"Automaton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the song of the chaffinch. There he sits within sight, motionless, a little bird-shaped automaton, made to go off at intervals of twelve or thirteen seconds; but unfortunately one hears with the song the whirr and buzz of the internal machinery. It is not now as in April, when it is sufficient in a song that it ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... activity. On the Canadian shore I see a village of poor cottages, surrounded with apple orchards, like a village in Normandy, in front of which the red sentry marches up and down, as stiff as an automaton. The inhabitants of the said village, French both in feature and appearance, hurried up in delight when they heard us speaking the language of their forefathers. "It's the only tongue we know. We don't want our children to learn ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... automaton than as one under a will, Halket was seated on a chair, with this said old and blind woman by his side, who sat silent and with blank eyes waiting for the stranger to explain what he wanted. Nor was the opportunity lost by Halket, who, unable to understand how she should have called herself Mary ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... crowd did not escape the sharp eyes of Father Glapion, who, seeing that the hot-blooded Italian was overstepping the bounds of prudence in his harangue, called him by name, and with a half angry sign brought his sermon suddenly to a close. Padre Monti obeyed with the unquestioning promptness of an automaton. He stopped instantly, without rounding the period or finishing the sentence that was ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... intelligence. Much larger than the brain proper was the spinal cord, especially in the region of the sacrum, controlling most of the reflex and involuntary actions of the huge organism. Hence we can best regard the Brontosaurus as a great, slow-moving animal automaton, a vast storehouse of organized matter directed chiefly or solely by instinct, and to a very limited degree, if at all, by conscious intelligence. Its huge size and its imperfect organization, compared with the ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... California Psychical Research Society. Dr. J. C. Anthony is a well and favorably known physician, who has practised here for many years, also a member of our Council. Dr. Cecil E. Nixon is a Dentist, best known as a Magician, and as the inventor of "Isis," a wonderful automaton which plays any tune you request of her on the zither. Mr. Henry Huppert is one of the partners in the Preston-Huppert X-Ray Laboratory, a man with scientific training and a student ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the ceiling; underfoot was a heavy but narrow crimson patterned carpet with a strip of polished oak parquet on either side of it. Exactly along the central line of the carpet Nina tripped, languorously, like an automaton, and exactly over her head glittered the line of electric sparks. The corridor and the journey seemed to be interminable, and Nina on some inscrutable and mystic errand. At length she moved aside from the religious line, went into a service cabinet, and emerged with a small bunch of pass-keys. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of all power of grasping anything and transformed him into a senseless automaton, wholly absorbed in a chill ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... which it stands is inclined, or scratching where it is made uncomfortable, or croaking when pressed in a particular spot. If its spinal cord be severed, the lower limbs, disconnected from the brain, will also perform actions of this kind. The question arises, Is the frog entirely a soulless automaton, performing all its actions directly in response to external stimuli, only more perfectly and with more delicate adjustment when its brain remains intact, or is its soul distributed along its spinal marrow, so that it can be divided into ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... one "Follow," as Leoni softly took the King's hand and led him over the ground he so lately had traversed, pausing after a time as the trio came within sight of the sentry, and standing close up against the wall, to wait till the man reached his nearest point to the secret door to turn in his automaton-like fashion and begin ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... constitutional act of a free power. Was this humiliating resignation an affectation of slavery, or a sign of restraint and degradation made from the throne to the armed powers, in order that they might comprehend that he was no longer free, and only see in him the crowned automaton of the Jacobins? The letter was ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of the possibility of winning the marquise; but from the moment in which his brother, with no apparent motive of personal interest, aroused the idea that he might be beloved, every spark of passion and of vanity that still existed in this automaton took fire, and he began to be doubly assiduous and attentive to his sister-in-law. She, who had never suspected any evil in this quarter, treated the chevalier at first with a kindliness that was heightened by her scorn for the abbe. But, before long, the chevalier, misunderstanding the grounds ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... mended it before his eyes, biting off the thread with her whit teeth, and saying "Now it will be warmer" as she bit; and finally, how she shook hands with every boy in turn and, throwing a deprecating glance at the female automaton, insisted upon filling their pockets ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Clerambault, "he can oppose them with a clear conscience if they are contrary to right and happiness. Liberty consists in that very thing, that a free man is in himself a conscious law of the universe, a counter-balance to the crushing machine, the automaton of Spitteler, the bronze Ananke. I see the universal Being, three parts of him still embedded in the clay, the bark, or the stone, undergoing the implacable laws of the matter in which he is encrusted. His breath and his eyes alone are free; "I hope," says his look. And his breath ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... automaton? Good! Let me alone, then," said Rose, speaking from a corner where she was sitting on the carpet at the foot of a bookcase, with a volume spread open on her knee.—"Miss Helstone, how do you do?" she added, directing a brief ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... on the door; the Commander said: "Come in," and a man, one of their automaton soldiers, appeared in the aperture, announcing by his mere presence that luncheon ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... amanuensis to a literary gentleman, who was employed upon a work of great extent, but of little interest. My labour was entirely mechanical. The confinement and the sedentary nature of my employment wrought still greater change on me; for hours I have sat, like an automaton, copying passages I felt no interest in, held only to my task by the consciousness of being no longer burthensome to my parents. An entire new train of ideas began to pass through my mind in rapid succession; some of them so fearful and horrid that I trembled for myself. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... a number of birds, and a piece of mechanism, an automaton in the form of a bird, which ate like a living creature, drank, hopped from one bar to another, opened his bill, and sang the air which was so popular before the revolution, "Oh, Richard! ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... that my experiences left no definite impress upon my brain. I have indistinct remembrances of alternating between hope and despair, between joy and sorrow. I remember, too, that I was called upon to perform certain actions, but to this day I do not know what they were. I was more like an automaton than a man. ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... that will do; I needn't trouble you further." Then, after a word or two, partly aside, with Mr. Carey, he turned to Lionel and abruptly asked what salary she wanted—just as if Lionel had brought him some automaton and made ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... closer scrutiny even of a friend to determine, so much had the passing of these few months altered him in appearance and in manner. Once light of mien, now he smiled never at all. For hours he would seem to go about his duties as an automaton. He spoke at last to his ancient and faithful friend, kindly as ever, and with ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... hands, and each was avoiding looking at the other. The official was smiling like an automaton. The father turned his back brusquely, and threading his way through the throng, entered a cafe, where for some time he needed the most retired seat in the darkest earner ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... impulse has lost its force, and another which before I should not for a moment have entertained, is all-powerful over me. In short, I know just as little about myself as I do about the Eternal Essence, and I have a haunting suspicion that I may be a mere automaton, my every thought and act due to some power ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... was the first regular French tragedy: the last French tragedy on the same subject was the Cleopatre of Marmontel. For the representation of this tragedy Vaucanson, the celebrated French mechanist, invented an automaton asp, which crawled and hissed to the life,—to the great delight of the Parisians. But it appears that neither Vaucanson's asp, nor Clairon, could save Cleopatre from a deserved fate. Of the English tragedies, one was written ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the two friends of his bosom and Mr. Quigg descending a flight of steps to the sidewalk. They saw him at the same time; and both Overtop and Maltboy violently beckoned him to approach. Mr. Quigg added his solicitations in a calmer and more dignified manner, moving his arm like an automaton three times from the elbow. Even the driver, Captain Tonkins, in the spirit of invitation peculiar to his mental state, steadied himself on the seat, poked his right arm and his long whip toward Marcus, and said: ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and like an automaton—lifeless and thoughtless—she began putting the dingy, squalid room to rights. The Abbe helped her demolish the improvised screen; with the same gentle delicacy of thought which had caused him to build it up, he refrained from speaking to her ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... before Mary Ann came so prominently into the centre of Lancelot's consciousness again. She remained somewhere in the outer periphery of his thought—nowhere near the bull's-eye, so to speak—as a vague automaton that worked when he pulled a bell-rope. Infinitely more important things were troubling him; the visit of Peter had somehow put a keener edge on his blunted self-confidence; he had started a grand opera, and worked at it furiously in all the intervals left him by his engrossing ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so she could ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... fictitious exaltations; the alternations of despair brought her to the brink of the grave. She was reduced almost to a shadow; she would go about the affair—she would entertain no other—with a sort of jerking, spasmodic activity as unlike muscular energy as if she were an automaton. She had no rest in her sleep, and would scream and cry out in weird accents at intervals, and dream such dreams! She would blanch when questioned, and close her lips fast, and never a word escaped them of what these visions ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... much from the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his leisure. No subject is exhausted,—it is only touched upon. He learns ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... mastered all other feelings. Although she repeated to herself that she wanted never to see him again, Margaret could scarcely resist an overwhelming desire to go to him. Her will had been taken from her, and she was an automaton. She struggled, like a bird in the fowler's net with useless beating of the wings; but at the bottom of her heart she was dimly conscious that she did not want to resist. If he had given her that address, it was because he knew she would use it. She did not know why she wanted to go ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... lips for any cause. Some French writer has called such a condition of desiccation of the heart's interior. Maryan found that definition quite appropriate. When he sat motionless, deaf and dumb, or walked like an automaton moved by springs, he felt exactly as if the interior of his ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... flower garden, we enter a labyrinth, and arrive at a small hut, with a closed door, upon the threshold of which we have scarcely pressed, when the wicket flies open, and a big brown friar, with long beard and sandals, starts up in act to frighten us, which he succeeds in doing. This automaton Schedoni might really well produce abortion, and would not care if he did: he cannot, we suppose, be placed there as a lawful instrument of relief, for all the donzelle of Palermo must be aware of, and be used to him. This, however, is thought so good a joke, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... of judgment shuddered as one man, when he came to his awful disclosure, hitherto unsuspected, unimagined, of that second strangulation: as to feelings, he might as well have been a galvanized mummy, an automaton lay-figure enunciating all with bellows and clapper, for any sense he seemed to have of shame, or fear, or pity; he admitted his lie about the door, complimented Burke on the accuracy of his evidence, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... aullido m. howl, cry of horror. aumentar increase, enlarge, magnify. an, aun adv. yet, still, even, nevertheless. aunque conj. although. aura f. breeze, zephyr. aurora f. dawn, break of day, aurora. ausencia f. absence. autmata m. automaton, mere machine, puppet. avanzar advance, go forward. avariento, -a avaricious. avaro, -a avaricious, covetous. avaro m. miser. ave f. bird. aventura f. adventure, affair. avergonzarse de be ashamed of, blush for. vido, -a eager, covetous. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... adding invalidism to my other disintegrations. In the evening I played cards with my secretary or practised at the piano, with some revival of my old interest in music. I read little, even in the newspapers. I was become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... conscience is upon him and he cannot tolerate its reproachful gaze? Nowhere do we feel the inadequacy of the sense-philosophy more piercingly than in this matter of conscience. It has cut the world in twain and treated it as a piece of mechanism and reduced man to the position of an automaton. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... a minority." The foregoing is printed in very large type. The article then continues, commenting upon Herve's advice as follows: "The soldier has been fed and clothed by the working class. His continued efficiency as a military automaton depends upon regular supply of food, clothing, and the necessaries of life from the same source. He has been transported to the field of conflict by the labour of a whole army of railwaymen. Let us suppose that the day of the final ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... twenty-four hours, my existence is that of an automaton merely. I know I am being conducted away from the spot where this awful tragedy was enacted. I am mounted behind my guard, to whose waist I am firmly bound by raw hide thongs. We encamp in a belt of cotton woods, near a small stream. Fires are lighted, ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... his coat, which was thrown over the balustrade, was employed in watering the flowers: a man with movements so mechanical—with a face so rigidly grave in its tawny hues—that he seemed like an automaton ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... turned to Sybil Latham, and then, rigidly as an automaton, she walked swiftly to her husband's side. For a moment the two stood facing each other, eye riveted to eye. Her beautiful bare arms flew out swiftly, resting upon his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... have heard of Sanford? He loves you well. He is the one who moves the automaton with the whiskers and long mustache, and gives your wife a ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... his legs moved regularly. In the grasp of this mental, metal monster he was a mere automaton. Phobar noticed idly that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yards across. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could not understand, he had been transported across millions of miles of space—undoubtedly to the dark ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... The automaton chess-player and other pieces of mechanism exhibited by Monsieur Maelzel were very popular at Washington. The chess- player was the figure of a Turk of the natural size, sitting behind a chest three feet and a-half in height, to which was attached the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... began at the appointed hour in the evening with the resourceful Ormsby in command; and when the outsetting, in which she had to sustain only the part of an obedient automaton, was a fact accomplished, Elinor settled back into the pillowed corner of her sleeping-car section to enjoy the unwonted sensation of being the one cared for ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... attack her openly, seize the diamond, fling it at Mr. Grey's feet, and then kill himself. That had been his plan. But when he found, after a round or two among the guests, that nobody looked at him, and nobody recognized the well-known millionaire in the automaton-like figure with the formally-arranged whiskers and sleekly-combed hair, colder purposes intervened, and he asked himself if it would not be possible to come upon her alone, strike his blow, possess himself of the diamond, and make for parts unknown before his ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... in the chair proffered him by the lawyer. There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind blowing through the hall made ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... with one horn tipped rakishly toward her speckled nose; she blinked silently at wind and heat, and forged steadily ahead, up-hill and down coulee, always in the lead, always walking, walking, like an automaton. Her energy, in the face of all the dry, dreary days, rasped Pink's nerves unbearably. For nearly a week he had ridden left point, and always that line-backed cow with the down-crumpled horn walked and walked and walked, a length ahead ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... that while the Emperor Mu of the Chou dynasty was making a tour of his empire, a skillful mechanic, Yen Shih by name, was brought into his presence and entertained him and the women of his seraglio with a dance performed by automaton figures, which were capable not only of rhythmical movements of their limbs, but of ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... answered Dominie Sampson, in a voice whose untuneable harshness corresponded with the awkwardness of his figure. They were the first words which Mannering had heard him speak; and as he had been watching with some curiosity when this eating, drinking, moving, and smoking automaton would perform the part of speaking, he was a good deal diverted with the harsh timber tones which issued from him. But at this moment the door opened, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... man, whose perfections human artist never could depict or insculp—Demetrius, the son of Antigonus. Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within his hand the resemblance of a poniard, its point inverted towards his breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point through his heart, and underwent a painless death. During his trance, his spirit metempsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of his admiration ... Arnaud awoke ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... automaton. Such a man is like a machine,—a spring. Weight carries him away, making him move and turn forever in the same direction, and with equal motion. He is uniform, and never changes. Once seen, he appears the same at all times and periods of life. At best, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... occurred in Berta's house, for the nurse seemed to have been seized by a sudden fit of restlessness that would not let her sit still for a moment. She went to and fro, upstairs and down, out and in, with the mechanical movement of an automaton. It was a sort of nervous attack that had in a moment increased twofold the housekeeper's domestic activity. Suddenly she would stand still, and placing her forefinger on her upper lip she would remain motionless, as if she were seeking ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... Camp [Austrian Camp, and Reviews in Hungary, where the Kaiser and everybody had been very gracious to me] with much regret." Parted regretfully with Keith;—had played, at Presburg, in sight of him and fourteen other Englishmen, a game with the Chess Automaton [brand-new miracle, just out]; [Account of it, and of this game, in KEITH too (ii. 18; "View, 3d September, 1774:" Keith to his Father).]—came on through Vienna hitherward, as fast as post-horses could carry us; travelling night ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that it was a good match and that Sarah was a lucky girl. She went on with her wedding preparations. John Mangam came as usual and sat silently. Sometimes when Sarah looked at him and reflected that she would have to pass her life with this automaton a sort of madness ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... of all the poetical machines, was not yet brought to perfection; and like those animals which change their state, some parts of the old narrative still adhered. It still had a chorus, it still had a prologue to explain the design; and the perfect drama, an automaton supported and moved without any foreign help, was formed late and gradually. Nay, there are still several parts of the world in which it is not, and probably never may be, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Posh, a man of a most scientific imagination, assigned the role of hero in his story to a marvellous automaton. Unfortunately for him he was not content with generalities, but described the process by which this artificial superman was produced in such minute detail that his publishers realised that it might be positively prejudicial ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... only five years of age, on the death of his great grandfather, Louis XIV.; and, even after he came to his majority, he was ruled by his ministers and his mistresses. He was not, like Louis XIV., the life and the centre of all great movements in his country. He was an automaton, a pageant; not because the constitution imposed checks on his power, but because he was weak and vacillating. He, therefore, performing no great part in history, is only to be alluded to, and attention should be mainly ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... repeated Miss Holmes after him, as though in polite acquiescence, but speaking as an automaton ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... gun! Now stand up!" He obeyed like an automaton, his brain seemingly paralyzed. There was nothing to fear from this fellow, yet I knew better than to become careless—terror has been known to drive men crazy. I caught him by the collar, whirling him about, my ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... by her kind manner to the poor son, who was very well trained, and behaved like an automaton, but grew restless with the hopes of wild beasts and London shops. His mother was about to take leave, when Percy proposed to take charge of him, and leave her to rest for the afternoon with Mrs. Martindale, a plan very ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... executed by these youths. He always made a point of choosing men who were highly strung and impressionable. He was known to boast that after three interviews with him he could make anyone, either man or woman, into a will-less automaton. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... kind city fathers,—and the walls are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... by the water into which he plunged the repentant sinners. For the last hour that he stood in the stream, his whole body was numb; he had ceased to feel life in his feet, and his arms worked with a mechanical stiffness like the arms of some automaton over ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... must think for herself," she declared. "She shouldn't become a mere automaton,—and these questions involve so much! People are discussing them, the magazines and periodicals are beginning to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... extortioner—that was the truth, the truth that he would not let himself recognize. Her depredations probably had much wider scope than he guessed. He must save her from herself; he must somehow reach the submerged personality and awaken it to the hideousness of that other, the soulless, heartless automaton that schemed and executed crimes with mechanical exactitude. He took a long breath of determination, and again grinned at the farce he was playing for his own benefit. Through repetition he was beginning to believe in the fiction of his former intimacy with ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Heaven!" he would merely have been speaking out of the fullness of his heart. Instead of that, he wheeled like an automaton and retraced his steps. He knew where ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... loss to imagine. Beside his memories of the direct fervid outpouring and appeal of Janet, in which she seemed to talk face to face with God, they must have seemed to him like the utterances of some curiously constructed wooden automaton, doing its best to pray, without any soul to be saved, any weakness to be made strong, any doubt to be cleared, any hunger to be filled. What can be less like religion than the prayers of a man whose religion is his profession, and who, if ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... to distribute good and ill, but to feel neither. No, but I would have a dagger in his throat before the night were passed, but that his short light slumbers are guarded by a slave of singular power, whom the villains fear to attack. I had meant to beg or buy of him this same fierce automaton, but something broke off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... pride Of early manhood. Yestermorn he went. The sun shone bright, and scintillant the tide. O'er which the sea-mew swept, with dewy drops besprent. Before he went he kissed me; and I watched His boat that lay so still and stately, till Automaton she seemed, and that she moved To where she willed of her own force and law. But I knew better: his was the will That set the pretty sprite a-going. His arms controlled her to obedience: Those arms that lately clasped ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... of the abbess? Were they the mere ravings of delirium, or had they signification? If Rita was false, then indeed was there no truth upon earth. Confused, bewildered, tortured by the ideas that crowded upon his heated brain, Herrera sat like an automaton upon his horse, unmindful of where he was, and utterly forgetting the dangers that surrounded him. He was roused by the Mochuelo from his state ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... she had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by a will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing appointed business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering foreordained observations, and making dictated responses, all without suggestion of spontaneity, and all without meaning other than as means to bridge ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Bridget, turning instantly from a friend into an automaton, as was her custom on the rare occasions when I hardened myself to find fault. The words were submissive enough, but her manner announced that she had said her say, and would stick to it, though Herself, poor thing, must be humoured when she took the high horse. As ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he cannot ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... to the soul of Julius Caesar, and call it an immaterial automaton (M. Leibniz's own phrase), and compare it with an atom of Epicurus; I mean an atom surrounded with a vacuum on all sides, and which will never meet any other atom. This is a very just comparison: for this atom, on the one hand, has a natural ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... are doing, but we must be able to know, or there will be nothing worth while to forget! The danger of the mechanical idea—the extreme technician's notion that the sign is enough—is that the person may become an automaton and inhibit the power of real feeling in himself; and though he may perform admirably and win the applause of some critics who love form unduly, he fails in the great issue and wins only superficial success or fails utterly, without seeing why. The real experience has a magnetism ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... wink, saying, "We're rogues together; then I must lend you a hand." But he could be ruthless also, displaying a curious aloofness from his fellow-men and an unconsciousness of any suffering he might inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would sometimes trifle whimsically with the theory of a transmigration of souls; he traced all beliefs in immortality to the longing of those who were unfortunate here (and who did not think himself ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... away, and for a little while there was silence. Then, none commanding him, but as though an instinct pushed him forward, Red Martin began to move up the length of the long room, half dragging, half carrying his captive Ramiro. It was as if some automaton had suddenly been put in motion, some machine of gigantic strength that nothing could stop. The man in his grip set his heels in the floor and hung back, but Martin scarcely seemed to heed his resistance. On he came, and the victim ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... had grown on him in the years of his prosperity of putting his hand to his mouth and of opening his eyes in an assumption of surprise, which had no basis in fact, now grew upon him. He really degenerated, although he did not know it, into a mere automaton. Life strews its shores with such interesting and ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... be in this bit of manhood? Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... comfortless cell, kneeling upon the pavement, we may see a delicate woman mechanically repeating her daily-imposed penance of Latin prayers, before the image of a favorite saint and a basin of holy water. This self-regulating, automaton praying machine, as she counts off the number of allotted prayers by the number of beads upon her rosary, beats into her bosom the sharp edge of an iron cross that rests within her shirt of sacking-cloth, until, nature and her task exhausted, she ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... the initiative, overcoming the bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an automaton. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... you long. It is a bad plan to make a dog repeat too frequently a trick which he obviously dislikes, and insistence on your part may do great harm. The Poodle is exceptionally sensitive, and is far more efficiently taught when treated as a sensible being rather than as a mere quadrupedal automaton. He will learn twice as quickly if his master can make him understand the reason for performing a task. The whip is of little use when a lesson is to be taught, as the dog will probably associate his ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... remarked Kennedy as imperturbably as if he were an automaton, "that supposing some one took advantage of your absence to rob your safe, don't you think the wisest course would be to be perfectly ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... itself. Whether generated in the brain by the nerve centres, or whatever may be its origin, a force coincident with it is diffused throughout the nervous system, which converts the subject of it, just paralysed by despair, into a vigorous agent, or, if you will, automaton. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... and true men were snoring snugly in bed. To-morrow they would send Angelo to his death without a quiver. He shuddered, striding on, he knew not whither, into the night. His brain no longer worked. He had become a peripatetic automaton self-dedicated to nocturnal perambulation. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... to take his chances with them. But he had not yet learned to estimate these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess automaton advancing ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... puckering his old, smooth, lined face, "are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's crying her heart out for you—calling 'Bob, Bob,' every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from coming ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... and motor images. It would be possible to study these facts experimentally if we had at our disposition a human being who, while retaining his sensations and their motor reactions, was by special circumstances rendered entirely spontaneous like a sensitive automaton, whose movements were neither intentionally produced nor intentionally repressed. In this way, melodic intervals in a hypnotized subject ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ancients, that true proceeds from cause to effect; though the ancients, so far as I know, never formed the conception put forward here that the soul acts according to fixed laws, and is as it were an immaterial automaton. ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... was little Monsieur Paulin Limayrac. He has become the most accomplished specimen of the job-editor. As firmly convinced of the supremacy of the Articles of War as the best disciplined private soldier who ever showed how perfect an automaton man may become by thorough discipline, his political opinions are something more than a creed: they are a watchword which be observes with a most supple obstinacy. The cabinet-minister he calls master is a corporal who has the right to think for him; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not removed her eyes from the spot on the carpet, or lowered the paper screen. She looked like a statue and spoke like an automaton. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for feeling were occupied and tested by ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... been twenty-five years wondering why the devil I liked you, and now I know. Why, you cold-blooded, efficient, human automaton, you've actually got a heart! Bow! wow! Faithful Fido Skinner was just a-tugging at the chain and dragging the dog house after him in his efforts to eat me up! I hope I go bankrupt if I don't raise ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... major at his mechanical pursuits. He quoted Allan's extravagant account of the clock, and expressed his own anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which that clock puts in motion—on the procession of the Twelve Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance—and this before ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... we should be strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being patriotic. I ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... surrounding world. Save in the deep centre of her soul, where she agonized, she seemed to have lost all capacity for emotion. Nothing moved her, or even interested her. She sat in the house, and ate a little, and talked a little, like an automaton. She walked about the streets like a bored exile, but an exile who has forgotten his home. Her spirit never responded to the stimulus of environment. Suggestions at once lost their tonic force in the woolly cushion of her apathy. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... this sinister somnambulist stirred from his motionless position and advanced at a slow pace; he walked like an automaton. After taking a dozen steps he stopped, looked around him, and slightly bent forward. His strained features resumed their natural proportions, life re-animated his brow, the deathlike inertia of his face gave place to an expression of sadness and prostration. For a few ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne |
