"Personify" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it became quite dark. Then was heard a soft footstep descending the stairs; the door opened, and a lady came in, bearing a lighted lamp, which she stood upon the table. She was tall, very slender, and with a face which a painter might have used to personify the spiritual life. Its outlines were of severe perfection; its expression a confirmed grief, subdued by, and made subordinate to, the consciousness of an inward strength which could convert suffering into triumph. Her garment was black, of the simplest ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... unlikely thing on earth that a woman who had forsaken her husband should countenance his scheme to personify her—whether she were in America, in London, or ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... imperial American zone, should be a great Asiatic Power. We have it now in evidence, written in islands among the most gorgeous of those that shine in the Southern seas—islands that are east from the Atlantic and west from the Pacific shores of the One Great Republic—that we may personify hereafter, sitting at the head of the table when the empires of the earth consult themselves as to the courses of empire. Our Course of Empire ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... is some further confusion: Christian philosophers have tried to personify this 'soul of the universe,' for God, they say, thinks and feels and knows. They try to get a personality without form or bounds or dimentions, but it all ends in vagueness and confusion. As for me, and I think I am not so different ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... to get a Jesus. That is to say Jesus was God's Man sent down to swing the world back. Satan is trying his best to get a man—one of the original trustee class, to whom the dominion of the earth was intrusted—a man who will stand for him even as Jesus stood for God. Indeed a man who will personify himself even as Jesus was the personification of God, the express image of His person. When he shall succeed in that the ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... find in the infancy of man you also find in the infancy of nations. It is the same. In both cases there is the same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the unknown. And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother Hubbard and Venus, there is only ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... more discover power in mental than in physical sequences. The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions. The hypothesis of 'power' has been really the source of 'illusion.' The tendency to personify leads us to convert metaphor into fact, to invent a subject of this imaginary 'power,' and thus to create a mythology of beings to carry on the processes of nature. In other words, Brown here follows Hume or even anticipates Comte. As J. S. Mill remarks,[471] this erroneous identification ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... lowest, is the idea of God as an absolute power or principle." To this need only be added the desire to be in right relation to it. Mr. Marett's word "supernaturalism" seems to mean the same thing; "There arises in the region of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify, and even to personify, the mysterious or supernatural something felt; and in the region of will a corresponding impulse to render it innocuous, or, better still, propitious, by force of constraint (i.e. magic), communion, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... We poets personify abstract things, and not poets only but sculptors[7] and painters too. All the great things of the world are those ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... above the man of thought are typical. His heroes, fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the national ideal. His whole vision of life is Scandinavian, bright and vivid, with a tinge of melancholy. Tegner was, with Geijer and Ling, the first to adopt national subjects, to use the Scandinavian ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... the highest good. With that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him, her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed (beat), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with him even in the flesh. Already, in the Vita Nuova,[139] she appears to him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... party. Terrible also is the blind, remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity. Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to personify society at its immemorial task of creating institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... you invite the enlightened nineteenth century to accept the idea of a godhead that is anything else than an abstraction?" continued the weak male voice. "Why, to personify your god is to limit him. How can a ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... class of men have suffered more from the evils of intemperance than our brave sailors, fishermen, and rivermen. Foreigners tell our missionaries to convert our drunken sailors abroad, and when they wish to personify an Englishman, they mockingly reel about like a drunken man. And what lives have been lost through the intemperance of captains and crews! The 'St. George,' with 550 men: 'The Kent,' 'East Indiaman,' ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... this race, who moved westward, seem to have had a special fondness for open air nature, and a willingness to personify the powers of nature. They were glad to live in the open air, and they specially encouraged the virtues which an open-air people prize. Thus no Roman was thought manly who could not swim, and every Greek exercised in the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... how peaceful the glimpses of some great mountain's breast! They disregard the hurricane that goes crashing through their old woods; the cloud-thunder disturbs not them any more than that of their own cataracts, and the lightnings play for their pastime. All minds under any excitation, more or less personify mountains. When much moved, that natural process affects all our feelings, as the language of passion awakened by such objects vividly declares; and then we do assuredly conceive of mountains as endued with life—however dim and vague ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of ...
— Sophist • Plato
... associated with Bel, who, it will be recalled, is the 'god of the lower region,' but who becomes the god of earth par excellence. When, therefore, Bel and Ea are invoked, it is equivalent, in modern parlance, to calling upon earth and water; and just as Bel is used to personify, as it were, the unification of the earthly forces, so Ea becomes, in a comprehensive sense, the watery deep. Ea and Bel assume therefore conspicuous proportions in the developed Babylonian cosmogony and theology. In the cosmogony, Bel is the creator and champion ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... prognostications speedily fulfilled! I was helpless and knew it. For a second time those whose dignified office it was to personify the charity of our Redeemer showed themselves the least charitable of mankind. I was chewing the sour cud of these reflections when I heard Virginia thanking the officers for their paternal resolves in her regard. Strange girl! She thanked ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... suffered in consequence of the state of insecurity in which the people constantly live. A party of their own Indians, a most degraded band of cowardly vagabonds, that lived not a great way from the city, concluded to personify a company of northern savages, in order more successfully to plunder the inhabitants. With shoutings, these vagabonds rushed into the houses of the people, who were so paralyzed by the very sight of Indians in a hostile attitude, that, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... that this tendency of the mind to personify isolated qualities or impulses, was essentially the mythological tendency(647) which had created the religion and expressed itself in the poetry of the Greeks, and possibly contributed to foster Shelley's ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... by Blackman to associate the placenta with the ka, it is of interest to note Moret's suggestion concerning the fourteen forms of the ka, to which von Bissing assigns the general significance "nourishment or offerings". He puts the question whether they do not "personify the elements of material and intellectual prosperity, all that is necessary for the health of body and spirit" ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... sunbeams, for people, and, notwithstanding the luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was at his best. His manner was clear and engaging; he moved his audience to tears and smiles. There was satire and tenderness and the marvellous insight that made him absolutely personify the writers he touched upon. The audience ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... laughed at Theresa, who instead of looking grave and inquiring, as Portia should, at her lord's unusual action and appearance, flung herself into position and out of position with a mirthfulness of behaviour wholly inconsistent with the character she was to personify. How they all laughed! ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... remain content with this entirely legitimate thought of the dependence of finite things on the ideal of the Being of all beings, as a relation of concepts to the Idea, but, dazzled by an irresistible illusion, proceeds to realize, to hypostatize, and to personify this ideal, and, since she herself is dimly conscious of the illegitimacy of such a transformation of the mere Idea into a given object, devises arguments for the existence of God. Reason, moreover, would scarcely be induced to regard a mere creation of its thought ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg |
