"Repulsion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... No one who meets Mr. and Mrs. Lane, at home or abroad, would dream that, at one time, they were driven asunder by a strong repulsion. Few are more deeply attached, or happier in their domestic relations; but neither trespasses on the other's rights, nor interferes with the other's prerogative. Mutual deference, confidence, respect, and love, unite them with a bond ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... that had created it to the hieroglyphs engraved upon the walls of its gigantic edifices.[10] At the same time they were shocked by the coarseness of its fetichism and by the absurdity of its superstitions. Above all they felt an unconquerable repulsion at the worship of animals and plants, which had always been the most striking feature of the vulgar Egyptian religion and which, like all other archaic devotions, seems to have been practised with ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on everyone: but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted that the more you read Walpole the more does the prejudice, which Macaulay and others have helped to create against him, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... would ask, 'What is it that you want?' That question would derive all its meaning from the look with which it was accompanied, and the tone in which it was spoken. It might mean either annoyance and rude repulsion of a request, even before it was presented, or it might mean a glad wish to draw out the petition, and more than half a pledge to bestow it. All depends on the smile with which it was asked and the intonation of voice ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the night, but Stingaree knocked at a lighted window under the veranda, which Mrs. Melvin presently threw up. Her eyes flashed when she recognized one against whom she now harbored a bitterness on quite a different plane of feeling from her former repulsion. Even to his first glance she looked an older and ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... stick, &c., would attract them; but care would be required in making the experiment, from the readiness with which these threads would move upon disturbance of the air. If electric, then it would be important to know whether they were positive or negative; which their attraction, or repulsion, by a stick of sealing-wax, rubbed on the sleeve of a coat, would at once determine. It is well known that these threads are almost perfect insulators of electricity, and would retain a charged state for a long time in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... radio-activity measurements is a modified type of the old gold-leaf electroscope. The measurement is made by the mutual repulsion of quartz fibres acting against a spring—the extent of the repulsion is very clearly shown against a ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... appears to me probable that these symbolize—and if so the symbol is at once full of meaning and grandeur—the inevitable, ever wakeful energies and forces of nature, the marvellous agency of electricity, chemical affinity, heat, attraction, repulsion, and so forth. We are accustomed to speak of "blind force;" but here observe the wheels are full of eyes, ever vigilant to fulfil the purpose for which they are appointed. And this representation of forces appears necessary to complete a symbolic representation of God in nature: ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... many scientific people fail to remember —Gravity and Apergy, or the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The pull in is and must be always balanced by the pull out. There is in the universe as much repulsion as attraction, and the former is a force quite as important as the latter. The bubble's speed kept increasing until apergy, the tendency to fly off, ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... pas a eclairer, que le premier pas, le pas difficile a faire pour arriver a expliquer la creation par des modifications successives, c'est le passage de la matiere inorganique a la matiere organisee, et il imagine la chaleur et l'electricite comme etant les deux facteurs qui par attraction ou repulsion finissent par former ces petits amas organises qui seront le point de depart de toutes les ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... and without friction. The assistant who is pushing on the instrument must be warned to stop if at any time resistance gives way. This may mean the turning of the fetus, in which case the object of repulsion has been accomplished, but much more probably it implies the displacement of the instrument from the body of the fetus, and unguarded pressure may drive it through the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... putting it, of course. Te Kop himself was probably no favourite, for he scarce appealed to my judgment as a type of industry. And there must be many others whom the king (to adhere to the formula) does not like. Do these unfortunates like the king? Or is not rather the repulsion mutual? and the conscientious Tembinok', like the conscientious Braxfield before him, and many other conscientious rulers and judges before either, surrounded by a considerable body of "grumbletonians"? Take the cook, for instance, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doubtfully his approach. But when he was within a few feet of her, wonder and interest gave way to terror. His bulk, his blackness, his square, mighty head, his big, blazing eyes, and short, thick muzzle filled her with repulsion and amazement. His voice, too, though unmistakably caressing and persuasive, was too daunting in its strangeness. With a wild snort, she turned and fled into the woods with a speed that he could not ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... with an almost involuntary repulsion. For the second time that almost satyr-like grin on ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away or any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she knew—indeed, by all she had been told—Jack Fyfe was tarred with the same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no feeling of repulsion. ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... no mustache—and boldly assertive chin deeply cleft in the centre—affected Beryl very unpleasantly, as a perplexing disagreeable memory; an uncanny resemblance hovering just beyond the grasp of identification. A feeling of unaccountable repulsion made her shiver, and she breathed more freely, when he hewed slightly, and walked on toward his horse. Upon the attorney her extraordinary appearance produced a profound impression, and in his brief scrutiny, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful. The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excites intense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes. The original innate difference is not ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning loved her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any imaginative quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The relationship seemed to have almost as much to do with blood and body as a mortgage. It was something that ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... unnecessary distance from his eyes, holding it as he did so daintily between finger and thumb. Its subtle appeal to his senses as a man failed to reach him. It simply aroused an old feeling of reserve toward the sex it represented. His face altered slightly and he dropped it suddenly with an odd repulsion, as he might have dropped a snake, on ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... position of Victor. He, however, having a force at least double that of Wellesley, assumed the offensive, and attacked the allies, on the 28th, at Talaveyra de la Reyna. The battle ended in the total defeat and repulsion of Victor; but Wellesley found it impossible to advance further into Spain, because Ney, Soult and Mortier were assembling their divisions, with the view of coming between him and Portugal. The English retired, therefore, to Badajos, and thence ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... win her for his wife, and she almost regretted she could not return his affection: it might be true affection—something beyond and above the dominant whim of an imperious nature. And what a solution to all her difficulties! But it was impossible she could overcome the repulsion which the idea of marriage with any man she did not love inspired. There was to her but one in the world to whom she could hold allegiance, and he was forbidden by all sense of self-respect and modesty. How was it that, strive as she might to fill her mind to his exclusion, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... and high aspirations,—those lips of eloquent music,—that great soul, which trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,—that large heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,—that hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,—oh, friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there no more that we can do now than to give thee ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... feet astern, while the shark could plainly be seen gobbling the refuse which the cook had just flung out from the galley. His long, dirty-white body was anything but pleasant, and when he turned over to catch a morsel and his V-shaped mouth became evident, Mart felt a repulsion that ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... altogether so steady as it might have been, as he swaggered into his mother's presence. His handsome face was deeply flushed. He was laughing boisterously; but there was that in his aspect which made his sister turn away with a look of repulsion, though his mother's glance rested on him with a look of admiring pride that savoured of adoration. In her fond and foolish eyes he was perfection, and the more he copied the vices and the follies of the gallants about the person of the King, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... so terrible a visage or exhibited more grossly the debasing influence of illicit ambitions. I am sure that I shall look upon the ruin wrought by the armies of the Central Empires with the same repulsion and deep indignation that they stir in the hearts of the men of France and Belgium, and I appreciate, as you do, sir, the necessity of such action in the final settlement of the issues of the war as will not only rebuke ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... sitting erect in one of the motors the man for whom he had felt at first sight an invincible repulsion. Prince Karl of Auersperg. Young von Arnheim had represented the good prince to him, but here was the medieval type, the believer in divine right, and in his own superiority, decreed even before birth. John noted in the moonlight his air of ownership, his insolent eyes and his heavy, arrogant ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sprang up. His baffled hands had not even touched her. "David Hull!" she cried, and the indignation and the repulsion in her tone and in her manner were not simulated, though her artfulness hastened to make real use of them. She loved to rouse men to frenzy. She knew that the sight of their frenzy would chill her—would fill her with an emotion that would enable her to ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... see the poor fellow. Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also ennobled by that almost saintly dignity which is given by illness, the first impression made on Leam was one of acute physical repulsion: the second only gave room to compassion. Fortunately, that little shudder of hers was unnoticed, and Alick saw only the beloved face, more beautiful to him than anything out of heaven, with its grave ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... give him his full title—crossed the path when near the solitary figure, so as to have a full view of her face. At that moment Miss Lafitte raised her eyes, and their expression when they rested on Mrs. Felton was hard to interpret. It seemed a mixture of repulsion and dread. She drew back as they went by, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been at twenty. What did he want with a wife—still more, with a son? The thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps—with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son—with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... something—but they didn't do this! With incalculable rapidity a force was gathering within her, a tremendous, assimilative force, drawing from every sense, every corner of her brain, and as it surged up inside her she felt an enormous terrified repulsion. She drew her arms in close to her side ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... outlines must suffice: any attempt to draw the lines more sharply would only falsify the picture. The manifold play of mutual attraction and repulsion among those earliest political atoms, the cantons, passed away in Latium without witnesses competent to tell the tale. We must now be content to realise the one great abiding fact that they possessed a common centre, to which they did not sacrifice their individual independence, but ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of extraordinary brilliancy and power was at this time exercising a great influence either of attraction or repulsion on all serious students of history. Those who are old enough to remember the appearance of the first volume of Buckle's 'History,' in 1857, and of the second volume, in 1861, will remember also how rapidly and how passionately it divided opinion. It was in truth ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... forehead became contracted with horror—he stood silent a few seconds, petrified and overwhelmed with his emotions—his body shrinking back in an attitude of repulsion and dislike, as if a venomous reptile were before his sight. His regard then fell full on Loup Bergund, and the terrible severity of its expression made the unworthy tyrant shrink beneath his glance ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... relation in which the marine and sailor stand toward each other—the mutual repulsion implied by a system of checks—will, in degree, apply to nearly the entire interior of a man-of-war's discipline. The whole body of this discipline is emphatically a system of cruel cogs and wheels, systematically grinding up in one common hopper all that might minister ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to absolute, sick repulsion from all the facts of his existence. With the passing minutes the lines deepened on his haggard countenance, his expression perceptibly aged. The stubble of beard that had grown since the day before grizzled his ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... him, then, with a great, inner relief that the situation was at last swinging around to a normal kidnapping. Still, Al Woodruff seemed unable to play his part realistically. He failed to fill her with fear and repulsion. She had to think back, to remember that he had killed men, in order to realise her own danger. Now, for instance, he merely forced her back to the campfire, pulled the saddle strings from his pocket and tied her ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... through the whole of the coils in series, forces of attraction and repulsion are brought into existence which tend to force one movable coil upwards and the other movable coil downwards. This tendency is resisted by the weight of a mass of metal, which can be caused to slide along ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... those thoughtful men, and the millions of whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which is to us as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about which they know nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine Empire, weary yourselves ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... hands were close to his throat while he shrank from the white fury in her face. Suddenly her arms dropped to her sides. Such a feeling of physical repulsion swept over her that she could not touch him ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... legs, dragged him to the door and threw him into the road outside. Then he came back, laughing loudly, and swaggering as though his feat had been one to be proud of. Solange had shuddered and shrunk for a moment, but almost at once she shook herself as though casting off her repulsion and ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Elena, replacing the orchid with a gesture of repulsion, very different from her former one of curiosity. She then joined in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... doubly to be noted now. It was blood against blood as they faced each other. And it came to me that it was more than a personal duel. No wrong is so unforgivable as one from our own family whose secret weaknesses we know and share, and I felt that the repulsion in the woman's eyes was part for herself and part for her pride of race. Yet I was uncertain of the issue. The tie of blood is strong, and after a few minutes I thought that Starling was gaining ground. His great personality enwrapped us all, and his strange, compelling voice ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to conceive any other aim in life. In moments of benevolence she had tried to take an interest in the sorrows of other people: but she could not do it. The sufferings of others filled her with an ungovernable feeling of repulsion: her nerves were not strong enough to bear them. To appease her conscience she had occasionally done something which looked like philanthropy: but the result ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... herself away, and finding herself held fast her quick anger rose and she lifted the hand which held the whip and blindly slashed the air about her; her eyes closed, her heart swelling with horror and fear. A great repulsion for the man whom hitherto she had regarded with deep respect surged over her. To get away from him at once was her greatest desire. She lashed out again with her whip, blindly, not seeing what she struck, almost beside herself with ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... thin summer clothing, as Tristan seized Alice's hand and towed her toward the spreading shelter. I followed them at first, then began to lag with an odd unwillingness. I had been only half serious in my objection, but all at once that tree exercised an odd repulsion on me; an imaginary picture of the electric fluid coursing through my shriveling nerve-channels ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... are the eternal laws upon which the cosmos is founded. They constitute the inseparable affinities, attraction and repulsion, of everything within the realm of manifested being. In this mystic constellation, we see the first ideas of maternal instinct arise. This is a necessary result of the impulsive action of the heart in Leo—the reaction from a state of imperious, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Razumihin was more than ecstatic and Raskolnikov perceived it with repulsion. He was alarmed, too, by what Razumihin had just ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... head, and a soft, flabby, uninteresting face, which, however, was redeemed from vacancy by the gleam and glitter of his remarkably keen and piercing black eyes. His hair was grey, and a straggling beard, grey also, adorned his heavy chin. Gladys was conscious of a strong sense of repulsion as she looked at him, but she tried not to show it, and feebly smiled as she ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... found herself considering Drake's words as a light thrown upon the man who spoke them, rather than as the description of an actual incident. The humiliation which she experienced made her shrink with a certain repulsion from her recollections of Gorley and dwell instead upon the contrasting tones in Drake's voice, the contrasting expressions upon his face when he spoke to her and when he merely narrated his story. In the first instance gentleness had been the dominant characteristic, ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... in preventing an immediate explosion, the mere fact of a total secession, and of the formation of two Confederacies, almost equal, (in appearance at least,) will permit no one to count on the prolonged preservation of peace. What repulsion, what grievances will be found in all relations, in all questions! And from a grievance to war, from war to negro insurrections, what will be the distance, I ask? The South will be then an immense powder magazine, to which the first spark will set fire. And the ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... I—I—thought that to escape me, she might have leaped into the water. She was capable of it. Gwendolen had a strong nature. The struggle between duty and repulsion made havoc even in her infantile breast. Besides, we had had a scene that morning—a secret scene in which she showed absolute terror of me. It broke my heart, and when she disappeared in that mysterious way—and—and—one of her shoes was found on the slope, what was I to think but that she had ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... eventually passed within the entrance. The passage was narrow, low, steep, and extremely slippery. With an Arab to each hand—as a precaution against a nasty fall—the soldier, breathing a muggy atmosphere, sweating at every pore, and filled with repulsion at the close proximity of his yelling conductors, made a crab-like and painful progress through darkness over the 220 feet of distance to the King's Chamber. This apartment, viewed by candlelight or a flare now and then from a piece of magnesium wire, does ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... a spiritual repulsion to which physical repulsion at its worst is but a pale shadow. Those who give love to one who cannot love may not escape the stroke of that poisoned fang. Sooner or later that ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... divorce from expediency and convenience, was one that Burke's political judgment found preposterous and unendurable. He hated the arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the English assumptions over the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when he found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanent advantage which their victory would procure for the mother country or for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a victory; not by the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... kindness, that she has forfeited her child's respect, and never deserved its love, only increases her resentment and adds poignancy to the pang. She feels the slight form start and shiver with a strange, fearful repulsion as she places it on her lap. Would the strong natural affection nature had implanted there, so cruelly crushed out, now nearly if not quite dead, arise anew to life, and grow stronger than this ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that which will later be love, holy and beautiful, between man and woman characterize these years. At first there is a mutual repulsion between the sexes. The boys are "so rough and horrid," and as for the girls—the masculine sentiment concerning them was voiced by one young cavalier in the words, "Oh, mush!" when his Sunday School class was asked if they ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... Perhaps it may be wise to counteract this with a little quiet promotion of ideas of safety and prosperity, based on order and law. It may be well to calm the nerves of the timorous and it can do no harm to set in motion a counter wave of horror and repulsion against those who are planning to lead the world back to conditions of tribal savagery. Educational work is always beneficent. Let us have much of that but no panic. The power of truth and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... desert are, it seems to me, in all cases—even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth—untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps hatred; but we do not judge. This is a point of view which emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the play afterwards, we fall back ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... showed her repulsion. Then she drew a long breath and apparently made up her mind to some ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... revolted as she continues)—struck you purposely, deliberately, with the intention of hurting you, with a whip bought for the purpose! Would you remember that, do you think? (Gloria utters an exclamation of indignant repulsion.) That would have been your last recollection of your father, Gloria, if I had not taken you away from him. I have kept him out of your life: keep him now out of mine by never mentioning him to me again. (Gloria, with a shudder, ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... the tail being about 100 millions of miles in length, and the head about 127,000 miles in diameter. A detailed study which he gave to this comet prompted Olbers to put forward that theory of electrical repulsion which, as we have seen, has since been so carefully worked out by Bredikhine. Olbers had noticed that the particles expelled from the head appeared to travel to the end of the tail in about eleven minutes, thus showing a velocity per ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... They prefer seeing a particular palm tree to hearing a general description of palms. A narrative of some special deed of kindness moves them more than a discourse on kindness. They feel a natural drawing toward real, definite persons and things, and an indifference or repulsion toward generalities. They prefer the story to the moral. Children are little materialists. They dwell in the sense-world, or in the world of imagination with ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... Europe. The Greek philosopher Empedocles looked on the world as the product of two all-pervading forces, love and hate, acting on blind matter: love brought cognate particles together and held them in union; hate or repulsion kept asunder the unlike or hostile elements. We may use the terms of this old cosmogony in reference to existing political conditions, and assert that these two elemental principles have drawn Europe apart into two hostile masses; with this difference, that the allies ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... am frightening you to no purpose," Fraisier continued. (La Cibot's feeling of repulsion had not escaped him.) "The affairs which made Mme. la Presidente's dreadful reputation are so well known at the law-courts, that you can make inquiries there if you like. The great person who was all but sent into a lunatic asylum was the Marquis d'Espard. The Marquis d'Esgrignon was saved from ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... slumbers, forgetful of the return of day, of the holy season, and of the friend whom he had so coldly received and was now so churlishly neglecting. John's disgust redoubled at the thought, but hunger was beginning to grow stronger than repulsion, and as a step to breakfast, if nothing else, he must find ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can't say, but McMurtrie's politeness always filled me with a feeling of repulsion. There was something curiously ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... to search for an old thing merely because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do. Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore the more precious when we have it really ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatest resemblance to one another, will present the strongest mutual attraction, but they cannot, on that account, compose an independent whole; for the degrees of this affinity imperceptibly diminish and increase, and in the midst of so many transitions there is no absolute repulsion, no total separation, even between the most discordant elements. Take which you will of these masses which have assumed an organic form according to their own inherent energy; if you do not forcibly divide them by a mechanical operation, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... war on account of the Russian bone; but for many this fear has now been almost quieted by the total collapse of the Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel uprisings from within, which were strongly supported by the Allies; and by the repulsion of the Polish invasion which had England, France and the ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest—these were men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves, condemned to penal servitude; ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... feeling of involuntary repulsion, at first drew back slightly, instead of taking the hand offered by the Slasher; then, recollecting that, after all, he owed his life to this man, he wished to make amends for this first movement of repugnance. But the Slasher had perceived it; a ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Ricks's rasping voice still talking to the few customers who were left. He knew, without glancing up, just how Ricks looked when he said the words; he knew how his teeth pushed his lips back, and how his restless little eyes watched everything at once. A sudden fierce repulsion swept over him for peddling, ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... prisoner and the man who should be here is stalking about camp, planning more robberies. Yet I'd rather associate with the very worst of the deserters or dead beats inside there," and the dark eyes glanced almost in horror—the slender figure shook with mingled repulsion and chill—"than with that smooth-tongued sneak and liar. There's no crime too mean for him to commit, Mr. Gray, and the men are beginning to know it, though the colonel won't. For God's sake get me ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... The stranger was young, twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps, thick set and powerful, tanned to the brownness of an Indian by sun, wind and rain, but the features obviously were those of the white race. It was an evil face, but a strong one. Henry felt a shiver of repulsion. He felt that something demoniac had entered the lodge, because he knew that this was Simon Girty, the terrible renegade, now fully launched upon the career that made his name infamous throughout the Ohio Valley ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... than a perception of some sort of regularity, and as regularity is an inescapable condition of existence, all that it proves is existence. On that point there is no dispute. And the moral justification of the cosmic process while intellectually indefensible, adds an element of moral repulsion. That the process as we know it is morally repugnant is shown by the appeal to the future, the request to suspend judgment till such time as the plan is completed, when it is hoped that the end will justify the means. God, it is trusted, will justify himself in the future. But ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... on her companion. The tears sprang to Marcia's eyes. Yet her temperament did not tend to easy weeping; and at the root of her mind in this very moment were feelings of repulsion and of doubt, mingled with impressions of pity. But the hours at Hoddon Grey had been hours of deep and transforming emotion; they had left her a more sensitive and ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the herald, and the genealogist, in short, Notes relating to all subjects but such as are, in popular discourse, termed either political or polemical, should meet in our columns in such juxta-position, as to give fair play to any natural attraction or repulsion between them, and so that if there are any hooks and eyes among them, they may ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... asked. "Whose fault was it? Mine?" With a strange thrill of fear and repulsion, she clenched her teeth and held herself until the fit of trembling passed. "Is this real, Ethel Knight? Do you mean to say this is what love is—just this, just this?" She shook her head and bit her lips. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... other, and in all cases whatever, in which inanimate or dead bodies act on each other, the effects produced are motion, or chemical attraction; for though there may appear to be other species of action which sometimes take place, such as electric and magnetic attraction and repulsion, yet these are usually referred to the head ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... the table and placing his hand on her bare shoulder, drew his fingers voluptuously down the arm. Virginia started back, feeling repulsion and disgust even at ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... takes sides. The same faith that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love, forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force works out its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion. And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe where masses are in continual conflict and new combinations are engendered out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... repulsion did not arise, but rather the assurance that success and pleasure would attend a faithful dispensing of the word for reforming and elevating the prisoner in his bonds, as well as in efforts to save sinners under ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Prescott shuddered with repulsion. Instinctively he foresaw what was coming, and there was no task which he would not have preferred in its place. And he was expected, too, at such a moment, to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... with all the depths of her emotion roused to tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements, she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judicious Hooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr. Casaubon's time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband's ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... ever coming any nearer. Next is the inner ring of attraction. Those who come within its irresistible influence are drawn so close that it seems as if they must become one with her sooner or later. But within this ring is another,—an atmospheric girdle, one of repulsion, which love, no matter how enterprising, no matter how prevailing or how insinuating, has never passed, and, if we judge of what is to be by what has been, never will. Perhaps Nature loved Number Five so well that she grudged her to any mortal man, and gave her this ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... clear of the vulgar errors of mythologists. They have in every age introduced into nature active causes without contact, continuity, or proximity; and, even in our days, continue to extort worship towards the unseen and occult powers of attraction or sympathy, and of repulsion or antipathy! It is true, they say that such words only express results or phenomena, and others equivocate by saying there is in no case any contact:—but I reply, that to give names to proximate causes does not correspond with my notions ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... distorted images of dog and deerlike forms, of birds—of dwarfs and here and there the simulacra of the giant frogs! Spore cases, yellowish green, as large as mitres and much resembling them in shape protruded from the heaps. My repulsion grew into a ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... said this with such unctuous satisfaction that even the callous lawyer experienced a slight ripple of repulsion. He now saw clearly in his fatuous visitor the conceit of the lady-killer, the egoistic ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... as reciprocal foils do these elements act, which is the feeble conception of many, but by union. They are the sexual forces in music: "male and female created he them;" and these mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities by repulsion, but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... taken the motherless girl to her arms, but first, at Corp's discovery, she had drawn back in uncontrollable repulsion, and Grizel, about to go to her, saw it, and turned from her to Tommy. Her eyes rested on him beseechingly, with a look he saw only once again in them until she was a woman, but his first thought was not for Grizel. Elspeth was clinging ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Bill knew it all with an intimacy that robbed it of any charm. He had only repulsion, but repulsion that failed to deny a certain attraction. His hot words broke through the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... as much as to say, we must suit the incantation to the listener, so that when he hears the words he shall not think that the enchanter is laughing at him in his sleeve. I cannot certainly conceive a method better calculated to excite hatred and repulsion than to go to some one who knows that he is small and ugly and a weakling, and to breathe in his ears the flattering tale that he is beautiful and tall and stalwart. But do you know any other ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... sight of the deep, circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden, fish-like eyes, and the head, with its short, coarse, scantily-growing hair—a head utterly divested of all the faculties of the senses—who would not have experienced, as Genestas did, an instinctive feeling of repulsion for a being that had neither the physical beauty of an animal nor the mental endowments of man, who was possessed of neither instinct nor reason, and who had never heard nor spoken any kind of articulate speech? It ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... bullet straight when a man has never, in all his life, fired a gun. And without looking he could see that horrible, red stream creeping toward him like some monster in a nightmare. His flesh crimpled with physical repulsion, but he meant to try; perhaps he could shoot the man in the mask, so that there would be another huddled, lifeless Thing on the floor, ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... drowned in a piercing scream, as Estrella came to herself and understood. Always the rawhide had possessed for her an occult fascination and repulsion. She had never been able to touch it without a shudder, and yet she had always been drawn to experiment with it. The terror of her doom had now added to it for her all the vague and premonitory terrors which ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... in another state of existence. If we take, for instance, the inertia of matter, and consider it philosophically, we can make of it nothing more than a power of resistance, or persistence, residing in certain points, which we call particles of matter. The same is true of attraction and repulsion. These are forces residing in the same points; and these forces are all we know, or can know, about them. So of the sensible qualities of matter; color, for instance. This is merely the power of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... actively; force driving apart.] Repulsion — N. repulsion; driving from &c v.; repulse, abduction. magnetic repulsion, magnetic levitation; antigravity. V. repel, push from, drive apart, drive from &c 276; chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the cold shoulder; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... a wonderful effect; and my scrutinising gaze may have appeared rude enough to him. I cannot say that he elicited my admiration. On the contrary, his appearance produced an opposite effect. I beheld him with, what might be termed an instinct of repulsion: since I could assign no precise reason for the dislike with which he had inspired me on sight. He was a man of about thirty years of age; of a thin spare body, less than medium height; and features slightly marked with, the bar sinister. A face without beard—skin ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... felt something like the reverse side of his mask. On one side of that mask he had the sympathy of the people, who welcomed Gwynplaine; on the other, the contempt of the great, rejecting Lord Fermain Clancharlie. On one side, attraction; on the other, repulsion; both leading him towards the shadows. He felt himself, as it were, struck from behind. Fate strikes treacherous blows. Everything will be explained hereafter, but, in the meantime, destiny is a snare, and man sinks into its pitfalls. He had expected to rise, and was welcomed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... on a higher plane. Married people live in such close relations that each becomes absorbed by the other, and then having nothing fresh to give, what was once attraction becomes repulsion. I see these things so plainly myself that the criticism, and may be, censure of a multitude, jealous of personal freedom, affects me no more than the passing breeze. I know that if I stand upon a mount and behold a beautiful ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... an Owl" and the "Lion devouring a Boar." What a series of banquets on blood and warm, almost living flesh is here presented! How cruel these creatures are to each other, is the thought that first comes to us, but a second, reminds that it is but their instinct and a necessity of natural law, and repulsion is lost in astonishment and delight at the marvellous fidelity with which the sculptor has rendered these links in the great chain of animal life. Their (as we call it) savage eagerness, their almost ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... individuation, is here designated polarity; for instance, the power termed magnetism (not meaning that there is necessarily an actual tangible magnet in the case) has two poles, the negative, answering to attraction, rest, carbon, &c., and the positive, answering to repulsion, mobility, azote, &c.; and as the magnetic needle which points to the north necessarily indicates thereby the south, so the power disposing to rest has necessarily a counteracting influence disposing to mobility, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cried Polly, recovering herself as she saw a chance to make things right for Mother Pepper; "it all came to me, Grandpapa, all alone by myself. Oh! I hate the big display!" she declared with sudden vehemence, astonishing herself with the repulsion that now seized her. ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... throw reenforcements and provisions into Fort Sumter, by means of the steamer Star of the West, resulted in the repulsion of that vessel at the mouth of the harbor, by the authorities of South Carolina, on the morning of the 9th of January. On her refusal to heave-to, she was fired upon, and put back to sea, with her recruits and supplies. A telegraphic account of this event was handed ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... were ready and acquiescent in its fall; regretful, but resigned—very much resigned. This attitude was more marked among the younger men, those at the school. In the service outside I found somewhat the same point of view, but repulsion was keener. The navy then, even more than now, symbolized the exterior activities of the country, which are committed by the Constitution to the Union. Hence, the life of the profession naturally nurtured pride in the nation; and while States'-Rights had undermined the principle of loyalty ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... cohesion crucifixion declension dimension dissension distortion divulsion expulsion impulsion insertion intention occasion propulsion recursion repulsion revulsion ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... beautiful things, especially things on a certain plane of idea? He had admired other women: in what then did his admiration for this woman differ from that, which others had drawn from him? In his admiration for other women there had always been a sense of repulsion; this feeling of repulsion seemed to be absent from his admiration for Kitty.... He hardly perceived any sex in her; she was sexless as a work of art, as the women of the first Italian ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... wish it, Mrs. Harold," was the reply in a tone which meant that Juno had instantly donned her armor of repulsion ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... best illustrations of repulsion between factors occurs in the sweet pea. We have already seen that the loss of the blue or purple factor (B) from the wild bicolor results in the formation of the red bicolor known as Painted Lady (Pl. IV., 7). Further, we have seen that ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... of Marimonda has always awakened in Selkirk a sentiment of repulsion; she not only reminds him of Stradling, but with her withered cheeks, projecting jaw, and especially her dancing motion, he now imagines that she resembles him; and yet, pausing before her, he contemplates her not without a lively emotion ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... might have a beauty and a temperament which would be her ruin did her natural protectors tell her that she was a pariah, an outcast, that they could have none of her. Betty conjured her up, a charming and pathetic vision; but in vain. The repulsion was physical, inherited from generations of proud and intolerant women, and she could not ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... pity, anger, tenderness, repulsion—the whole range of feeling, it seemed, between love and hate—swept over her as she looked at the great gaunt form stretched there. Colin was still in riding clothes and booted and spurred. His moleskins ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... either (1) "Collision ... causes a natural repulsion," or (2) "When brought into contact ... one is naturally repelled," or (if "ill-treatment" is emphatic), (3) "One is naturally repelled by ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... delicate graces, half feline, half feminine (if these two be not the same). All these passed like clouds over the unquiet sea of her nature, reflecting the changing skies of circumstance, and were fitted to produce a fascination ever on the verge of repulsion even when it was strongest. Ysolinde was the more ready of speech, but her words were touched constantly with dainty malice and clawed with subtlest spite. She catspawed with men and things, often setting the hidden spur under the velvet foot deeply ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... understanding, the information, the liberalized feeling, and the propriety of deportment, which we are to ascribe to the higher and cultivated portion, goes downward into the lower, it should seem impossible but there must be more of repulsion than of amicable disposition and communication between them. We may suspect, perhaps, that those more privileged classes are not generally desirous that the interval were much less wide, provided that without cultivation of the lower orders the nuisance of their annoying and formidable temper ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding," our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the skeleton grinning ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the difference between Pharisee and Sadducee was political rather than theological. It was not till Judaism came into contact, contact alike of attraction and repulsion, with other systems that a desire or a need for formulating Articles of Faith was felt. Philo, coming under the Hellenic spirit, was thus the first to make the attempt. In the last chapter of the tract on the Creation (De Opifico, lxi.), ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams |
