"Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beautiful than her rival, as was the case with Cleopatra, the more conscious of the two engaged in such a match is bound in the end to be less happy in her discoveries, less spontaneous in her inventions, and therefore less successful in her results. For natural spontaneity is quickly felt and appreciated by a group of fellow-beings, as is also the element of vexation and overanxiousness, which Cleopatra was beginning to reveal despite all her efforts ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... Spontaneity must be the soul of such a movement. "It was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... tingled in every nerve, less at the actual words than at the manner of their utterance—a mingling of embarrassment and schooled politeness, which set her at arm's length, checked spontaneity, and brought her down from the heights with the speed ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... there is nothing I dread more than Mr. Seward's ridicule. I would rather walk up to the cannon's mouth than encounter it." "I too am with you," "And I," said two or three others who had been silent at the table. I never had a more serious, heartfelt conversation than with these ladies. Mrs. Seward's spontaneity and earnestness had moved them all deeply, and when the Senator appeared the first word he said was, "Before we part I must confess that I was fairly vanquished by you and the Judge, on my own principles ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his inheritance. It seems strange ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... a very genial person; she also, in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dispensation while they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... earlier and purely secular work there is something, though less of this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainly no poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity and want of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, and which he used with most success—the trochaic dimeter catalectic of seven syllables—lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable to this frequently ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for originality and spontaneity before all other qualities in a dramatic artist was characteristic of herself, though not of her nation. Thus it was that Madame Dorval, the heroine of Antony and Marion Delorme, won her unbounded admiration. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... generally. It was possible still, of course, but such things are done best on the spot, the personal touch and presence of value; arranged by correspondence it becomes another thing at once and loses spontaneity. The accent lies on the wrong details. Sympathy is watered by the post.... Importance lodges in angles not intended for it. Master of his time, with certain means at his disposal, a modicum of ability as well, he was free to work hard on the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... psycho-neural and muscular forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of heredity. The best guide to the former is interest, zest, and spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the same organs as does ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... sun-downs to teach me in the arts that enrapture, exalt, supernaturalise. Sing me a lullaby, O Mother eternal! Give me to drink of thy love, divine and diabolic; thy cruelty and thy kindness, I accept both, if thou wilt but whisper to me the secret of both. Anoint me with the chrism of spontaneity that I may be ever worthy of thee.—Withdraw not from me thy hand, lest universal love and sympathy die in my breast.—I implore thee, O Mother eternal, O sea-throned, heaven-canopied Goddess, I prostrate my face before thee, I surrender myself wholly to thee. And whether I be to-morrow the censer ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... details. The basis of the system is a declaration of the eternity of matter, and its submission at remote intervals to decay and re-formation; but this and the organisation of animal life are but the results of spontaneity and procession, not the products of will and design on the part of an all ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... adaptation, establishes itself as a result of the spontaneity of the exercises; the free development of a personality which grows and organizes itself is that which determines such an internal condition, just as in the body of the embryo the heart, in process of development, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... by the spontaneity of the huge popular turnout. "It means," said the girl, as they made their exit, "that San Francisco is again aroused to its danger. What a great, good natured, easy-going body of men and women this town is! We feed on novelty and are easily wearied. That's why so ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... series to which uniform experience assures him it must belong. He regards all that he witnesses in the present as the efflux and sequence of something that has gone before, and as the source of a system of events which is to follow. The notion of spontaneity, by which in his ruder state he accounted for natural events, is abandoned; the idea that nature is an aggregate of independent parts also disappears, as the connection and mutual dependence of physical powers become more and more manifest: until he is finally led to regard Nature as an organic ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... complexity, of her extreme sensitiveness, could have conceived "Patroclus," nor could she herself hope to complete it successfully at any other period of her life. Any earlier she would have been too immature to adapt herself to its demands; any later she would have lost the spontaneity, the jeunesse, and the freshness which were to contribute to its ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the curtain on my college days I must relate a little adventure which is amusing as an illustration of my reverend friend Napier's enthusiastic spontaneity. My own share in the farce is a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... insupportable fatality; that is to say, into the Mohammedan fate, which is the worst of all, because it does away with foresight and good counsel. However, it is well to explain how this dependency of our voluntary actions does not prevent that there may be at the bottom of things a marvellous spontaneity in us, which in a certain sense renders the mind, in its resolutions, independent of the physical influence of all other creatures. This spontaneity, but little known hitherto, which raises our empire over our actions as much as it is possible, is a consequence of the system of preestablished ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... an orator of preeminent power. In fertility of thought, spontaneity of expression, modulation of voice, and grace of gesture, he has had few equals. He always spoke from a deep sense of duty. When he began a sentence you could not always foresee how he would end it, but he always succeeded. He had an extraordinary ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... greatest significance and importance arises from the fact that, for the most part, community organization of many diverse types is springing up in rural communities throughout the country as a means of meeting their local needs. This spontaneity of the movement is the best evidence that changing conditions have brought about a real need for some better machinery for ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... wrote it and tore it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on her ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... their disarmed understandings as far down the vale of tears as he deemed wise, then permitted himself a magnificent burst of spontaneity. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... eyebrow—to borrow Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow"—and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit mistress for him—this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her. The women of his dreams were quite other—beautiful, voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty thought, with dark amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic melodies. They hovered about him as he wrote and played—Venuses rising from the seas ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of procedure, recognized by treaty or statute, for the regulation of matters between the government and the several tribes. So far as the law is concerned, complete anarchy exists in Indian affairs; and nothing but the singular homogeneity of Indian communities, and the almost unaccountable spontaneity and unanimity of public sentiment within them, has thus far prevented the attention of Congress and the country being called most painfully to the unpardonable negligence of the national legislature in failing to provide a substitute for the time-honored policy which ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... novelist's descriptions of men as the leaders and aggressors in love is not fiction but the common fact of real life. Man's tendency towards leadership in love is not scientifically explained by any superficial assumption that established social conventions have repressed an original spontaneity of women. On the contrary, there are the best of physiological and psychological reasons for believing that the social conventions have arisen as an expression of masculine aggressiveness and natural tendency towards leadership in affairs of the heart. The ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... any resemblance between the nervous impulse in plants and animals? In the animal there are certain automatically pulsating tissues like the heart. Are there any such spontaneously beating tissues in a plant? What is the meaning of spontaneity? And lastly, when by the blow of death, life itself is finally extinguished, will it be possible to detect the critical moment? And does the plant then exert itself to make one overwhelming reply, after which response ceases altogether? Its autobiography can only be regarded as complete, if, with ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... to carry conviction in inventing letters for fictitious persons than in making them converse. In the latter case there is a background; there is the life and movement of the various characters, the spontaneity of question and reply, and the running interchange of talk, all helping to keep a spell upon the reader. The letter gives much less chance of illusion, and we may very soon become conscious of the author—instead of the suffered ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... mass and organize them—they are made to occur at regular times and under fixed conditions, as in the Christian Lent, the Moslem Ramadan, and the Creek Busk. Such arrangements give orderliness to outward religious life, but are likely to diminish or destroy spontaneity in observances. Ceremonies of this sort have great vitality—they are handed on from age to age, the later religion adopting and modifying and reinterpreting the forms of the earlier. In such cases the lower conceptions survive in the minds of the masses, and are moralized by the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... sitters that it is scarcely to be wondered at that it sometimes failed him. Occasionally he resorted to such artificial devices as were common among his contemporaries. Such fresh inspirations as the Strawberry Girl and Master Bunbury could come but rarely in a lifetime. The spontaneity of Miss Bowles is perhaps ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous episode of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... fixed rigid outlines. It admits of as many inflections as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or left: it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... spontaneous power of the will, so peculiar to man and to the higher animals, are altogether so many outcomes of certain conditions of matter and nothing else, makes at best merely a subjective statement. He cannot help acknowledging that spontaneity is not a quality of matter. He is then driven to the contention that what we believe to be spontaneous in us, is, after all, an unconscious result of external impulses only. His contention rests ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... to see that between the rich complexity of the workings of the whole mind and the means by which we would fain render them articulate, there yawns a gap which no effort can bridge over? Even the poet fails—much more the scientist! To refuse to take cognisance of the fresh spontaneity of feeling and intuition is to rob life of its higher joys and its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... earlier centuries, has in large measure reversed that of the age in which they were born. The former, and particularly where it undertook to scourge the vices, the heresies, and the follies of the period, lacks entirely that air of simplicity and spontaneity—that 'wild-warlock' lilt, that 'wild happiness of thought and expression'—which, in the phrase of Robert Burns, marks 'our native manner and language' in ballad poetry certainly not less than in lyrical song. The laureated bard, honoured of the Court and blessed by ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,—you must bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry. That is just as much discrimination as you have. Tell you to be gentle, and you think ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... possibilities of his nature. It was not the fine and essential difference between man and woman, but that more fatal gulf in which there would appear no certain glimpses of a royally endowed love in all its spontaneity, its glow of feeling, its variation of rich emotions. How would she, with her versatile, changeful soul, with its cycle of moods, ever live in the strong, steady ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the uninitiated amateur about three sentences of description mark the limit of his ability to see and describe. To get started, to gain confidence in one's ability to say something, to acquire freedom and spontaneity of expression,—this is the first step in the practice of composition. Afterward, when the pupil has discovered that he really has something to say,—enough indeed to cover three or four pages of his tablet ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the same—the stirring of the blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... said, "that modesty PROVES you are a genius! Heavens, what would I not give to have you spontaneity, your modesty, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists—that something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M. Eugene Veron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting absolute beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the mass of French painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians and Dutchmen, eloquent of the lack of poetry that results from a scepticism ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I begin to think them peculiarly wise. There is the spontaneity of animals about their play, and a good deal of the unembarassed movements of animals—with something very human superadded. One reads often enough about the love-light in the eyes of lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either frank ridicule, or ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... that in many respects we are what we call ourselves—the most highly civilized people in the world. But do we not pay too high a price for much of our civilization? If it is such that it fails to enable us to conserve our health, our powers of enjoyment, our spontaneity, our mental vigor, our spirituality, and the exuberant radiance of our life—bodily, mental, spiritual—I feel that we need to examine it carefully and find out wherein lies its ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... fond of sport in every way, but the aristocrats lack sporting spontaneity; they like it, or pretend to like it, because it is the fashion, and they take up one sport after another as it becomes the fad. That this is true can be shown by comparing the Englishman and the American of the ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... she cried, her face alight with joy and fine enthusiasm. All her spontaneity, her love and admiration were aroused. And she kissed him with so frank and glad a love that Stern felt his heart jump wildly. He thought she never yet had ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics—all dull things in the doing—while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity. He often seems to contrast life with that of those who have loved more after our fashion, and have more seeming weight in the world, and always humbly as though he were only sure his way is best for him: ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... declared that they did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite sincere in ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... unanimity with which they come here; the fact that without organization, almost as a matter of spontaneity, 35,000 names should have been gathered and sent to this Capitol to a committee, whose voluntary duty it was made to receive them; the fact that other names are now coming in at the rate of some 500 a day; that from California 10,000 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially suitable for ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... is told in imitation of Miss More, with that detailed description which Goodrich had found so fascinating. If a little overdone in this respect, the narrative has certainly a freshness sadly deficient in many later volumes. Even the second tale seems to lack the engaging spontaneity of the first, and already to grow didactic and recitative rather than personal. But both met with an equally generous and appreciative reception. Parley's educational tales were undoubtedly the American pioneers in what may be readily styled the "travelogue" ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... too plainly that her son was estranged from her; and she could form a rough estimate of the reason. He addressed her indeed with a semblance of love and showed her filial attention, but her maternal instinct assured her that something stood between them, something which took the reality and spontaneity out of ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... working day. His mind was so full of material that the labor was mainly that of selection. Creative work, when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... usual professional apathy,—had doubtless sent many more enigmatical and mysterious messages,—but nevertheless, when he finished, he raised his eyes inquiringly to his customer. That gentleman, who enjoyed a reputation for equal spontaneity of temper and revolver, met his gaze a little impatiently. The operator had recourse to a trick. Under the pretence of misunderstanding the message, he obliged the sender to repeat it aloud for the sake of accuracy, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... played. Play had passed out of him. He was not precisely morose or gloomy from his years on the trained-animal stage and in Harris Collins's college of pain, but he was sobered, subdued. The spring and the spontaneity had gone out of him. Just as the leopard had claw-marked his shoulder so that damp and frosty weather made the pain of the old wound come back, so was his mind marked by what he had gone through. He liked Jerry, was glad to be with him ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... celebrity with the spontaneity of true genius, and left her name high upon the natural bridge of American literature. Holmes did not come before the public until years after her death; and then perhaps it might not have happened but for James Russell Lowell and the Atlantic. He was a bright man, and possessed a peculiar ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... those ultramoderns who dare to call Strauss an intermediate type. So rapidly doth music speed down the grooves of time. From Vienna comes Schoenberg; in Vienna lives and composes the youthful Erich Korngold, whose earlier music seems to well as if from some mountain spring, although with all its spontaneity it has no affinity with Mozart. It is distinctively "modern," employing the resources of the "new" harmonic displacements and the multicoloured modern orchestral apparatus. Korngold is so receptive that he reveals just now the joint influences of Strauss and Schoenberg. Yet I think the path lies ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the Princess extends the hand, palm down, to favored guests, and these reverently touch the finger-tips and lift the hand to their lips. Perhaps the spontaneity of the American girls' welcome was esteemed a pleasing variety to the established custom. At all events, her Highness, true to her breeding, appeared not to notice any breach of etiquette, but took the proffered ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... or nothing of the science of voice as we know it to-day. They did know, however, the great fundamental principles of singing, which are freedom of form and action, spontaneity and naturalness. They studied Nature, and learned of her. Their style of singing, it is true, would be considered superficial at the present day, but it is generally conceded that they did make a few great singers. If the principles ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... would expect anything else. What you say about the vagueness of what I have called the direct action of the nervous system, is perfectly just. I felt it so at the time, and even more of late. I confess that I have never been able fully to grasp your principle of spontaneity, as well as some other of your points, so as to apply them to special cases. But as we look at everything from different points of view, it is not likely that we should agree closely. (Professor Bain expounded his ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "Fantaisie-Impromptu?" Whether the reader may think so or not, he will agree with me that the fourth impromptu (in C sharp minor), Op. 66, is the most valuable of the compositions published by Fontana; indeed, it has become one of the favourites of the pianoforte-playing world. Spontaneity of emotional expression and effective treatment of the pianoforte distinguish the Fantaisie-Impromptu. In the first section we have the restless, surging, gushing semiquavers, carrying along with them a passionate, urging melody, and the simultaneous waving triplet accompaniment; in the second section, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with the essential difference between the main stream of man's advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation has been towards strictness of conscience. They have made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... musical notes of patriotic songs. Suddenly, amidst applause and cheers, the crowd would make an opening in the street. All Europe was passing here; all Europe—less the arrogant enemy—and was saluting France in her hour of danger with hearty spontaneity. Flags of different nations were filing by, of all tints of the rainbow, and behind them were the Russians with bright and mystical eyes; the English, with heads uncovered, intoning songs of religious gravity; the Greeks and Roumanians of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... good warm articles of clothing for themselves and their children which they so sadly needed were handed out to them was touching; but the children themselves did not enter into the joy of the occasion with the same spontaneity. Finally just as I got to the bottom of one box and before I had opened the other one, a little boy sniffling to himself in the ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... with me. I'm trying my brushes—trying my brushes. Perhaps I may be able to do something stronger some day, and perhaps not. But at all events I sha'n't force my mood. I shall wait for my inspiration. One thing I've noticed, that as a man grows older he loses his spontaneity and gets more critical with himself. I could do more, no doubt, if I would only let myself go. But I'm like this meerschaum here,—a hard piece and slow ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... women (in The Association of Collegiate Alumnae) have seriously discussed the question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of Harper's Monthly has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective construction" in certain American authors was only made possible, probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The Century Magazine has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single writer of original power before the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. She asked little more than not to have it broken up. She dreaded ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... been surmised by you who read, was more of a humorist than anything else, but the enthusiasm of his humor, its absolute spontaneity and kindliness, gave it at times a semblance to what might pass for true poetry. He was by disposition a thoroughly sweet spirit, and when I realized that he had gone before, and that the trips he and I had ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... ghoulish and a treacherous business. He would feel like an interviewer and like a spy. It would have to be done in a noble, self-denying sort of secrecy, amassing and recording day by day; and he would never be able to let his hero suspect what was happening, or the gracious spontaneity would vanish; for the essence of such a life and such talk as I have described is that they should be wholly frank and unconsidered; and the thought of the presence of the note-taking spectator would ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the fellifluous fanatic enslaved by his prejudices; to the vain glorious mortal puffed up with his own presumptuous ignorance; to the voluptuary devoted to his pleasures; or to the wily reasoner, who, disingenuous with himself, has a peculiar spontaneity to form illusions to his mind. Blessed, however, with a heart, gifted with a mind such as described, man will surely discover this rara avis: thus constituted, the attentive philosopher, the geometrician, the moralist, the politician, the theologian himself, when he shall sincerely ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... blamed himself when rash speculations failed, and he never profited by bitter experience. Simply, he was by nature a spendthrift, high-spirited, impulsive, weak, with little thought for the future and none at all for the past. Wherever he went he was popular. His gaiety and spontaneity won him favour. But no one took him very seriously. No one ever dreamed that his ill-luck was a cause for anything ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... spontaneity in the matter. It is simply the principle of creation, and acting under laws and by ways that, however ill-understood by us, have existed from the beginning ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... thesis is that living things are active, intelligent agents, personally continuous with all their ancestors, possessing an intense but unconscious memory of all that their ancestors did and suffered, and moving through habit from the spontaneity of striving to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... occasions with a person to whom they have been taught to bow or courtesy as a public habit. The children of neighbouring landowners, who were few and far between, and of the professional people in Norcester, were at such times as Stephen met them, generally so much on their good behaviour, that the spontaneity of play, through which it is that sharp corners of individuality are knocked off or worn down, did ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly. 'It is the mind,' she said, 'and that is death.' She raised her eyes slowly to him: 'Isn't the mind—' she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, 'isn't it our death? Doesn't it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the first of his own letters that have been preserved, written to his lifelong friend, John H. Wigmore. With many breaks, especially in the early chapters, the sequence of events, and his moods toward them, pour from him with increasing fullness and spontaneity, until the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Hence the spontaneity of the allegory, its ease and freedom of movement, its unlabored development, its natural and vital enfolding of that old pilgrim idea of human life which had so often bloomed in the literature of all climes and ages, but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... intellectual culminated at Athens. Sophocles had every element of character and person to fascinate the Greeks,—beauty of face, symmetry of form, skill in gymnastics, calmness and dignity of manner, a cheerful and amiable temper, a ready wit, a meditative piety, a spontaneity of genius, an affectionate admiration for talent, and patriotic devotion to his country. His tragedies, by the universal consent of the best critics, are the perfection of the Greek drama; and they moreover maintain that he has no rival, Aeschylus and Shakspeare alone excepted, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow's look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night's friendliness but an aloofness which might have been compounded of scorn ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... illicit still and being the home of Keltic treasure. Precisely in fact the right kind of place, and the sort of story that hardly anyone can put down unfinished. I am bound to add that, perhaps a hundred pages from the actual end, the humour of the affair seems to lose spontaneity and become forced. But till the real climax of the tale, the triumphant return of the various hunters from Inisheeny, I can promise that you will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... found that she was doomed to finish her last year at school under Nancy Ellen, to work double so that her sister might go to school early and remain late, coming home tired and with lessons to prepare for the morrow, some of the spontaneity left Kate's efforts. ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... washing off the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, have preserved in all its innocence, its sensuous splendour, its spontaneity and youth. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... all know the unhappy period from seven to fourteen when he who formerly was all grace and spontaneity discovers that he has too many arms and legs. How disagreeable the boy then becomes! Before, we liked to see him playing about the room. Now we ask why he is allowed to remain. For he is a ceaseless disturber; ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... extraordinarily quiet, Furnival's young girl. He measured the difference by the power she had of making Furnival—as Straker put it—different from himself. She had made him grave and quiet, too. Not that he had by any means lost his engaging spontaneity; only the spontaneous, the ungovernable thing about him was the divine shyness and the wonder which he was utterly unable ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... beautiful individual utterance, showed no improvement in quality, no marks of having sprung from the same mental womb where it had lain side by side with so fair a sister. But, of course, one can readily understand that such work would naturally lack spontaneity of impulse, having to be done, more or less, against the grain, from reasons of expediency: so long as "Fiona Macleod" must remain a secret, William Sharp must produce something to show for himself, in order to go on protecting that secret, which would, also, be all the better kept by William Sharp ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... any attempt at classification of material so freely and variously used as the Mother Goose rhymes is sure to stiffen the work of the class and render it less enjoyable. Spontaneity is more vital here than at any other stage ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going when set upon a line of rails with the steam up and the machinery in full play; whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so that the first has no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free will, while the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... intercessory prayer may be jotted down and distributed over the days of the week for use in due rotation. Such schemes, however, if drawn up and used, should be revised from time to time, and not suffered to become a mechanical burden or a legal bondage. There should be freedom and spontaneity in a Christian's prayers. It is well to have rules, and to try not to be prevented by mere slackness from keeping them. But it is important to see to it that the self-imposed rule is so framed as to prove genuinely ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the writer of superlatively melodious verse. He was followed by Simms, who was among the first in the South to live by his pen. His tales of adventure are still interesting and important for the history that they embody. Timrod's spontaneity and strength appear in lyrics of war, nature, and love. Hayne, a skilled poetic artist, is at his best in lyrics of nature. Lanier's poems of nature embody high ideals in verse of unusual melody, and voice a faith in ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... noticeable, generally, for its charm, poetry, and spontaneity. The first movement, an Allegro moderato, is in sonata-form. The second, in the key of the relative minor, entitled Fantasie, has in it more of the spirit of Beethoven than of Emanuel Bach. The Finale is in rondo form; the middle section consists of a playful Duettino, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... literature is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim, but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... out of a man, and what a refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort to fill a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious, hard-working young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his goddess, and full to overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity. This in itself was worth risking one's neck ...
— The Man In The High-Water Boots - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... story of a mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and reticences, not ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of society as on any other is quite evident. It would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... speak when I thought he quite failed; some burst or spurt redeemed him when he seemed flagging short of the goal, and, whoever else was in the running, he came in ahead. His near-failures were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide, when they are on their feet. He knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an imagined audience; that this was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... He is a husbandman who practices no rotation of crops, but submits to the exhaustive process of taking about the same things from his soil year after year. Some readers think they detect a falling off. It is evident there is not the same spontaneity, and that the soil has to be more and more stirred and encouraged, which is not at all to ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... conception of workmanship which sets it in conflict with originality. There is often an inherent antagonism between the impulse for freedom and spontaneity which is characteristic of genius, and a conventional, hard-and-fast rule or method of securing certain technical results; but there is no antagonism between the boldest originality and the most complete mastery of craftsmanship. There ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... assistance. The people who are brought up with a tradition of highbred courtesy, and who learn almost instinctively to repress their own individuality, can generally triumph over their moods. Perhaps in their expansive moments they lose a little spontaneity in the process; they are cheerful rather than buoyant, gentle rather than pungent. But the result is that when the mood shifts into depression, they are still imperturbably courteous and considerate. A near relation of a great public man, who suffered greatly from mental depression, has ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who has provided us with these two delightful volumes; I merely wish to say that nothing can prevent people from purloining the first, and that drastic measures will have to be taken if I am to retain the second. In these dialogues and sketches I do not find quite so much spontaneity as in the first volume; once or twice it is even possible to imagine that the author, after taking pen in hand, was a little perplexed to find a subject to write about. But that is the beginning and the end of my complaint. Once again we have a broad-minded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... must always be shaded by penitent sorrow for ourselves. But that necessary element of sadness in the Christian life is not the cause why so many Christian lives have little of the buoyancy and hope and spontaneity which should mark them. The reason rather lies in the lack of true union with Christ, and habitual keeping of ourselves 'in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... virtue in spontaneity which is difficult to define; perhaps it bears more convincing witness to the artist's integrity than slower and longer labours, from which it is difficult to ward all duplicity of intention. The finishing-touch ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living—something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... intellectual point of view, society, or the collective man, is especially distinguished from the individual by spontaneity of action,—in other words, instinct. While the individual obeys, or imagines he obeys, only those motives of which he is fully conscious, and upon which he can at will decline or consent to act; while, in a word, he thinks himself free, and all the freer when he knows that ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... but her sister searched her father's eyes. She did not quite like the way he said those words. His voice lacked its usual heartiness and spontaneity. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... hayfield, the chimney-nook, milking-time, the blossoming of "high-boughed hedges"; but it is not every one who has sung out of the fullness of his heart and with a naive delight in that of which he sung: and so by reason of their faithfulness to every-day life and to nature, and by their spontaneity and tenderness, his lyrics, fables, and eclogues appeal to cultivated readers as well as to the rustics whose quaint speech ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... quantitative restitution of that heat. There is nothing gratuitous in physical nature, no expenditure without equivalent gain, no gain without equivalent expenditure. With inexorable constancy the one accompanies the other, leaving no nook or crevice between them for spontaneity to mingle with the pure and necessary play of natural force. Has this uniformity of nature ever been broken? ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... reached seems to be explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words. Confidence and spontaneity of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no longer act." For abuse of the critical faculty brings with it its natural consequences—timidity of soul, paralysis of the will, complete self-distrust. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... also know when to let his material alone. In his excessive regard for style even so great a master as Robert Louis Stevenson robbed his work of much of the spontaneity and natural charm found, for example, in his Vailima Letters. The main thing is for a writer to say what he has to say in the best way, natural to himself, in which he can say it, and then let it alone—always remembering that, provided ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... natural—that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and a look as if the satyrs had ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... express or even to feel regret," he answered, and his eyes twinkled delightfully; "if youth lost its spontaneity it would at one and the same moment lose its charm. Did your cry refer to this?" He pointed with his umbrella to a scrimmage which was taking place a few yards away ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... able to create: two principal conditions.—"Creative spontaneity," which resolves itself into needs, tendencies, desires.—Every imaginative creation has a motor origin.—The spontaneous revival of images.—The creative imagination reduced to three forms: outlined, fixed, objectified. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... sketches on the margins of that priceless copy of the Praise of Folly, which Basel preserves in her Museum, had been suited to their company. Admirable, though unequal, as are their merits, they are sketches, whose chief beauty is their happy spontaneity. Such things are among the trifles of art, and are not to be put into the scales at all with the finished perfection of his serious designs for wood engraving. These were drawn on the block; and even these cannot properly represent the drawing itself ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... she was, that he was not attempting to deceive her this time. But he could say no more. Many a strong man would in that moment have sobbed aloud and shed tears, but Giovanni was not as other men. Under great emotion all expression was hard for him, and the spontaneity of tears ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... much frequented. How did he come to speak in this manner, to say this and that? To what feeling or thought, to what attitude to life, is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke "out of the overflow of his heart"—and we can believe it when we think of the freshness and spontaneity with which he spoke—of what nature and of what ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... consideration of those who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility. They are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel. When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that faint touch of fingers, reached high in air, means. They would be mortified beyond measure if they failed to observe any of the little gentilities of life, while the larger consideration of their visitor's ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... religion and the State which has for thousands of years supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society—one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate its rational sides, not overlooking ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the whole apartment swang to and fro like a hammock, with an exhilarating motion. For some while I was so extremely pleased with these particulars that I thought I could never be weary of beholding them: then dropped of a sudden into a causeless sadness; and then, with the same swiftness and spontaneity, arrived at the conclusion that I was drunk and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under their joint names really belong to Fletcher alone or to Fletcher and other collaborators. The scholarship of our day agrees with the opinion of their contemporaries in assigning to Beaumont the greater share of judgment and intellectual power and to Fletcher the greater share of spontaneity and fancy. Fletcher's style is very individual. It is peculiarly sweet; but its unmistakable mark is his constant tendency to break down the blank verse line by the use of extra syllables, both within the line and at the end. The lyrics ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... this spontaneity and freshness run through all the mass of short and similar work which ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... to the bows of the ship and hung looking over. Suddenly, just under the surf, there was an emerald gleam; another; then a leap and a dive; a leap and a dive again. A pair of porpoises were playing round the bows with the ease, the spontaneity, the beauty of perfect and happy life. As we watched them the same mood grew in us till it forced expression. And "Oh," I said, "the ship's a prison!" "No," said ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... It seems obvious that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity, as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a 'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... at the suggestion. The spring was internal, of the spirit, for they were too overwhelmed by the imminent presence of beauty to show a spark of spontaneity on the outside. They muttered their agreement, kicked the ground, and avoided the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... but slight manifestation of feeling. Without any show of sympathy even his friends slipped away, as if unwilling to add to his humiliation by their commiseration. On the other side, the congratulations offered Maitland were for the most part lacking in the spontaneity that is supposed to be proper to such a smashing victory. Some of his friends seemed to feel as if they had been called upon to witness an unworthy thing. Not so, however, with either Frances Amory or Sidney Templeton. Both greeted Captain Jack with enthusiasm ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... have already, makes a large share. It seems to me that it consoles me to make that gift to you. From a literary point of view he was not a man of the first rank, one loved him for his goodness and spontaneity. Less occupied with affairs and philosophy, he would have had a charming talent. He left a pretty ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... origin of reflection is not to be found in what may be called the mythical creation of nature, which is the necessary result of the spontaneity of the intelligence, both in man and animals; it is developed after long duration of barbarism and ignorance. M'Lennan and others have shown how the era of reflection and hypothesis begins in the evolution of human intelligence. Sekesa, an intelligent Kaffir, said ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... this condescension to literature of which we speak is that it has that quality of spontaneity that does not presuppose either a capacity or a call. There is no mystery about the craft. One resolves to write a book, as he might to take a journey or to practice on the piano, and the thing is done. Everybody can write, at least everybody does write. It is a wonderful time for literature. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... holiday Toinette had spent with him he had missed the spontaneity he had known in the little child, and, without being able to analyze it, felt that something was wanting in the girl. She had been sweet and winning, yet under it all had been a manner quite incomprehensible ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant anecdote, but told with such enjoyment of the joke that you cannot resent the digression. Indeed the plots are ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... so forced, so diverse from naturalness, we drive our human engines at such a fearful speed, that our finer life is crushed out. Spontaneity and humor, and the possibility of a fine culture and a superb charm of personality in us are almost impossible and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the cure; it was the complete clearing away of the last film of the cloud of doubt as to the will of Jesus. It answered the 'if' by something that spoke louder than any word. And, though it was not meant for anything but the silent voice of pity and love, we do not rob it of its beautiful spontaneity when we see, in the touch of that pure hand on the rotting feculence of leprosy, a parable of the Incarnation, in which He lays hold on our flesh of sin and is yet without sin—contracts no defilement by contact, but by touching cleanses the foulness on which He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of enduring and resisting much. If, on the contrary, he is a weak child, whose slow budding will come only timidly into existence, one or two whippings followed by threats, may suffice to keep him in a permanently cowed condition, incapable of initiative, incapable of spontaneity. ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... managed to identify themselves completely with their grandfather in the estimation of the people of Morningquest. Charming manners were a family trait, and the Heavenly Twins had always been popular in the city on their own account; their spontaneity and extreme affability having usually been held to balance their monkey tricks. Hamilton House, however, was ten miles distant from Morningquest, and they had hitherto been thought of as Hamilton-Wells; but after that year at the Castle, they became identified with the old stock, the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... incredible variety of ordinary topics, are distinguished by their fertile fancy, their glowing language, and by thought which, if seldom profound, is never commonplace, and seems always the spontaneous and easy outcome of the author's mind. In no form of composition does excellence depend more on spontaneity than in the meditation. The ruin of such writers as Hervey, and, to some extent, Boyle, has been, that they seem to have set themselves elaborately and convulsively to extract sentiment out of every object which met their eye. They ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius, a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of Phaedra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... as yet, a remarkable scarcity in Japan, of domineering, brutal, aggressive, or morbid individuality. What does impress one as an apparent weakness in Japanese intellectual circles is the comparative absence of spontaneity, creative thought, original perceptivity of the highest order. Perhaps this seeming deficiency is racial: the peoples of the Far East seem to have been throughout their history receptive rather than creative. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... of outlines. They are necessary, if any subject is to be covered comprehensively. But if they are overelaborated, the whole performance becomes automatic and dull. A little spontaneity is always needed. Even when working from a manuscript, a speaker should be ever-ready to depart from his text if a sudden idea pops into his mind. It is better to try this and to stumble now and then than to permit the mind to be ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... rolling and flashing, his hands and head poised into beautifully effective gesture, and appealed to them in great rolling, fiery sentences that completely swept the conference like a whirlwind, and sat down amid a great burst of applause which broke with splendid spontaneity from the assembled delegates, and the winning golden smile upon his face which Robert's companion had described earlier in ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... acquaintance with them enables me to testify with great confidence, that, with the exception of a very small high-church party, headed mainly by Mar Yohanan, I discover no special tendency to Old Churchism of any kind, and if let alone, they are more than satisfied with the gospel simplicity and spontaneity of worship." ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... idea of his design before he ever touched the needle to the plate. Though he is often admired for his spontaneity, particularly in his landscapes,[9] this is a misconception. Benesch lists no fewer than 78 landscape drawings by Rembrandt in the years 1648-1650,[10] and there were perhaps many more, now lost or unidentified. For this etching alone, there are ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... is indeed an original creation, and one of the few masterpieces of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous vigor, it belongs to the spring-time of literature. It has entered into the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a social realm ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Mabinogion is rather romantic than epic. Life is treated naively and not too emphatically. The hero's individuality is limitless. We have free and noble natures acting in all their spontaneity. Each man appears as a kind of demi-god characterised by a supernatural gift. This gift is nearly always connected with some miraculous object, which in some measure is the personal seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... presence of a supervisor who is adversely critical may do injury to the efficiency of a good teacher. No one can teach as well under disapprobation as he can where he feels that his hands are free; and so in some places supervision may act as a wet blanket. It may suppress spontaneity, initiative, and real life in the school. But this is only an abuse of a good thing, and probably does not occur frequently. In any event, the exception would only prove the rule. Supervision is as necessary in a system of schools as it is in a ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious, observation. It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural objects Byron sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any but the most conventional term, or a single ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... should be at least partially extemporaneous; he may have a fairly clear conception of how he is to frame his sentences, but he should have nothing learned word for word. Thus his speech may have an element of spontaneity that will give it a tone of sincerity and earnestness unattainable when one is repeating a memorized passage. Too much, however, must not be left to the inspiration of the moment; no student should ever try to debate without first attempting in his ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... in the bed next his. Like a pageant, he passed, in review scene after scene, turning it over, and wondering at significances that he had not before, imagined. He recalled their first meeting, that instantaneous attraction, and he asked himself what had caused it. Her spontaneity, freshness, and utter lack of conventionality, he supposed, but that did not seem to explain all. He wondered at the change that had even then come about in himself that he should have been so entranced by her, He went over his early hopes ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, and—most ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... exceptionally capable, there was now the added charm which association with a girl of her own age had developed in spontaneity, and her attitude toward Mrs. Harold—the pretty little affectionate demonstrations so unconsciously made—revealed to her father what Peggy had lacked for nearly nine years, and he began to waken to the ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in it, he insisted on it; I will not say that he affected minute daily acts of devotion, for that word would not accord with the spontaneity of his nature; but he accented his demonstrations, he spoke constantly of his religion. Without any intention to wrong the serious side of his religious feelings, it seemed to be a bravado put on for the incredulous, a toy which he converted ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... he could bring forward a chair for her, and put cushions at her back, and pour out her tea and wait on her. He tried by a number of careful, deliberate attentions to make up for his utter lack of spontaneity. And she sat there, drinking her tea, contented; pleased to be back in her happy home; serenely unaware that anything ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... speak then of my books you will know what I mean. The chief charm of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairly hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the centuries. How we love 'em! They laughed for themselves, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... done this kind of work with finer poetic grasp or more convincing truthfulness than Felix Gras.... This new volume has the spontaneity, the vividness, the intensity of Interest of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... the same appeal to our common instincts as any other play. Verse has taken a mighty bound from formalism to the free intoxicating air of poetry and nature. Men and women no longer exchange dull speeches; they converse with easy spontaneity and delight us by the beauty of their language. A poet may be a dramatist at last without feeling that his imagination must be held back like a restive horse lest the decorum of human speech ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... She could not forget that he had never spoken to her of marriage till Mr. Royall had forced the word from his lips; though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... progressive division of labor, work has become more and more mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony—to the absence of spontaneity or ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... discussion, which Colonel Benton likened to "shooting on the wing." So deficient is Mr. Schurz in this talent, that he has been known to use a manuscript in an after-dinner response, a style of speech whose chief merit consists in its spontaneity, with apt reference to incidents which could not possibly ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine |
