"Perceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one group of human beings," Stryker quoted his Handbook, "can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... wonder, that makes some people want to tell a writer whom they have never seen all about themselves, their thoughts and histories? In some cases it is an unaffected desire for sympathy from a person whom they think perceptive and sympathetic; in some cases it proceeds, I think, from a hysterical desire to be thought interesting, with a faint hope, I fear, of being possibly put into a book. Some of the letters have been simply ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... publication world outside of Park Row, Banneker did not recognize a name, unknown to the public, which in the inner literary world connoted all that was finest, most perceptive, most discriminating and helpful in selective criticism. Miss Thornborough had been the first to see and foster half of the glimmering and feeble radiances which had later grown to be the manifest lights of the magazine and book ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... are true to the nationality,—all over American. They are much above the average in expression,—lighted with clear, well-opened eyes, intelligent and perceptive; most have an air of business frankness well calculated to deceive. There is one capacious, thought-freighted forehead. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... majesty and the pathos of the human spirit and reveal them in significant and expressive line. Knowledge supported rather than rivaled insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need religious instruction. Nevertheless they are what they are because they are first perceptive rather than reasoning beings. They both owe, the one his salvation, the other his despair, to the fact that they have seen the vision of the holy universe. Both are seers; the saint has given his allegiance to the heavenly ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.—CONFUCIUS. ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... months or more before Hazel became actively aware that a subtle change was growing manifest in the ordinary manner of Mr. Andrew Bush. She shrugged her shoulders at the idea at first. But she was a woman; moreover, a woman of intelligence, her perceptive faculties ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Ada Cambridge's teaching, so far as it can be gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to make us more patient with life's complexities and perceptive of its compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal characters, in their foibles and their strength—in the little acts and impulses which qualify alike ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Moreover, the volume of our sensible universe embraced in the clairvoyant's field of view will increase in the same way that a balloonist's view increases in area as he rises above the surface of the earth. To account for clairvoyant vision at a distance, it is of course necessary to posit some perceptive organ other than the eye, but the fact that in trance the eyes are closed, ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... discerned in her friend to the general happenings which had followed from the Raynham episode. And amongst these she gave a certain definite place to the abrupt withdrawal of Quarrington's friendship, and resented it. She felt curiously disappointed in the man. With such fine perceptive faculty as he possessed she would have expected him to be more ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... guessed. Something of it had been apparent to them in the earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... clear grey, rather deeply set, and changing in expression with every impression that passed over her mind. The forehead was wide, and largely developed both in those parts of it which are deemed to indicate imaginative and idealistic power, and those that denote strongly marked perceptive and artistic faculties. The latter perhaps were the more prominently marked. The Indian strain showed itself in the perfect gracefulness of a very slender and elastic figure, and in the exquisite elegance and beauty of ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of character was indicated there; an indomitable will that would bend the most adverse conditions to serve its own masterful purpose and make of obstacles the paving-stones to success; a mind gifted with keen perceptive faculties, but which hitherto had dealt mostly with externals and knew little of itself or of its own powers. Young, with splendid health and superabundant vitality, there had been little opportunity for introspection or for the play ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... well-balanced sentence, paragraph, or poem. To cite the very simplest example, if I read, "on the one hand ... on the other hand," I have a feeling of balanced tensions precisely analogous to what I experience when I look at a vase. Structure is not a purely intellectual or perceptive affair; it is also motor and organic, and that means emotional. It is felt with the body as well as understood by the mind. I have used the case of symmetry to bring out this truth, but I might have used other types of unification, each of which has its unique feeling tone, as I ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... see what light we can get concerning the intellect. What are its functions and limitations? Is it safe as a guide? According to the phrenological classification, the intellectual faculties are divided into three classes; viz.: the perceptive, literary and reasoning faculties. The perceptive faculties bring us into relationship with the external world, and through them we learn about the color, size, form, weight, etc., of material objects. If the phrenologists are right, then neither those who claim that the ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... were obviously not well off as regards material goods? Copplestone had the faculty of seeing things at a glance, and refined and cultivated as the atmosphere of Mrs. Greyle's parlour was, it had taken no more than a glance from his perceptive eyes to see that he was there confronted with what folk call genteel poverty. Mrs. Greyle's almost nun-like attire of black had done duty for a long time; the carpet was threadbare; there was an absence of those little touches of comfort ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... the slow and faulty methods of human intelligence; thought was vision, intellect intuition, knowledge omniscience. Thus His divine nature cognised and knew. That, however, is only one half of the picture. On other occasions his mind appears to have been perfectly human. His intelligence and perceptive faculties differed not essentially from ours. He asked questions and sought information. He used human categories. He progressed in wisdom. The development of His mind was gradual. His knowledge was relative to His age and ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity that I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect revel of—what shall I call it?—taste, intelligence, fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have seated myself more than once again at ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... locomotive, wiry, fibrous man—full of energy, wide awake,—tenacious, keenly perceptive; could pass his sharp eye round you in a second and tell your age, weight, and habits; could nearly look round a corner and say how many people were in the next street; has a touch of shrewd, sudden-working humour to him; can ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... V. be sensible of &c adj.; feel, perceive. render sensible &c adj.; sharpen, cultivate, tutor. cause sensation, impress; excite an impression, produce an impression. Adj. sensible, sensitive, sensuous; aesthetic, perceptive, sentient; conscious &c (aware) 490. acute, sharp, keen, vivid, lively, impressive, thin-skinned. Adv. to the quick. Phr. the touch'd needle trembles to the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the perceptive faculty of undergraduates, it ought to be said that the classmates and contemporaries of Richard Harding Davis knew perfectly well, while he and they were young together, that in him Lehigh had a son so marked ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... we have here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... point—in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course—a state of mind that was positively like ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Constructiveness, Cautiousness, Approbativeness, Self-Esteem, Firmness, Religion, Benevolence, Hope, Marvellousness, Poetry, Ideality, Imitation, Wit or Mirthfulness, Eventuality, Individuality, Perceptive Organs, Time, Comparative Sagacity, Causality, Tune, Constructiveness, Language—Comments ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... her airs, and bent before them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance, were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which women who are accustomed to suffer ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... President! You're going to have to make a speech pretty soon; you'll need a bracer!" He handed the second one to the physician. "Here you go, Doc! Congratulations! It isn't everyone who's got a President in the family!" Then his perceptive brain noticed something in the doctor's expression. "Hey," he said, more softly, "what's the trouble? You look as though you expected ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... far as relations can be traced between this object and all other objects, so much the more rational does the knowledge of the watch become. Rationality is the comprehending of anything in its relations. The perceptive, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... man determines to succeed and has a perceptive mind to see opportunities, if he relies on no one but himself, and follows this up by hard, persistent work, he will succeed. If he does not he is lacking in some other vital point, but we have never yet ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... By-and-by the boaters will pass him homeward-bound. All are blistered and sore: his withers are unwrung. Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories; no corporeal pangs clog his sthesis — his perceptive faculty. Some have quarrelled in the day and are no longer on speaking terms; he is at peace with himself and with the whole world. Of all that lay them down in the little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the sweetest. ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... the earlier ages of life on the earth she comprehended the male, it is not perhaps singular that, even after the appearance of mankind on the earth, the greater importance of the mother element in human society should have been recognized; nor, as the power to bring forth coupled with perceptive wisdom originally constituted the Creator, that the god-idea should have been ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... first of all, that the Deity does not, like other objects, come within the direct cognizance of our perceptive faculties. We have an organization, by means of which we are enabled to perceive various objects around us; and, by travelling to other lands, we can obtain a knowledge of many things of which we had before been ignorant. We perceive also what is going on within us. The telescope and the ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... recollection, association, or reflection that I look to deriving pleasure in Italy, but from my vivid perceptive faculties, from my senses (my nose, perhaps, excepted), and in the mere beauty that remains from the past, and abides in the present, in those Southern lands. You know what a vividly perceptive nature mine is; and, indeed, so great is my enjoyment ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Unfortunately, there were almost no books in the cottage. How he had kept it I cannot imagine, but he certainly had retained a quickness of apprehension which made him half-unconsciously adapt himself to Aunt Emmy and her little habits in a way that astonished me. It was she who showed herself less perceptive as regarded him. But this she never divined. She had got it rooted into her small, graceful head that he would naturally wish to converse principally about his farm. And, in spite of scant encouragement, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... become the equivalent of greater intensity. In other words, the larger image made the stronger impression. Now in external perception the stronger impression tends to hold the attention more securely; that is, it is more effective in producing those adjustments of the sensory organs which perceptive attention implies. So here what was noticed as the superior brightness and distinctness of the larger image may be supposed to imply some advantage in the latter in securing those adjustments of the mental attitude which were favorable to the apprehension of that ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... is the very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion. He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... on Mind" were written by a Mr. Petvin, who after some years again astounded the literary public by sending forth, in diction equally terrific, another tract entitled a "Summary of the Soul's Perceptive Faculties," 1768. He was at that time compared to Duns Scotus, the subtle Doctor, who, in the weakness of old age, wept because he could not understand the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... has taught him that he can concentrate his attention more perfectly; therefore his memory or understanding of the subject read or thought of will be increased. Very many people think and commit to memory by this method of concentrating attention; they probably do not belong to the quick, perceptive, imaginative class, but rather to those who have power of application and who have educated their minds by close voluntary attention. Galton found a large proportion of the Fellows of the Royal Society were of this motor type. But the fact that certain individuals make use of this faculty ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... of so communicative a nature, that it seems to delight in the conferring of existence upon every degree of perceptive being. As this is a speculation, which I have often pursued with great pleasure to myself, I shall enlarge further upon it, by considering that part of the scale of beings ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... may have perceptive powers of which we can form no conception, and may thus discern the approach of particular events as distinctly an we can now calculate the ebb and flow of the tides, or the eclipses of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... though intuitive and perceptive as to form, "gaining God by first leap" as all true art must do, leaves the impression, when regarded as a whole, of an articulated system. It is a view of man's life and destiny that can be maintained, not only during the impassioned moods of poetry, but in the very presence of ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... or degree tends to subvert the spiritual nature of Thought, which has its source in the capacities whereby we perceive, remember, and comprehend that significant sounds or words are the commuted representatives of the objects of intelligence. The perceptive organs of many animals are more exquisitely endowed than man, and their local memory more retentive; yet they are wholly incapable of comprehending language or calculating numbers;—capacities by which the Creator has ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... misto of crooks, demi-mondaines, blackmailers, gamblers, roues, murderers, receivers and decent congenital idiots of all sorts. The characterisation is adroitly done and the workmanship avoids that slovenliness which makes nineteen out of twenty books of this kind a weariness of spirit to the perceptive. I wonder if Maisie with such a father and mother would have been such a darling. Perhaps Professor KARL PEARSON ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... respectful. In a crisis they could and would rely on one another utterly. Why should their demeanour be so false an index to their real feelings? He supposed it was just the fault of loose habit. He did not blame her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence in the art ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... opposite side of the head. Paralysis, if not dependent on the spinal cord, is dependent on the basilar region of the opposite side of they brain; and conditions of the right eye affect the lower margin of the left front lobe, in which the perceptive ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... being saved, it were slowly re-peopled.—We talked of what was beyond the tomb; and, man in his human shape being nearly extinct, we felt with certainty of faith, that other spirits, other minds, other perceptive beings, sightless to us, must people with thought and love this beauteous and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... as he walked on in—partly in anger, partly in fear. It seemed ridiculous that one glance had not told the guard that he was not a Class Six. The Guesser was quite certain that he didn't look like a Sixer. But then, Fives were not very perceptive ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... let alone. I can quite understand that it is different with children and with uneducated persons: their imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling, much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has given even the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Hereditary Knowledge Perceptive Faculties Original Thought Memory Reason Receptivity in Training Efficiency in Execution Nervous Energy Keenness of the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday |
