covered and mountains disappear, but one rock stands fast—'The mountain of the Lord's house is exalted above the top of the mountains'; and when everything is rocking and swaying in the tempests, here is fixity and tranquillity. 'She shall not be moved.' Why? Because of her citizens? No. Because of her guards and gates? No! Because of her polity? No! Because of her orthodoxy? No! But because God is in her, and she is safe, and where He dwells no evil can come. 'Thou carriest Caesar ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... simply. "I saw you knew your business, and that is why I did not interfere. But even I did not expect so splendid a success. Your men have done well indeed, but it is to you and your fixity of purpose our win is mainly due. I have never known an apparently more hopeless chase; and, to you others, I say that it shows that there is almost nothing that fixity of purpose will not achieve in ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... it," pursued Craig, "is the loosest sort of organization conceivable, I believe, with no set membership, no officers, no laws—just a place of meeting with no fixity, where the comrades get together. Could you get us into the inner ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Times without number Cherry Malotte had marked that subtle, scornful change in other women, and reviled herself for heeding it. But in some way this girl's manner hurt her worst of all. She betrayed no sign, however, save a widening of the eyes and a certain fixity of smile ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... old country and the new. Kept within just bounds, such an affection is reasonable, is right and creditable to those who cherish it. Why I refer to this broad fact, which distinguishes the populations of all the four seaward Provinces, as much as it does Lower Canada herself, is, to show the fixity and stability of that population; to show that they are by birth British-Americans; that they can nearly all, of every origin, use that proud phrase when they look daily from their doors, 'This is my own, my native land.' Let but that population and ours come together for a generation ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... comparative anatomy to abandon forever the idea of the transformation of the organs of one type into those of another. The metamorphoses of certain animals, and especially of insects, so often cited in support of this idea, prove, by the fixity with which they repeat themselves in innumerable species, exactly the contrary. In the persistency of these metamorphoses, distinct for each species and known to repeat themselves annually in a hundred thousand species, and to have done so ever since the present order of things was ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... may deem advisable, to join the United States in a conference to adopt a common ratio between gold and silver, for the purpose of establishing, internationally, the use of bimetallic money, and securing fixity of relative value between those metals; such conference to be held at such place, in Europe or in the United States, at such time within six months, as may be mutually agreed upon by the executives of the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... which I am about to quote, it is evident that the link was formed by the doctor's frequent thought about Mrs. Broughton, yet he had clearly no especial wish that she should see what he was doing at the time. That it was this kind of clairvoyance that was employed is shown by the fixity of her point of view—which, be it observed, is not the doctor's point of view sympathetically transferred (as it might have been) since she sees his back without recognizing him. The story is to be found in the Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... the fixity of her regard, he, once more, became absorbed in her loveliness. Surely a most unwise proceeding—in Arcadia, by the light of a midsummer moon! And he mentally contrasted the dark, proud beauty of her face, with that of all the ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... land into pasture which had been going on all through the century was already becoming less active even in the first years of the reign, and had reached its limit some while before the Armada. As the displacement of labour diminished, fixity and regularity of employment increased, while the labour already displaced was gradually absorbed by the rapid growth of manufactures. This may perhaps in some degree explain the almost unaccountably sudden cessation of laments over agricultural depression. Still, the effective wage ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... into Lawson's career—a most unwelcome task—the writer has detected a continuity of purpose, a fixity of design, a uniformity of method pervading his every public act. What he is doing now, i.e., exposing somebody or something, he has repeatedly done on a lesser scale in the past; not from worthy motives, but for the sole purpose ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... relegation to the class of the genuzim. But it did not prevail. Hananiah, son of Hezekiah, son of Garon, about 32 B.C., is said to have reconciled the contradictions and allayed the doubts. But these traces of resistance to the fixity of the canon were not the last. They reappeared about 65 A. D., as we learn from the Talmud, when the controversy turned mainly upon the canonicity of Ecclesiastes, which the school of Schammai, which ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... Combe and Madame Guyon were in the world's eye. The churchly authorities became alarmed at the influence exerted by Father La Combe and Madame Guyon. Their doctrine of "Quietism," or constant, pure love, was liable to create a schism. What the Church wants is fixity, security and obedience. At that time in France the civil authorities and the Church worked together. The "lettre de cachet" was utilized, and Father La Combe was landed suddenly and safely in the Bastile. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the science of politics has no definite principles, and it can have no fixity; it is the spirit of the hour, the perpetual application of strength proportioned to the necessities of the moment. The man who should foresee two centuries ahead would die on the place of execution, loaded with the imprecations of the mob, or else—which ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... this difference to another of Mr. Carlyle's doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be 'any fixity in things.' In the same way we find him almost lamenting the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be immovable, has begun to twist and toss on ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... unconscious fixity, looked into his assistant's honest face. He had an exasperating notion that McCrae might have said ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... few descriptions and illustrative woodcuts; great variety in the Forms; their early origin; directions in which they run; bold conceptions of children concerning height and depth; historical dates, months, etc.; alphabet; derivation of the Forms from the spoken names of numerals; fixity of the Form compared to that of the handwriting; of animals working in constant patterns; of track of eye when searching for lost objects; occasional origin from figures on clock; from various other sources; the non-decimal nomenclature of numerals; perplexity caused ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... real reason. And she had got her first good look at his face. It was lean and strong. His eyes were deep-set and rimmed by heavy lashes and brows, and there was a glow in them as he looked at her—a compelling fixity that held her. Her own drooped, and were lifted to his again in sheer curiosity, she ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... until he had settled the doubt which made havoc of his days. At heart he knew that he would not present himself for the Civil Service examination; but he durst not yet put the resolve into words. It seemed a sort of madness, after so many months of laborious preparation, and the fixity of purpose which had grown with his studious habit. And what a return for the patient kindness with which his father had counselled and assisted him! He thought of Daniel and Alexander. Was he, too, going to drift in life, instead of following ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... less than ten paces off, the old man did not turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism, more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing at the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... I stared at his personage with a dreadful fixity, for I counted him the figment of a disarranged mind. But palpably he remained before me, fanning himself complacently, and watching me with every mark of kindly interest. Evidently perceiving that I was fully alive to my surroundings, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... They were hopelessly enslaved. Think it over. Anyway, say they went to Terra from here. That still accounts for the legends and so on. However, they were too far gone to make a recovery, and yet they had enough fixity of purpose not to manufacture any of you Omans there. So their descendants went a long way down the scale before they began to work back up. Does that ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... proper field: he eschewed the occult and mysterious, and emphasized observation and experiment. It was Braid who gave us the word "hypnotism." At first a sceptic, he began experimenting and proved that fixity of gaze had in some way such an influence on the nervous system of the subject that he went off into a sleep. He therefore opined that the transmission of a fluid by the operator had no ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... profoundly indifferent to what was going on, or rather abstracted from it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap. But, for all that, his eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with a thoughtful fixity of gaze. Desprez could not tell whether he was fascinating the boy, or the boy was fascinating him. He busied himself over the sick man: he put questions, he felt the pulse, he jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still, whenever he looked round, there were the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Beauclerc, throwing back his head with an air of defiance in his countenance; there was as he looked at his guardian a quick, mutable succession of feelings, in striking contrast with the fixity of the ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... to arouse these two women at the mill from their spiritless prostration. One night in early July, Carlisle came suddenly upon the name of Hugo Canning in the foreign tattle column of a London newspaper. She read, with intense fixity of gaze, that Hugo was in Europe: in short, that Hugo was enjoying himself at Trouville, where he was constantly seen in the company of the Honorable Kitty Belden, second daughter ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... were an accepted fact. His face was handsome, with a strange, watchful alertness and a fundamental fixity of ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... across at his neighbor, he found the dark glasses focused upon himself with such fixity that he responded with a friendly nod, and, making some trivial remark, found Mr. Mannering not at all averse to conversation. A few commonplaces were exchanged until the arrival of Mr. Rosenbaum's order, when ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... demands made upon it, though we may doubt whether it was multiplex enough or intellectual enough to satisfy the deeper needs of our time. As it is, the changes which have been made in sonata form since his day are merely changes of detail. To him is due the fixity of the form. [See "The Pianoforte Sonata," by J. S. Shedlock: London, 1895. Mr Shedlock, by selecting for analysis some of the most characteristic sonatas, shows Haydn in his three stages ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters full of their "earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special care," as it were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of the fascination he possessed for these religious ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the introduction of what is called responsible government will by no means prove to its advantage.... The institutions of Newfoundland have been of late in various ways modified and altered, and some time must unavoidably elapse before they can acquire that amount of fixity and adaptation to the colonial wants of society which seems an indispensable preliminary to the future extension ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... some gentleman adventurer who followed the fortunes of Raleigh or Drake. For in spite of its insignificant irregularity of feature there was alert resolve in its expression; a curious light-hearted fixity ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... resolutely forward, still without haste, but with dogged fixity of purpose; but the Mole, now thoroughly alarmed, placed himself in front of him, and looking into his eyes saw that they were glazed and set and turned a streaked and shifting grey—not his friend's eyes, but the eyes of some other animal! Grappling with him ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... at last through the panelled door, the expression of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more distracted than she had yet seen it. When he made her no answer she was magnetized for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied of all expression, by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled from that bald brow. Under the shock of this impression she wished to die. But when she heard the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish at the moment when her heart was breaking, her ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still. The Scriptures not being capable of lying or erring, it followeth that the position of those ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... canvassed the conclusions of both these investigators; and as the result of his own observations declares that algae, so far from being as polymorphic as they have been described, vary only within relatively narrow limits, and present on the whole as great fixity as the higher plants. It certainly supports his view to discover, on subjecting to a careful investigation Botrydium granulatum, a siphonaceous alga whose varied forms had been described by J. Rostafinski ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... This fixity of race characteristics has enabled the several national varieties of men to go forth from their nurseries, carrying the qualities bred in their earlier conditions through centuries of life in other climes. The Gothic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... pervaded the statues as this fact was made known, and each began to wonder how the elegant aristocrat would behave. To say that he stared, feebly expresses the fixity of his noble gaze, as it rested in turn upon the three faces opposite. When satisfied, he also produced a paper and began to read. But Matilda caught a big, black eye peering over the sheet more than once, as she peered over the top of ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... could dress herself admirably and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket. It covered her very feet. And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... — N. rest; stillness &c. adj.; quiescence; stagnation, stagnancy; fixity, immobility, catalepsy; indisturbance[obs3]; quietism. quiet, tranquility, calm; repose &c. 687; peace; dead calm, anticyclone|!; statue-like repose; silence &c. 203; not a breath of air, not a mouse stirring; sleep &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... none perfect. At their feasts I tasted ever the same food, and none that made an end of hunger. In their talk I heard ever the same words, and none that went to the depth of thought. The very quietude and fixity of their being perplexed and estranged me. What to them was permanent, to me was transient. They were inhabitants: I ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... were already visible in all their distinctness from the beginning, as all those who have read the introductory chapters will readily admit. And the same lines were to be followed with an undeviating fixity of artistic purpose and with unfailing verve and spirit to the last. 'The Prodigious Adventures of Tartarin,' 'Tartarin on the Alps,' and 'Port-Tarascon,' form a trilogy; and I know of no other example in modern French literature ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of the lesser generalizations and theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements in chemistry, the undulatory movement of light, the stability of the planetary orbits, the indestructibility of the atom, are all abstractions which have been subjected to the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... with the box of fondants and the pocket-portfolio of secret papers, and held a letter long and steadily before her eyes. Again the old gentleman opposite turned to the landscape of fields on his right, and his loose lips worked ominously. The fixity of those keen eyes with their tell-tale slight inward squint, as she studied the letter, proved too much for him, particularly when she began to smile; and his glance wandered desperately to the country he was traversing, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... realise the patient process of history; and Doellinger continued to recognise him as a master and originator of true scientific methods when his influence on jurisprudence was on the wane. On the same track, Drey, in 1819, defended the theory of development as the vital prerogative of Rome over the fixity of other churches. Moehler was the pupil of Drey, and they made Tuebingen the seat of a positive theology, broader and more progressive than ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the processes of a tree into their mechanical and chemical elements, but there is besides a kind of force there which we must call vital. The whole growth and development of the tree, its manner of branching and gripping the soil, its fixity of species, its individuality—all imply something that does not belong to the order of the inorganic, automatic forces. In the living animal how the psychic stands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it, science cannot ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... and at the same time displayed the other part of the card he had received. The door was shut, and the carriage rolled away. When the lady raised her veil, Eliphas Levi saw that she was of mature age; and beneath her grey eyebrows were bright black eyes of preternatural fixity.' ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of the Act of 1870, it cannot in strictness be called a mere development or completion of it, being in many respects based upon entirely new principles. The most salient of these are what are known as the "three Fs," namely—Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, to be decided by a Land Court, and Free Sale. As regards the last two, it has been pointed out with some force that the one practically does away with the other, the only person benefited being ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... of character among Semitic nations have been summed up by one writer under five heads:—1. Pliability combined with iron fixity of purpose; 2. Depth and force; 3. A yearning for dreamy ease; 4. Capacity for the hardest work; and 5. Love of abstract thought.[33] Another has thought to find them in the following list:—1. An intuitive monotheism; 2. Intolerance; ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the nun, stood looking from one to the other of us with a smile on her face of that fixity which denoted that she did not understand a single word of what ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... is due to their fixity and complexity: like words, they are thought of as existing in a social medium, and can be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes have never been so accurately or universally classified and distinguished; the instrument ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... gold. But note how he understood it: "To create a new nature in a given body or to produce new natures and to introduce them ... he who is acquainted with the forms and modes of super-inducing yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and the rest, with their gradations and methods, will see and take care that these properties be united in some body, whence its transformation into gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with scientific methods highly analogous to those which Bacon indicated or foresaw, has ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... moments, the little frown that his words had brought out still on her brow. Presently she looked up and saw that he had read his letter, and had put it in his pocket; he was tilted back against the crab-apple tree again, his forehead knit, his eyes brilliant, a peculiar fixity in their gaze. "Oh, here!" she cried protestingly, "you look as though you had just decided to become the President of the United States of America! Stop scowling and listen; Elsie is after me again to join her in Europe. She is fairly eloquent ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... century has been followed by considerable modifications of popular beliefs. Already the churches, though clinging still to the hypothesis of a specially-created soul, have accepted the main doctrine of physical evolution; and neither fixity of belief nor intellectual retrogression can be rationally expected in the immediate future. Further changes of religious ideas are to be looked for; and it is even likely that they will be effected rapidly rather than slowly. Their ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones. He is of the type of Brutus or of Cato—a model of austere fixity of purpose, but ungracious, domineering, and not quite free from ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... have said that the condition, and the only condition, of possessing the fulness of God's Spirit is faith in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the more you trust the more you have, and the less your faith the less the gift. You can get much or little, according to the greatness or the smallness, the fixity or the transiency, of your desires. If you hold the empty cup with a tremulous hand, the precious liquid will not be poured into it—for some of it will be spilt—in the same fulness as it would be if you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... a moment while she put on her hat. My idea was to let them pass on without seeing me, since they seemed not to want my company, but I had got too far on the landing to retreat; he looked up, and stood staring at me—engrossed to a dream-like fixity. Thereupon I, too, instead of advancing as I ought to have done, stood moonstruck and awkward, and before I could gather my weak senses sufficiently to descend, she had called him, and they went out by the garden door together. I then thought of ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the discovery left its mark upon young Jemima. Her lips retained permanently a certain cold fixity, that reminded more than one person who remembered him of Basil Kildare, and it was significant that she was never called again by her old ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... in biology has been found not only to be advantageous, but to be a prerequisite to progress in research, as the vast multiplicity of facts, still ever accumulating, would otherwise overwhelm the scholar. In philological classification fixity of nomenclature is of corresponding importance; and while the analogies between linguistic and biotic classification are quite limited, many of the principles of nomenclature which biologists have adopted ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nature of injury. Importance of recognizing true nature of these cults and of the ritual observed. Varying dates of celebration. Adonis probably originally Eniautos Daimon. Principle of Life in general, hence lack of fixity in date. Details of the ritual. Parallels with the Grail legend examined. Dead Knight or Disabled King. Consequent misfortunes of Land. The Weeping Women. The Hairless Maiden. Position of Castle. Summing up. Can incidents of such remote antiquity ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... tears in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... naturally enough, man did not like it. He was too lordly. For a long time, therefore, he pretended to be fighting for the Bible, when he was really fighting for his own dignity. This was rather hard on the Bible, which has nothing to do with the Aristotelian theory of the fixity of species; though it might seem possible to read back something of the kind into the primitive creation-stories preserved in Genesis. Now-a-days, however, we have mostly got over the first shock to our family pride. We are all Darwinians in ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... hand I extended—and remained quite still. Conscious of the secret force I had within myself I resolved to try if I could use it upon him in such a way as to keep him a prisoner till I chose to let him go. I watched him till his eyes began to look vague and a kind of fixity settled on his features,—he was perfectly unconscious that I held him at my pleasure,—and presently, satisfied with my experiment, I relaxed the spell and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... all, that we have a bodily form, in the main, persistent and yet, at the same time, capable of modifications. Without a strong aversion to change its habits and, with its habits, the pabulum of its mind, there would be no fixity of type in any species and, indeed, there would be no life at all, as we are accustomed to think of life, for organs would disappear before they could be developed, and to try to build life on such a shifting foundation would ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... their knees. A rapturous joy and peace had descended upon her. Her head sank gently back on the pillow as though she were in a dream. Her eyes, which were wide open and looking upward, seemed to be filled with the infinite, and her expression gradually took the fixity of eternal things. A holy aspiration seemed to rise from her whole face. All that remained of life—one last breath, trembled on her silent lips, which were half open and smiling. Her face had turned white. A silvery pallor lent a dull splendour to her delicate skin and shapely forehead. ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... adherence to merely human formulas, which reflect views of the truth as it appeared to the men who framed them in the distant past. But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of righteousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not always plain nor always practicable; ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... struck by the fixity of his gaze upon the object, whose nature he had so promptly declared: he continued to contemplate it for several minutes, and I guessed what was passing in the mind of the man under the obsession of a fixed idea. This fragment of ice, torn from the southern icebergs, came from those waters wherein ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Young's studies of light might perhaps have gained earlier recognition had it not chanced that, at the time when they were made, the attention of the philosophic world was turned with the fixity and fascination of a hypnotic stare upon another field, which for a time brooked no rival. How could the old, familiar phenomenon, light, interest any one when the new agent, galvanism, was in view? ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... between the rudest societies and some of the lowest forms of animal life, there is analogy alike in the slight extent to which organization is carried, in the indefiniteness of this organization, and in its want of fixity. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... elusive simulacrum is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peaked sinister face is limned on the bare, sandy slope, so definite, with such fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of it came no earlier, and is startled ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... commissioners were appointed to an international conference on the subject of adopting a common ratio between gold and silver, for the purpose of establishing internationally the use of bimetallic money and securing fixity of relative value ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... withdrew, while his superior opened the roll in his hands, and with all apparent fixity and interest studied at the precepts and definitions of the grammar of ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... beach some distance from the water. Strong, handsome fellows they had been, light-haired all; and bits of white skin, soft and smooth, though muscular, could be seen through the rents in their garments, while their blue eyes, glassy and staring in death, looked up at the sky with a mysterious fixity. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
