"Passively" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by passively while the masterful doctor heckled and hustled the unhappy Center of Culture into his car. With heaven knows what feelings, she found herself seated beside me, Sophy Smith, while Alicia, beside the doctor, tossed gay remarks over her shoulder. Miss Hopkins realized that all ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... him passively, still keeping her hands before her face. But no sooner was she seated than she began to rock uneasily back and forth, moaning to herself, till suddenly the long-dried fount was opened up; the merciful blessing of tears found vent. She shook with uncontrollable sobbing; she ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... need and the loneliness of his wife. Absorbed by other interests, he seemed to leave it to her whether she should continue to hope for the fulfillment of her longing, or like him, however young in years, passively give up all hope. She told him what wrong he was directly committing against himself and her, by renouncing what after all, as he well knew, the law of nature would not force her to forego for a long time to come. She left him no room for doubt, that she was going by all means ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... position to wield. We have no such means of forming an idea of the character and personality of the second James as we have of his father. No voice of his sounds in immortal accents to commemorate his loves or his sadness. He appears first passively in the hands of conspirators who played him in his childhood one against the other, a poor little royal pawn in the big game which was so bloody and so tortuous. His young memory must have been full of scares and of guileful expedients, each party ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the window, dimly outlined against the darkening sky. Father Brown stared passively at it ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... forced along against his will. Every limb was in resistance; his feet were planted widely yet firmly upon the pavement; one of his arms was stretched out as if to lay hold on anything that should come within reach. M. le Cure resisted passively; but Jacques resisted with passion, laying his back to the wind, and struggling not to be carried away. Notwithstanding his resistance, however, this rough figure was driven along slowly, struggling at every step. He did not make one movement ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... 'that I should soon repent of these preposterous airs;' and, ordering tea to be carried into my little study, which had a communication with my bed-chamber, he once more locked the door upon me, and left me to my own meditations. I had passively followed him up stairs, not wishing to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... manner had been merely dogged and passively fierce, as usual, she would have had no greater dislike to his company than she always felt—perhaps, indeed, would have been rather glad to have had him at hand. But there was something of coarse bold admiration ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Rosalie had taken absolute control of everything and everyone in the chateau. Jeanne was quite resigned and obeyed passively. Weak and dragging her feet as she walked, as little mother had formerly done, she went out walking leaning on Rosalie's arm, the latter lecturing her and consoling her with abrupt and tender words as they walked slowly along, treating her mistress ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... all worth it?... He argued the point with himself, almost passively, stroking his brown beard meditatively; but the fact that he could argue it at all showed that the foundations of his ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... abhors the ridiculous Kulturkampf of Chancellor Bismarck. Louis II., of Bavaria, would fain follow in his wake. But, as is shown by the large Catholic majorities at the elections, he is not seconded, even passively, as in Prussia, by the Bavarian people. The persecution, attended by its essential results, is rendering all Germany more Catholic than ever. When its work shall have been accomplished, what will remain? The Church ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... life: he cannot question his love to him, and after the smart is over, and his obedience secured, must believe that so tender, so indulgent a father could have no other end in whipping him, but his good. Against him, he knows he has no remedy, but must passively submit; and when he is convinced he must, he will in ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the negative movement to one act or to one point in time; the movement towards a higher world must be maintained—the sustaining of the negative movement being a test of the reality of conversion. The process of conversion is not a process to be passively undergone, or to originate from without, but is a movement starting in the depths of ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... entertained by penetrating minds, that epidemic diseases generally are the concomitants of parasitic life. 'There begins to be faintly visible to us a vast and destructive laboratory of nature wherein the diseases which are most fatal to animal life, and the changes to which dead organic matter passively liable, appear bound together by what must least be called a very close analogy of causation.' [Footnote: Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 1874, p. 5.] According to this view, which, as I have said, is daily gaining converts, a contagious disease may be defined a ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... did sea or stream Kindle thus beneath his beam, Ne'er did miser's eye behold Such a glittering mass of gold 'Gainst the gorgeous radiance float Darkly, many a sloop and boat, While in each the figures seem Like the shadows of a dream Swiftly, passively, they glide As sliders on a ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... no wise help her. He would not even passively discourage the vicar, or refrain from offering to give him a seat in going to the meets. Mark and Lord Lufton had been boys together, and his lordship knew that Mark in his heart would enjoy a brush across the country quite as well as he himself; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... of mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the intention declared in the first act—'Look you, I will go pray'—so as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... herself from the worst of fates, and should save me from the agony of losing her to such a man as Sir George had selected for Dorothy's husband? Is it not a sin to disobey the law of self-preservation actively or passively?" Answer these questions as you choose. As for myself, I say God bless Dorothy for lying. Perhaps I am in error. Perhaps I am not. I but tell you the story of Dorothy as it happened, and I am a poor hand at solving questions of right and wrong ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... Sabeth, They shall be Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next court" In 1760 the legislature of ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... remarks on the perfect adaptation of this primitive theology to the initial torpor of the human understanding, which it spares even the labour of creating and sustaining the facile fictions of polytheism. The mind yields passively to that natural tendency which leads us to transfer to objects without us, that sentiment of existence which we feel within, and which, appearing at first sufficiently to explain our own personal phenomena, serves directly as an uniform base, an absolute unquestioned interpretation, of all external ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... constraint that he put upon himself that he had given no sign of his emotion, even at the near approach of Donna Mercedes, and the hand which signed his name beneath her father's as the principal witness was as steady as if it held merely the sword in some deadly combat. He endured passively the affectionate greetings of the happy de Tobar, who was intoxicated at the assurance afforded by the betrothal of the coming realization of all his hopes. He sustained with firmness the confidence of the Viceroy and the admissions de Lara made to him in private, of his pleasure in the suitable ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have refused to share in the profits of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... could not depend on sailing, then to run on shore at the point, and every one to shift for himself among the negroes; or failing these, to board, and blow up together, for he saw that the greatest part of his men were drunk, passively courageous, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... philosophical cigarettes. He found the rest in a house near by, and soon we were sitting on the floor of a room, in a dense crowd, drinking hot milk, and in our right minds; sick or wounded men of many regiments talking, sleeping, smoking, sighing, and all waiting passively. A benevolent little Scotch officer, with a shrewd, inscrutable face, and smoking endless cigarettes, moved quietly about, counting us reflectively, as though we were a valuable flock of sheep. We sat here till ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast tied to his heartstrings. But as grief must be fed with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that ravening passion. To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... believe that in such a sequence there is nothing more than an image associated with an act? In point of fact, the patient has appropriated and assimilated the idea of the experimenter. She does not passively execute a strange order, but the order has passed in her consciousness from passive to active. We can go so far as to say that the patient has the will to steal. This state is complex and obscure, hitherto no one has explained it. * * * The facts ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... speech, they set out together, and were already got some distance from the spot, ere he observed that she was still carrying the hand-bag. She gave it up to him, passively, but when he offered her his arm, merely shook her head and pursed up her lips. The sun shone clearly and pleasantly; the wind was fresh and brisk upon their faces, and smelt racily of woods and meadows. As they went down into the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... repressive or retrograde measures in either of these directions would, without doubt, meet with strong and, to a great extent, reasonable opposition in England. A large section of the public, forgetful of the fact that they had stood passively by whilst measures, such as the imposition of increased taxes, which the natives of India really resent, were adopted, would protest loudly against the adoption of other measures which are, indeed, open to objection, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... looked steadily away from the audience. Melchior came. He took him in his arms, and told him to blow kisses. He pointed out to him the Grand Duke's box. Jean-Christophe turned a deaf ear. Melchior took his arm, and threatened him in a low voice. Then he did as he was told passively, but he did not look at anybody, he did not raise his eyes, but went on turning his head away, and he was unhappy. He was suffering; how, he did not know. His vanity was suffering. He did not like the people who were there at all. It was no use their applauding; he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of thankfulness was unutterable. Passively he went with Slingerland, silent and gentle. The trapper dressed his wounds, tended him, kept men away from him, and watched by him as if he were ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... selfish culture of intellect, however far extended.—Perhaps a caution should be added to these suggestions. In speaking of great ideas, as sometimes springing up of themselves, as sudden illuminations, I have no thought of teaching that we are to wait for them passively, or to give up our minds unthinkingly to their control. We must prepare ourselves for them by faithfulness to our own powers, by availing ourselves of all means of culture within our reach; and, what is more, these ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... it while it interested him. If the time ever came when he needed a new set of relationships, he thought he could trust himself to form them; and if he did not desire to form them, well, to be bored was bad enough, but it was better on the whole to be passively rather than to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inattentively, and went on without waiting for any reply. They left the garden, and went down the road to the stable, Wally passively following Grant's lead. Someone came hurrying after them, and they turned to see Jack. The others had evidently stayed to hear the ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... but had appreciably diminished the pressure in other portions of the theatre of war. Gatacre was firmly established at Sterkstroom, with an advanced post at Cypher Gat, the main body of those fronting him remaining passively at Stormberg. A Boer commando had made a demonstration towards Molteno on 3rd January, and another party, about the same date, had driven out of Dordrecht a patrol of British mounted troops, which had occupied that place on the 23rd December. At ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... suppose, that revived me, even as, after my long sojourn in the noisome hold of the slaver, it had prostrated me by my sudden emergence into it, and I presently became conscious that I was feeling distinctly better than I had done for some time past. For a minute or two I lay passively where I was, in the bottom of the canoe, blinking up at the pallid zenith, near which the sun blazed with blinding brilliancy; and then, no one saying me nay, I slowly and painfully raised myself into a sitting posture ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff of your external world, the method and machinery of the common life, is not merely passively but actively inconsistent with your sharp interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is diseased as well as indolent. All man's perverse ways of seeing his universe, all the perverse and hideous acts which have sprung from them— these have set up reactions, have produced deep disorders in the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... mostly at Manisty's expense. Eleanor Burgoyne first laughed at his sallies, then gently turned her head in a pause of the general advance and searched the crowd pressing at their heels. Lucy's eyes followed hers, and there far behind, carried forward passively in a brown study, losing ground slightly whenever it was possible, was Manisty. The fine significant face was turned a little upward; the eyes were full of thoughts; he was at once the slave of the crowd, and ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... next moment he was an inflexible tyrant, spurning a suppliant. Again he would break into a soundless chuckle; then, raising his hand to his forehead, seem overwhelmed with despair and anguish. Occasionally he would walk some distance quite passively, only glancing furtively about him; but erelong he would forget himself again, and the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... reticence before or since. As if she were determined "to die and make no sign," she sat, bowing and smiling, and amounting to nothing, one way or another,—giving no opinion, if asked, and asking no question. She was passively polite, but so very near nothing that I was rejoiced when Mr. Remington entered with my husband, and proposed that we should go into the dining-room. He carelessly introduced Mrs. Remington, but further than that seemed not to know ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... near the clear space between the windows sat the bridegroom's mother, with a large pearl brooch gleaming out of the black satin folds on her bosom. Her face, between long lace lappets, looked as clearly pallid and passively reflective as the pearls. Not a muscle stirred about her calm mouth and the smooth triangle of forehead between her curtain slants of gray hair. If she speculated deeply within herself, and was agitated over the delay, not a restless ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... era of freedom and justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horror in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison rather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realise ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pipots—Mme. la Marquise, M. le Vicomte and I—just think of that, monsieur! M. le Marquis had his chateau, as no doubt you know, on the outskirts of Lyons. A loyal high-born gentleman; was it likely, I ask you, that he would submit passively to the rule of those execrable revolutionaries who had murdered their King, outraged their Queen and Royal family, and, God help them! had already perpetrated every crime and every abomination for which of a truth there could be no pardon either on earth or in Heaven? He joined ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... passively enough, and he did not speak until we had struck into the main trail of the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... which Nathan breathed at the moment of yielding, were the last he uttered. Submitting passively to his fate, he was dragged onwards by a dozen hands, a dozen voices around him vociferating their surprise at his appearance even more energetically than the joy of their triumph. His Indian habiliments and painted body evidently struck them with astonishment, which increased as they drew nearer ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Magda submitted passively to her ministrations. She was thinking of Michael Quarrington, the man who had come into her life by such strange chance and who had so deliberately gone out of it again. By the very manner of his going ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden within—the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. And this duality there—the fitfulness with which the higher ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... splendid brother. She was seen frequently to enter his apartments at night, and the writer can furnish abundant proof that she was seen to leave his apartments one morning. This is not penned with malice. It is simply that the writer knows and admires you and can not stand passively by and see you humiliated by the attentions of a man who is unworthy to lace your shoes. As for your sister-in-law, I have no desire to meddle. Confront both her and Warrington, if the truth of the above statement is ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... they supposed they were about to secure. And it was not till his pale and trembling fellow-prisoner had been conducted off on her horse some rods, that they could make him seem to comprehend that he was a prisoner, and must go with them. He then burst out into a piteous fit of weeping, and, passively receiving the kicks and cuffs of his keepers to get him in motion, went bawling along, like a whipped schoolboy, towards ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... did we give way to despair; and, hardly deeming it worth while to exert ourselves, we remained passively ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Phantasy or fantasy, so understood, presents numerous and varied images, often combining them into new forms with exceeding vividness, yet without any true constructive power, but with the mind adrift, blindly and passively following the laws of association, and with reason and will in torpor; the mental images being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... attract hostile attention, he drifted passively, until the sun had set in a flood of glory, and the stars peeped timidly down at him from their limitless heights. By this time he was some miles below the fort, and near the eastern bank of the river. ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... tallied with the appearances as now presenting themselves. Mrs. Williamson had fallen backwards with her head to the door; the servant, from her kneeling posture, had been incapable of rising, and had presented her head passively to blows; after which, the miscreant had but to bend her head backwards so as to expose her throat, and the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... don't, you see," Bernard replied politely. "Stop pulling those blinds about. Come over here." Laura came to him. "Kiss me," said Clowes, and she laid her cool lips on his cheek. Clowes received her kiss passively: even Laura, though she understood him pretty well, never was sure whether he made her kiss him because he liked it or because he thought she ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... said, after he had helped her down the Indian stairway; and when she held up her hand, passively, he ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... this man passively—to an appointment which, but an hour ago, she had promised herself she would not keep. Her inmost soul was stirred, just as before. Then it had been few words, now it was a little common song. But the strange power of the man held her close, so she realized that ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... imagination in which the Catholic Church so eminently excels. But, on the other hand, she continued to be, for more than a hundred and fifty years, the servile handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty. The divine right of kings, and the duty of passively obeying all their commands, were her favourite tenets. She held those tenets firmly through times of oppression, persecution, and licentiousness; while law was trampled down; while judgment was perverted; while the people ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unconsciously convicted him of remissness, of cowardice even; so vain and windy his theorising seemed, judged by the other's deliberate act! Yet placed as he was, what could he do, how advance their common end, but by passively waiting on events? At least, he reflected, he could perform the trivial service of trying to better his friend's case; and this he eagerly offered to attempt. The doctor thanked him, but without any great appearance of emotion: Odo was struck by the change which had transformed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... usually calico print, and a mantle of similar material is wrapped about the head and body. Unlike her Mohammedan neighbor, she 'makes no pretence of concealing her features; her face is usually a picture of pleasantness and good-nature rather than strikingly handsome or passively beautiful, as is the face of the Persian or Armenian belle. The costume of the men differs but little from the ordinary costume of the lower-class Persians. Like all the people in these Mohammedan countries, who realize the weakness of their position ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the sponge, permeated throughout by currents of sea-water, the absence of definite organization corresponds with the absence of definite unlikeness of conditions. In the Thalassicolla of Professor Huxley—a transparent, colourless body, found floating passively at the surface of the sea, and consisting essentially of "a mass of cells united by jelly"—there is displayed a rude structure obviously subordinated to the primary relations of centre and surface: in all of its many and important varieties, the parts ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... refused to sacrifice the advantages of belonging to the German confederation. British policy is not averse from Austria joining Germany, but no active steps have been taken to facilitate such an amalgamation. The treaty of Versailles practically inhibits it, and Britain remains passively loyal to that inhibition. The time may come when the French rivalry may enkindle our people to action, but it will be because the questions at issue are not brought forward into the light of ordinary publicity and discussed openly and frankly. Secret ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... put her younger ones to bed, came in search of them. "Dear, dear! poor darlings," said she, as she found them sitting in the dark; she felt their cold hands, and made them all come into the nursery, where Mary was already, and, fondling them, one by one, as they passively obeyed her, she set them down on their little old stools round the fire, took away the high fender, and gave them each a cup of tea. Harry and Mary ate enough to satisfy her, from a weary craving feeling, and for want ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... which opposes, passively, all fundamental changes, cannot now resist scientific demonstration as it has in the past. The instruction in the College of Therapeutics, is thoroughly demonstrative, leaving no room for doubt, and it gives a species of knowledge which ought to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... most unreasonable extremes, and to the great detriment of the interests and happiness of their children; while at the same time they often bring disgrace and misery upon their own heads and home. They set themselves up as the choosers of companions for their children, presuming that they should passively submit to their selection whatever it may be. This is taking away the free moral agency of the child, making no account of his taste, judgment, or affections; and forming between him and the object thus chosen a mere outward union, with no ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... tried the tea-chest, and, finding it locked, poured out some coffee, which he drank almost unconsciously, then gave his cup for more, sighed, pushed his hair back, and looked up somewhat revived. John tended him affectionately, persuading him to take food; and when he had passively allowed his plate to be filled, his appetite discovered that he had tasted nothing since yesterday morning, and therewith his spirits were refreshed; he looked up cheerfully, and there was less despondency in his tone as he spoke of her ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not naturally belong to me, and, unsustained by fortune, is but a souvenir even for Ossoli. Yet it has appeared to me, that for him to drop an inherited title would be, in some sort, to acquiesce in his brothers' disclaiming him, and to abandon a right he may passively wish to maintain for his child. How does it seem to you? I am not very clear about it. If Ossoli should drop the title, it would be a suitable moment to do so on becoming ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... own room a sudden revelation startled me. Everyone knows what it is to have details come under the eye which the mind first interprets long after the eye ceases to rest upon them. The impressions are received passively; but they are registered, and can be calmly read whenever the mind is in activity. It was so now. I suddenly, as if now for the first time, saw that the addresses on Bourgonef's letters were written in a fluent, masterly hand, bold in character, and with ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... carried away. The little Tirzah, in her home attire, stupefied with fear, went passively with her keepers. Judah gave each of them a last look, and covered his face with his hands, as if to possess himself of the scene fadelessly. He may have shed tears, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread; some verse of the Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which one can ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... conspicuous part we have played among its believers, the honesty and the fearlessness with which we have defended the subject, will weigh anything in our favor, we desire that our opinions may be received, and those who are moving passively down the rushing rapids to destruction should pause, ere it be too late, and save themselves from the blasting influence which ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... steadily at their oars, but the dead fish hung behind like a log, and our progress was very slow. Every now and then it gave a slight quiver, but that soon ceased, and it hung quite passively ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... together and went on, afraid now in a new way. It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food, but that he should be destroyed violently before starvation had exhausted the last particle of the endeavor in him that made toward surviving. There were the wolves. Back and forth across the desolation ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... was too old, and had suffered too deeply from the war, in body and mind and estate, ever to reconcile herself to the changed order of things following the return of peace; and with an unsound yet not unnatural logic, she visited some of her displeasure upon those who had profited most, though passively, by her losses. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Romayne would have asked for some explanation of this abrupt notice of removal. Now, he passively accepted the advice of his spiritual director. Father Benwell made the necessary communication to the authorities, and Romayne took leave of his friends in The Retreat. The great Jesuit and the great landowner left ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction was afforded by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt, and checked her progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood passively still. When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly switch. She ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... non-resistance. That among us, as every body knows, this power is lodged in the king or queen, together with the lords and commons of the kingdom; and therefore all decrees whatsoever, made by that power, are to be actively or passively obeyed. That the administration or executive part of this power is in England solely entrusted with the prince, who in administering those laws, ought to be no more resisted than the legislative power ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... ordered, on the morning of Saturday, to occupy Telegraph Mountain,—an elevation in the rear of Cedar Mountain,—which was used for a Federal signal-post. Nobody having notified the 28th to return to camp, they remained on the mountain, passively witnessing the carnage, and came away in the night. But although my remark was jestingly said, the knot of soldiers who heard it were intensely excited. They spoke of taking me "off that hoss," and called me a New York "Snob," who "wanted ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... infantry," says Scott, "could not advance in column without being mowed down by grape and canister, nor advance in line without being ridden down by the enemy's numerous horsemen." Nor were the Mexicans content on this occasion to remain passively in their works. Both infantry and cavalry attempted to drive the assailants back upon the Pedregal; and, although these counterstrokes were successfully repulsed, when darkness fell the situation of the troops was by no means favourable. Heavy columns of Mexicans ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... transforms the personality, and is therefore capable of taking its stand as a true and real pedagogy. Whereas the ancient pedagogy in all its various interpretations started from the conception of a "receptive personality"—one, that is to say, which was to receive instructions and to be passively formed, this scientific departure starts from the conception of an active personality—reflex and associative—developing itself by a series of reactions induced by systematic stimuli which have been determined by experiment. This new pedagogy ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... glasses; he did not take her hand, but merely bent over the little peace-offering as over a sacrament. Seeing that he had no intention of doing more, her hand fell passively to her side, and ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... to warrant the supposition that he would probably only leave to the orphan the usual portion of a daughter of the house, and that the lands would go in their ordinary destination. This belief, adopted passively, and as a thing of course, had had a very prejudicial effect upon Vernon's career. What mattered that he overenjoyed his youth, that the subordinate property of the Vernons, a paltry four or five thousand pounds a year, went a little too fast,—the splendid estates ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... him as an evidence of the fruits which their creed brought forth, deliberately exchanged for it the old religion of his country, which could sustain him in an action of such melancholy grandeur. But the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors with escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus or Agamemnon; and in its stern and tremendous features, more nearly resembling them than any which ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... face with it. Dinah could not do this as seeing but poorly with one eye only, she lost her sight almost entirely during the hurricane and washing her heated eyelids did not bring her any relief. Nell submitted passively to all of Stas' efforts; she only gazed at him like an exhausted bird, and only when he removed her shoes to spill out the sand and afterwards when he smoothed out the saddle-cloths did she throw her arms ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... away from ordinary sexual thoughts or imaginings. If these thoughts come into the mind do not be discouraged, but regard them as manifestations of a force which you intend using for the purposes of strengthening the body and mind. Lie passively or sit erect, and fix your mind on the idea of drawing the reproductive energy upward to the Solar Plexus, where it will be transmuted and stored away as a reserve force of vital energy. Then breathe rhythmically, forming the mental image of drawing up the reproductive energy ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... save the having the children over to-morrow, certainly," said Mr. Grey, and he was inducted almost passively into the leathern chair before the library table, where Mr. Curtis had been wont to administer justice, and Grace was diving deep into a bureau for the printed forms long treasured there, her mother directing her, though Mr. Grey vainly protested that any foolscap ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and others, strangers to him, put in their place, he could not refrain from tears. King as he was, however, and sovereign ruler over millions of men, he was utterly helpless in his uncle's hands, and obliged to yield himself passively to the disposition which his uncle thought best to make ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... had been passing. Desultory though the method of its production be, and loose 'the texture of its fabric', there is a certain sequence of thought running through the cantos. We see how from the first poignancy of grief, when he can only brood passively over his friend's death, he was led to questioning the basis of his faith, shaken as it was by the claims of physical science—how from those doubts of his own, he was led to think of the universal trouble of the world—how at ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... between the two countries. Seeing, then, that new preparations for hostile invasion of Texas were about to be adopted by Mexico, and that these were brought about because Texas had adopted the suggestions of the Executive upon the subject of annexation, it could not passively have folded its arms and permitted a war, threatened to be accompanied by every act that could mark a barbarous age, to be waged against her because she ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... undaunted front to the foe, and urged his followers by encouragement and commands, to stand firm, and defend themselves to the last extremity. A few only emulated his example; the rest, seized with an unaccountable panic, sought refuge in flight, or surrendered passively to the victors. ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... farmer and lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice for all men, black or white. These rumors and discussions drifted into the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire as neighbors dropped in. Martin Conwell was not a man to watch passively the trend of events. He took sides openly, vigorously, and though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell's views later took shape in action that had a marked bearing ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... strongly by the determination that his widowed mother's hopes should never be blasted by any assertion of his own will? Was he passively permitting himself to be warped and twisted into a minion of an institution alien to his soul in bigoted adherence to his morbid sense of integrity? Was he for the present countenancing a lie, rather than permit the bursting of a bomb which would rend the family and bring his beloved ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sensitive human souls, the one loves passionately and the other not at all, the other is unwittingly blind and deaf to love's clamors and claims: the one may ardently urge; the other but passively yields:— ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... drooped and two tears slipped from beneath her lashes as she sat on the edge of her narrow bed with her hands lying passively in her lap. Tears were so weak and futile in a world where only action counted that it was seldom they ever reached her eyes, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... else. She submitted silently to be led forth into the cool, fresh evening air, and then when he as calmly took her hand and placed it within his arm she made no move to withdraw it, neither did she seem to know how by means of it to lean upon his strength. Passively she let it lie, and, walking by his side, turned her face to the drifting snowflakes and cared not that the night was raw and chill, the lake ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... that the nation MUST do this as must the individual. Some one might say to me, 'I honestly think I should take off your right arm.' I would not permit it if I could help it. No more can a nation submit passively to dismemberment. The South did not expect that this nation would do so. It promptly prepared for war. If the North had said, 'We can do nothing, there's a blank, write out your terms and we'll sign,' we would have been more thoroughly despised than we were, if that ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... nine days' travel I did not see fifty able-bodied men who were not in some way connected with the army. Nearly every branch of business is at a standstill. The shelves in stores are almost everywhere empty; the shop of the artisan is abandoned and in ruins. The people who are to be seen passively submit to all that emanates from Richmond without a murmur; they are for the most part simple minded, and ignorant of all that is transpiring in the great theatre about them. An intelligent-looking man in Columbia laughed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... handkerchief intending to flap him awake with it. With the handkerchief tumbled out a whole family of unexpected articles: a silver thimble; a photograph; a little purse; a scent-bottle; some loose halfpence; nine green gooseberries; a key. They rolled to Swithin's feet, and, passively obeying his first instinct, he picked up as many of the articles as he could find, and handed them to her amid the ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... his broom passively, and saying, "What an impatient little miss you are!" clappered off to the dining-room, and brought forth the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... glance about her, stepped forward, her little, moccasined feet flitting from rock to rock across the murmuring shallows until she stood before him. Then he spoke, but she only shook her head and let it droop again, her hands passively clasping. He knew too little of her tongue to plead with her. He knew, perhaps, too little of womankind to appreciate what he was doing. Finding words useless, he gently took her hand and drew her with him, and passively she obeyed, and for a moment they disappeared ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... meet together, [236] No Protestant divine suffered more hardships than Doctor William King, Dean of Saint Patrick's. He had been long distinguished by the fervour with which he had inculcated the duty of passively obeying even the worst rulers. At a later period, when he had published a defence of the Revolution, and had accepted a mitre from the new government, he was reminded that he had invoked the divine vengeance on the usurpers, and had declared himself willing to die a hundred deaths rather ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eighteen eighty-five. He was dark and handsome, and, by a trick of coincidence, was dressed in loose knickerbocker suit, just as he was when he had walked up that very avenue to say his last good-bye. She remained for a moment tense, passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties. Then clear awake, and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer, sudden ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... had nothing to do with this charter, we might have some sort of Epicurean excuse to stand aloof, indifferent spectators of what passes in the company's name in India and in London. But if we are the very cause of the evil, we are in a special manner engaged to the redress; and for us passively to bear with oppressions committed under the sanction of our own authority, is in truth and reason for this house to be an active ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... feudal race. During the successive reigns of Lombard, Frankish, and German masters, they had passively accepted, stubbornly resisted feudalism, remaining true to the conviction that they themselves were Roman. In Roman memories they sought the traditions which give consistency to national consciousness. And when the Italian communes triumphed finally over ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a form of reaction means, then, that the sensation is not something done to the person, nor passively received by him from outside, but something that he himself does when aroused to this particular form of activity. What comes from outside and is received by the individual is the stimulus, and the sensation is what he does in ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... constantly proceeding in a quiet and religious parsonage—the bare possibility that sufferings so durable in their effects should be sweeping with their eternal storms a heart so capacious and so passively unresisting—are calculated to startle and to oppress us with the sense of a fate long prepared, vested in the very seeds of constitution and character; temperament and the effects of early experience combining to thwart all the morning promise of greatness and splendour; the flower unfolding ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey |
