"Receptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be considered. I believe that the bird, like creatures in other classes, has his receptive period, his time to learn, and that, like some mammals, he learns everything he needs to know in his first year or two; and that, having acquired his proper song, he adds little or nothing to it thereafter, although the song may increase in power and brilliance when the bird ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth "says he," and listen like a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... universe; yet she was modest and unassuming and had none of the personal airs of leadership. Her manners were gentle and self-possessed under all circumstances. Her conversation, though generally serious, earnest and logical, was sometimes playful and always good humored. Her attitude of mind was receptive. She never seemed to think even in her latest years that she had explored all truth. Though she had very clearly defined opinions on every subject that came under her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... or a puzzling legal question, or even to remember some refractory word in a foreign language which would not remain in the memory. After a certain amount of effort in many of these cases, further exertion is injurious, the mind or receptive power seems to be seized—as if nauseated—with spasmodic rejections. In such a case pass the question by, but on going to bed, think it over and will to understand it on the morrow. It will often suffice to merely desire that it shall recur in more intelligible form—in which case, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... for an exordium is to dispose the auditors to be favorable to us in the other parts of the discourse. This, as most authors agree, is accomplished by making them friendly, attentive, and receptive, tho due regard should be paid to these three particulars throughout the ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... thought concerning the relation of children to the Church and the Kingdom of God is apparent on every page. Dr. Martineau averred that children do not require to be led so much as not to be misled, and in these "Fifty-two Stories" we have a model application of his weighty aphorism. The receptive and expansive hours of child nature are admirably considered, and what is here written has a direct bearing upon its spiritual ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They may not know why they delight ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the two kinds of blessing which answer to one another—God's blessing of man, and man's blessing of God. The one is communicative, the other receptive and responsive. The one is the great stream which pours itself over the precipice; the other is the basin into which it falls and the showers of spray which rise from its surface, rainbowed in the sunshine, as the cataract of divine mercies comes down upon it. God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... breath, the passing of a summer shower, may help or hinder plans which alter our entire lives. And Miss Preston was wise enough to understand it. Here was a beautiful soul given for a time into her keeping. Now, at the period of its keenest receptive powers, a delicate and sensitive ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... and raw vegetables and excluding the dalry products, "Yogi" breathing, and "sitting in the silence." That is, sitting in darkness, in seclusion or in company with others, while keeping the mind in a passive, receptive condition for extraneous impressions. These practices tend to develop very dangerous phases of abnormal and subjective psychism, such as ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... reason that dry-farmers find it profitable to plow in the fall, as soon as possible after harvesting. In fact, Campbell advocates that the harvester be followed immediately by the disk, later to be followed by the plow The essential thing is to keep the topsoil open and receptive to a rain. ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... Silence is another. One may quiet himself physically and not be still, and he may be still without entering the Silence. When one becomes physically and mentally at rest, he is apt to become receptive to psychic influences; and when these are not desired it is advisable to protect oneself while mentally negative. One may affirm his Oneness with God, his being surrounded and protected by the divine Goodness, and may symbolize this by enveloping himself in thought with the white light of love ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... the founder of Hampton Institute, took up his work as a trainer of youth. He had very raw material, and doubtless most of his pupils failed to get the greatest lessons from him; but, as he had been a peculiarly receptive pupil of Dr. Hopkins, so Booker Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupil of his. To the formation of Mr. Washington's character, then, went the missionary zeal of New England, influenced by one of the strongest personalities in modern education, and the wide-reaching ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... as a fitting prelude to unknown realms of enchantment. The dreamful calm of the two days' passage obliterates the memory of bygone difficulties and perturbations, the interval between past and future experiences falling like refreshing dew on the weary spirit, and increasing the receptive capacity required for the assimilation of new impressions. The vast extent of the Malay Archipelago, and the stupendous size of the principal islands, comes as a fresh revelation to travellers whose ideas have been limited by vague recollections of schoolroom geography. The seven hundred miles ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... charmed some people, irritated others, frightened a few, and caused many to sneer. Her chief friend among the males was a young man named Mr Weakeyes, who had a small opinion of himself and a very receptive mind. Miss Troolove, among the ladies, was her chief friend. The strange misnomers which one meets with in society were also found in the little world in that steamer—that Royal Mail steamer we should say—for, while we turn aside for a brief period ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... baby-talk at all, if we can help it. And truly, when you come to think of it, it is absurd to expect a child to talk sensibly and rationally on the mental diet of 'moo-moos' and 'choo-choos' served out to them. Our Professor of Metaphysics and Ideology in our Child Study Course says that nothing is so receptive and plastic as the Mind of a Little Child, and that it is perfectly appalling how we fill it with trivial absurdities that haven't even the virtue of being accurate. So that's why we're trying to be so careful with Baby. You ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... life!" was the call of a prophet long ago. In barbaric Africa, Fortuny entered into life with the same fine, free, eager, receptive spirit that he had elsewhere shown. General Prim, soldier and scholar, saw that his secretary was capable of doing something more than keeping accounts, and so a substitute was hired and Fortuny was sent here and there as messenger, but in reality, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... untiring effort has been the rule of his life. Man was made to be well, and he was made to work. It is only work—which is the constant effort to retain equilibrium—that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth—a happy man, but one who knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving there and sitting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the same time it stirred him mightily. All through it he could read renunciation; she was giving him up; she was loosening her hold over him; she was nobly sacrificing her love to his life-work. And she announced herself as teachable and receptive. She could not yet understand, but ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... I have lost some of my hold over her," he answered. "It is the sort of thing which is likely to happen at any time. She has very weak receptive currents. It is like trying to drive ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are receptive, become willing to accept the divine Principle and rule of being, as unfolded in divine Science, the interpretation therein will be found to be the Comforter that leadeth ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... achieves a unified effect, thanks to the wonderful musical atmosphere which is its element, and to the pivotal position in it of province and city: "Graz, city lost in the expanse of nature, so still, so receptive and yet fulfilled as no other is with soft impressiveness; the green-dreaming, tree-rustling, gentle-singing city of Graz, animate beyond all great cities with the soul of nature." The next novel, The Sons of Haindl (1908), ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... experience, Peter's concern was: "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?"[507] They were as children to be trained and taught; but they were mostly willing pupils, receptive of soul, and imbued with a sincere eagerness to serve. To Jesus they were His little ones, His children, His servants, and His friends, as they merited.[508] They were all of the common people, not rabbis, scholars, nor priestly officials. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... impressed most easily through their imaginations. An intelligent father or mother can produce upon a child's receptive mind an impression that will ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... spiritual forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the massed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of M. Pelletier, who used to follow his wife to Pre-Charmoy as soon as he was free, proved quite a boon to Gilbert in his solitude, and a solid friendship was soon formed between the two brothers-in-law. M. Pelletier's mind was inquisitive and receptive; he had read much, and in the family circle we called him our "Encyclopedia." He made it his duty and pleasure to clear up any obscure point which might embarrass any of us, and often undertook long researches ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... scorn to my broken life. She uttered no reproaches. She took me as I was, and for three years our life together has been to me one long unbroken harmony. Our tastes were very similar. She was well read, receptive, a charming companion. Ennui was a word of which I have forgotten the meaning. And it seemed so with her, too, for she grew ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... progress through the two floors of the studios our newcomer is absorbing inspiration continually. To enumerate some of the features that make an impression on her receptive mind as she proceeds from room ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... will depend upon the mood. If we are not in the mood for it, we are unreceptive of Nature's impressions, and we are irresponsive. We do not come into touch with Nature. Consequently we see no Beauty. But if we are in a sensitive and receptive mood, if our minds are not preoccupied, and if our soul is open to the impressions which Nature is ever raining on it, then we respond to Nature's appeal. We feel ourselves in tune with her. We come into communion with her, and we ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... at you," said Yates, strolling into the barn, taking a telescopic metal cup from his pocket, and clinking it into receptive shape by a jerk of the hand. He offered the now elongated cup to Hiram, who ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... bowed gravely. Mr. Gwynn's strength lay in bowing. He was also remarkable for the unflagging attention which he paid to whatever was said to him. On such occasions his unblinking stare, wholly receptive like an underling taking orders, and never a glimmer of either contradiction or agreement or even intelligence to show therein, was almost disconcerting. Mrs. Hanway-Harley, however, declared that this receptive, inane stare was the hall-mark of exclusive English circles. Mr. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... "What cruel chance Made Martin's life so sad a story?" Martin? Why, he exhaled romance, And wore an overcoat of glory. A fleck of sunlight in the street, A horse, a book, a girl who smiled, Such visions made each moment sweet For this receptive ancient child. ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... became a frequent visitor to our cottage on the hill. He always came and went rejoicing. The Gospel of John was his daily study and delight. To his ardent and receptive nature it was a diamond mine. Two things he wanted to do. He had a strong desire to translate his favorite Gospel into Chinese, and to lead his parents to Christ. When he spoke of his father and mother his voice would soften, his ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... began my search for the child. At first I sought this child among my cultivated friends; married artists, musicians, highly-strung people, whose lives were passed in an atmosphere vibrating with quick impressions. But I went unrewarded. The children of such people are apt to be peevishly receptive, but their moods are often cloudy, and I wished for a pellucid nature. After a time I went lower down, and I began to look about the streets ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... with the English people and with English life. His was one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of coming out of it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition. He merely ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... (such was his name) was of so noble a temper that, being now nigh upon seventy years of age, and all but devoid of natural heat of body, he was yet receptive of the flames of love; and having at an assembly seen a very beautiful widow lady, Madonna Malgherida de' Ghisolieri, as some say, and being charmed with her beyond measure, was, notwithstanding ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... and began rapid expostulation in fluent Ogallalla. "It's no use, young man," interposed Bruce. "Your chum there has no buffalo tongues, and he knew it. Here's some hardtack for you," and he spread one liberally with sugar and handed it to the ever-receptive paw, outstretched to grasp it. A glance over the shoulder showed that Conroy was nearly at the edge. Then, quietly, Bruce, too, began to retire. He had not got ten paces, still facing his unwelcome visitor, when the Indian gave a shrill, sudden cry and tossed up his hands. Not a second ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... this monograph a delightful eulogium of books and their manifold influence, and has gained therein two classes of readers,—the scholarly class, to which he belongs, and the receptive class, which he has benefited.—Evening Mail and Express, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... and He in God. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." Therefore we are not only one with Jesus Christ, but through Him we are one with God. "I in them, Thou in Me." The very life of God is pouring its glorious tides through us, and would do so more largely if only we were more receptive and obedient. He pours water out of the mouth of the Congo at the rate of 1,000,000 tons per second; and is willing to do marvels as mighty through each believer. And as this life permeates us all alike, it makes us not only one with the ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd,[16] and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morning. They recount actual happenings accurately enough for literary purposes, they strain for the unusual side of things, and their purpose is too different from yours to make you liable to the charge of plagiarism if you rework their material. The receptive perusal of any newspaper ought to furnish the reader with a fresh stock of literary material. Such matter is particularly valuable to the short story writer because of the present and ever increasing demand for stories of the day, plots, characters, ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Harris sought out new homestead land and Arthurs proceeded with the development of his farm. It was McCrae, whose interest in every member of the expedition was that of a father, that dropped the germ of this suggestion into Arthurs' receptive ear, and it was with paternal satisfaction he found the young couples speedily work out for themselves the arrangements which he had ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... being in theirs, to lose our insignificant selves in the atmosphere they created and left behind. Is it possible that subtile** distillations of personality penetrate and saturate inanimate things, so that aromas imperceptible to the sense are given off for ages and affect all who come in receptive mood within their influence? It is quite likely that what we feel when we stand within the shadow of a great soul is all subjective, that our emotions are but the workings of our imaginations stirred by suggestive surroundings; but who knows, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... growing fame. Dan was a victim of that error to which young men yield in exultant moments, when, after a first brush with the pickets, they are confident of making their own terms with life. Dan's attitude toward the world was receptive; here in the Bassett domestic circle he felt no shame at being a Bassett man. All but Sylvia had spoken to him of his part in the convention, and she turned to him now after a passage with Allen that had left ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... reading had hurt the spring and elasticity of his mind. Doubtless we may carry our efforts to excess in this direction as well as any other, by calling into unduly vigorous and persistent action the merely receptive energies of the mind. Perhaps this was the case with Herder, as the range of his reading was truly immense; but if so, it argues with fatal effect against his claims to the highest order of intellect; if the weight of his body was too great for his wings, there ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sensation was long ago exhausted, and the oxygen has perished from every sentiment, so has it been breathed and breathed again,—that nowadays the wise adventurer sat down beside his own register and waited for incidents to seek him out. It seemed to him that the cultivation of a patient and receptive spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the occurrence of all manner of surprising facts within the range of one's own personal knowledge; that not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies and ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... whom he modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which, unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an artificer ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... as their influence must have been in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us here. His future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably affected by two men older than himself, and belonging to the dons—both of them fellows and tutors of St. Anselm's, though on ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... brother's words. Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame. He was extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination, pitched high, was ever at work establishing relations of likeness and difference. "Mr. Eden," was what he had thrilled to—he who had been called "Eden," or "Martin Eden," or just "Martin," ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to accomplish anything first put yourself in a concentrating, reposeful, receptive, acquiring frame of mind. In tackling unfamiliar work make haste slowly and deliberately and then you will secure that interior activity, which is never possible when you are in a hurry or under a strain. When you "think hard" ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... the American. The typical American has some strong qualities that seem in the typical Russian conspicuously absent; but his very practical energy, his pride and self-satisfaction, stand in the way of his receptive power. Now a conspicuous trait of the Russian is his humility; and his humility enables him to see clearly what is going on, where an American would instantly interfere, and attempt to change the course of events.* For, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... mouth, clean cut, full, firm and finely modelled in the lips. His nose was straight, high in the nostril and sensitive. He resembled his brother, Daniel, but stood three inches taller, and his brow was fuller and loftier. His expression in repose appeared frank and receptive; but to-day his face wore a look half anxious, half ferocious. He was clad in tweed knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, of different pattern but similar material. His tie was light blue and fastened with a gold pin modelled in the shape of a hunting-horn. He bore ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... of male and female is, then, the foundation of all religions; the heaven marries the earth, as man marries woman, and that union is the first marriage. Saturn is the sky, the male, or active energy; Rhea is the earth, the female, or receptive; and these are the father and the mother of all. The Persians of old called the sky Jupiter, or Jupater, "Ju the Father." The sun is the agent of the generative power of the sky, and his beams fecundate ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice's self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man—a man who knew his business—it would be easy enough to make him see through that ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting one himself—to prove his coolness—began again ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... me from the lips of Maarda herself. It was hard to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater than beauty, something more like lovableness, than ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... plate itself?" said the maiden, as she began to arrange her mind towards departure. "As the colours were still in a receptive state this person placed it safely aside for the time. It was somewhat near the spot ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the great masculine positive force, the soul as the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the "mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness. For love is receptive of each and all things that are in harmony with it; it longs for them, seeks them, and drinks them in as it were spontaneously, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Prillerman obtained from this official the promise to support a movement to supply this need. Superintendent Morgan furthermore directed Prillerman to Governor Fleming to take up with him the same proposal. The Governor was in a receptive mood and informed Prillerman, moreover, that this problem could be more easily solved than he had at first thought, for the reason that such an institution could be so established as to benefit by the Morrill Land Grant Act intended to subsidize, with funds ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Effort, obvious effort, detracts from the listener's enjoyment. Ease in the executant corresponds with enjoyment in the listener, or, at all events, if nothing more, it puts him in such a frame of mind, that the more positive qualities of the performance find him in an undisturbed, receptive state. ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... must unconditionally be resisted and combated. However, at the same time all that can be done must be done to alleviate the distress of the British masses, which is undoubtedly very great, and which makes them exceedingly receptive to the revolutionary doctrines of Socialism. As it would require too much space to deal with the social problem in Great Britain in its entirety, only a few of the most important points ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... discussion were modeled on actual personages. He himself was personified under the dual form of Florestan and Eusebius, the "two souls in his breast"—the former, the fiery iconoclast, impulsive in his judgments and reckless in attacking prejudices; the latter, the mild, genial, receptive dreamer. Master Raro, who stood for Wieck, also typified the calm, speculative side of Schumann's nature. Chiara represented Clara Wieck, and personified the feminine side of art. So the various personages ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... looks forward. Honore and Frowenfeld are walking arm-in-arm under the furthermost row of willows. Honore is speaking. How gracefully, in correspondence with his words, his free arm or hand—sometimes his head or even his lithe form—moves in quiet gesture, while the grave, receptive apothecary takes into his meditative mind, as into a large, cool cistern, the valued rain-fall of his friend's communications. They are near enough for the little doctor easily to call them; but he ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... want to be uncharitable, but he could not but think that those who used this word in this sense laid themselves open to the suspicion (in this case, at least, quite unjustified), that their minds were only receptive of one kind of suggestion, and ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... the course of a few weeks, would you not advocate opening negotiations for peace? And were I to show the Emperor of Germany that his great army could be destroyed in even less time, would he not be more receptive than we now ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity. Milton's was an heroic age, and its ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and Bascom, and many who had the courage of their convictions expressed then very frankly. Messrs. Botcher and Bascom were, when all was said, mere train despatchers of the Northeastern, who might some day bring on a wreck the like of which the State had never seen. Mr. Crewe was in a receptive mood; indeed his nature, like Nebuchadnezzar's, seemed to have experienced some indefinable and vital change. Was this the Mr. Crewe the humble rural members had pictured to themselves? Was this the Mr. Crewe who, at the beginning of the session, had told them roundly it was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating material ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... quite so much as he hoped she might, or as perhaps he believed she did. She had been interested in him mainly because she found him both receptive and capable of development in the matter of music—ready to understand, that is, and willing to be taught. To have such a man listen with respect to every word she said, never denying, defending or justifying what she might point out as a fault, but setting himself at once to the correction ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even, as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her character, its force of self-assertion, unfitted her to be the complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. He rebelled ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... where the young artist saw a great deal of a kind of life with which he possessed an immense sympathy. The hard work of the fishermen putting out to sea on stormy evenings, or toiling with their nets ashore after a sleepless night, made a living picture which stamped itself deeply on his receptive mind. A man of the people himself, born to toil and inured to it from babyhood, this constant scene of toiling and struggling humanity touched the deepest chord in his whole nature, so that some of the most beautiful and noble ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... the Antwerp transept; the statue of one of the apostles in Naumburg; the nave of Cologne; the conglomerate of chapels about the apse of Mayence; the Angel's Pillar at Strasburg—they were a joy in line and proportion to the eye, in effect and spirit of purpose to the understanding mind, the receptive soul. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... within with the body, and without with the sun, in so far as the soul with its twin faculty, puts into operation two functions: the one to vivify and realize the animal body, the other to contemplate superior things; so that it is in receptive potentiality from above, as it is in re-active potentiality below, towards the body. The body is, as it were, dead, and as it were apart from the soul, the which is its life and its perfection; and the soul is as it were dead, and a thing apart ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... never known before—the result of six weeks of unsettled weather, which must impair the harvest and increase the difficulty of maintaining order.[92] Certainly the stars in their courses fought against the ancien regime. The rains which made a receptive seed-bed for the writings of Paine also hampered the progress of Brunswick towards the Argonne, crowded his hospitals with invalids, and in part induced that inglorious retreat. As the storms lasted far into the autumn, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of things must often occasion—a look which comes from our inability to gain other than fragmentary visions of the work that the Father worketh hitherto. When the kingdom of heaven is at hand, one sign thereof will be that all clergymen will be more or less of the latter sort, and mere receptive goodness, no more than education and moral character, will be considered sufficient reason for a man's occupying the high position of an instructor of his fellows. But even now this possession of original power is not by any means to be limited ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... of such power that the Terrestrial's every sense wilted under the impact. He did not faint, he did not lose consciousness—he simply lost all control of every nerve and fiber as his entire brain passed into the control of the immense mentality of the First of Psychology and became a purely receptive, plastic medium upon which to impress the knowledge of ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the girl's frank sympathy, and he told himself, with deep and convincing earnestness, that next time they met he must guard his unruly tongue, else it might run away with him again, and find her in less receptive mood. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... very high opinion of the average public-school methods and results, and was both eager to undertake the instruction of her son and ambitious for the future of a boy whom she knew from pedagogic experience to be receptive and thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he found study easy and pleasant. The quality of culture in that simple but refined home, as well as the intellectual character of this youth without ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... find his law within himself, be the source of his own activity, not passive or receptive, but outgoing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... a greater and more independent individual efficiency, but also a deeper and more lasting influence on the men; but this influence of the superiors must always remain limited if it cannot count on finding in the men a receptive and intelligent material. This fact is especially clear when we grasp the claims which modern war will make on the individual fighter. In order to meet these demands fully, the people must be ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... probably only in the beginning of our evolution, and something new may always be expected, that is, new and fresh applications of universal law. The critic of literature needs to be in an expectant and receptive frame of mind. Many critics approach a book with hostile intent, and seem to fancy that their business is to look for what is bad in it, and not for what is good. It seems to me that the first duty of the critic is to try to understand the author, to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... way, I was often loth to do, owing to the confined air below, and the fresh glorious breezes on deck—the man who slept under me was a young banker, a clerk, going out to the Cape to make his fortune, and a fine capable-looking fellow he was, inclined rather to be receptive than communicative. He frequently bumped me with his head in getting up; I, not unfrequently, put a foot upon his nose, ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... she quivered as if she were being destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel vibrated, and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all dark, will-less, having only the receptive will. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... overwhelming and most painful. It was, as well as I can describe it, a deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality. About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of relation to the outer world destroyed. As a consequence, a large part of the receptive central organs must be out of employ, and, like other idle things, degenerating rapidly. Moreover, all the great central ganglia, which give rise to movements in the limbs, were also eternally at rest. Thus one half of me was absent or functionally ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... native vagabonds and disguised Boxers, who had hidden panic-stricken during the first hours after the relief, were now prowling about armed from head to foot. The vast city, which had been given over for weeks to mad disorders and insane Boxerism, was in a receptive condition for this final climax. There was no semblance of authority left; with troops of many rival nationalities always pouring in, and a nominal state of war still existing, with the possibility of a Chinese counter-advance taking place, how could there ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Albert traveled in Switzerland and Italy with Baron Stockmar—everywhere winning the admiration and respect of the best sort of people by the rare princeliness of his appearance, his refined taste, his thoughtful and singularly receptive mind. And so three years went by. They were three years of uncertainty in regard to the great projects formed for him, of happiness, and a noble and useful, if subordinate career. King Leopold, the good genius of the two families, had not suffered his cousin to forget him, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... reorganization which is molding the destinies of the women of our times, and those that come after us. That is what I want to talk to you about, and devoutly have I been praying that your heart will be receptive to the call that has claimed the life of Mary Elizabeth and me. There is a particular work, for which you are fitted as no other woman I have ever known is fitted, and I want to lay the case plainly before you to-night. Will you give ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... something less than faith. Faith abides, but knowledge passes away. Faith abides, because it is a positive sight of truth. It is an experience of the soul, by which it opens itself in trust, and becomes receptive of spiritual influence. Faith, therefore, remains, and its results are permanent in the soul. They make the substance of our knowledge as regards the spiritual world. This substance becomes a part of the soul itself, and constitutes a basis of self-consciousness as real as is its ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... To the receptive eye he was a sight not soon to be forgotten, as he bent over a piece of goods outspread before a customer, one hand resting on the stuff, the other on the yard-measure, his chest as nearly touching the counter as the protesting adjacent parts would permit, his broad smooth ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Had he cared, he might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success; certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in toiling ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... down the path, his keen face and insolent eyes triumphant. He was too absorbed in his own emotion especially to note hers. Besides, she had always been receptive rather than demonstrative ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... her thoughts to him and held them there. The worn leather, stained with years of hard usage and wrinkled permanently where they had shaped themselves to his legs in the saddle, brought his big, bluff presence vividly before her, when she was in a certain receptive mood. She would forget all about her story, and the riding and shooting and roping she had done that day to appease the clamorous, professional appetite of Robert Grant Burns, and would sit and stare, and think and think. Always her thoughts traveled in a wide circle ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... down in the heather and wait half an hour maybe while the curlew called, and then have Dancing Town take form and color before his eyes, hold it until every detail was visible, and then fade gently out as twilight fades into night. He had thought to be prepared and receptive. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... made short addresses at our public meetings, and was considered to have my share of self-possession; but I never could accustom myself to the keen, disturbing, irritating atmosphere of the Legislature. Everybody seemed wide-awake and aggressive, instead of pleasantly receptive; there were so many "points of order," and what not; such complete disregard, among the members, of each other's feelings; and, finally—a thing I could never understand, indeed—such inconsistency and lack of principle in the intercourse of the two parties. How ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the fact that Miss Doris Gray, an impressionable young English girl, receptive to sympathetic admiration and half in love with me—suppose, I say, I took advantage of this fact, and we marry in ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... beaten track, I likewise showed to my compatriots. I had never been able to tolerate Guido Reni; but his playing angels in the chapel of San Gregorio excited my profound admiration, and it was a satisfaction to me to pour this into the receptive ear of a girl compatriot. These angels delighted me so that I could hardly tear myself away from them. The fine malice, the mild coquetry, even in the expression of the noblest purity and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light and heat ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... would not be legitimate, however, to conclude from this that ignorance of the meaning was the rule in old times; those were the days when the nation's traditional songs, myths, and lore formed the equipment of every alert and receptive mind, chief or commoner. There was no printed page to while away the hours of idleness. The library was stored in one's memory. The language of the mele, which now has [Page 29] become antiquated, then was familiar speech. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... heroic, which irks me. We would like to get in on the ground floor, while all hands are in a receptive mood, and before the Plattsburgers and other such death-defying supermen make it ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... good spirits by the time Lord Rosebery ten minutes on his legs; Lord Selborne's unctuous dronings had disappeared into the irrevocable and vast distances; in short, the moribund Chamber was alive, vivacious, and receptive. And when he had got them to this point Lord Rosebery took the serious part of his work seriously in hand. Not that he attempted lofty appeal. On the contrary, rarely throughout the speech did he raise his voice above that clear, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to be brought to bear upon this enormity. No race of people can be lifted up by others to grand civility. The elevation of a people, their thorough civilization, comes chiefly from internal qualities. If there is no receptive and living quality in them which can be evoked for their elevation, then they must die! The emancipation of the black race in this land from the injustice and grinding tyranny of their labor servitude is to be effected mainly by the development of such ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... in those courting days was held unworthy) were crowded. Ladies, soldiers, churchmen, humanists in brocade, poets in velvet, a Cardinal, a cross-eyed Greek who had forsaken usury at Trebizond for moral philosophy at Nona; Madonna Diamante, too receptive wife of the Count of Cornuto; Madonna Smeralda, her discreet friend; Madonna Saphira; Madonna Rubina; frizzed young nobles in parti-coloured hose; humble abbates, uncured and incurable; a monk crowned with laurel for a sonnet; and a Knight of the Holy Ghost in retirement;—these ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... delightful way. She was 'open to all emotions as they came'—in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she has retained her power of happiness, while the hard Rebecca has arrived at hell, 'the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive organs closed.' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... confined myself to the purely intellectual side of this question. But man is not all intellect. If he were so, science would, I believe, be his proper nutriment. But he feels as well as thinks; he is receptive of the sublime and beautiful as well as of the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intellectual action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, sustained by an undercurrent of the emotions. It is vain to attempt to separate the moral and emotional from the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color of age. Knowing and satiated when the mind is most receptive, such individualities rarely develop beyond their first brilliant phase. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was for a long time considered a perfect specimen of that type. For the hero of that first work, as of every work published by him during the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... tropics were finally left behind, he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour, an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor, in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound. Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he could ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... of a race in my opinion,) something of this kind has certainly taken place in Boston. The New England metropolis of to-day may be described as sunny, (there is something else that makes warmth, mastering even winds and meteorologies, though those are not to be sneez'd at,) joyous, receptive, full of ardor, sparkle, a certain element of yearning, magnificently tolerant, yet not to be fool'd; fond of good eating and drinking—costly in costume as its purse can buy; and all through its best ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Velasquez had little sympathy with the superstitions of the multitude. His religion was essentially a Natural Religion: to love his friends, to bathe in the sunshine of life, to preserve a right mental attitude—the receptive attitude, the attitude of gratitude—and to do his work: these things were for him the sum of life. His passion was art—to portray his feelings on canvas and make manifest to others the things he himself saw. The Church, he thought, did not afford sufficient outlet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... men are stronger in differentiation. The thinking power of woman is deductive, that of man inductive; woman's influence on knowledge is thus held to be indirect rather than direct. But women have greater receptive powers, retain impressions better and have more vivid and surer memories; for which reason women are generally more receptive for facts than for laws, more for concrete than for general ideas. The feminine mind shows greater patience, more open-mindedness ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... stout, portly old lady. She had twinkling good-humored eyes, a mouth which smiled whenever she looked at a child, and a constant habit of putting her hand into her pocket and taking out a lollipop. This lollipop found its way straight into the receptive mouth of any small creature of the human race who ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... butt of affectionate jokes, the Grass still miles away, the population still hopeful of salvation. And then, because of the panic, the frantic scurry to save things once valuable and now only valued, no one noticed when a betraying wind blew seeds beyond the town, over the river, to find receptive soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the banks into the Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it built up greater bulk for itself, behind and beside. Each day it pushed a little farther ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... on terra firma; in the water the man will be thinking of the ducking in sight and his mind will not be in receptive mood. It is also essential to make him understand a hold thoroughly ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... he wasn't able to say in return. His idea of conversation for himself was giving you the convenience of speaking to him; and when he went to "see" Lady Kenyon for instance it was to carry her the tribute of his receptive silence. Where would the speech of his betters have been if proper service had been a manifestation of sound? In that case the fundamental difference would have had to be shown by their dumbness, and many of them, poor things, were dumb enough ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... marvellously receptive, flexible mind should have refused acceptance to the clearly logical doctrines of the new chemistry seems equally inexplicable. But so it was. To the very last, after all his friends had capitulated, Priestley kept up the fight. From ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... desks at a wall into which was let a solid slab of blackboard. The window adjoining this display exhibited a miniature classroom in which the "F.E. & S." system of classroom ventilation maintained air so pure and fresh that the most comatose pupil could not but keep alert and receptive in it. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... aim of the wise was to educate the receptive and all who came to them in the attitude of disciples. This aim corresponded very closely to that of the modern educator. Again the preface to the book of Proverbs clearly expresses this ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... thought I was going to broaden Jean, to show her what a narrow little Puritan she is, bound in the Old Testament thrall of her Great-aunt Alison—but not a bit of it. She is very receptive, delighted to be told about people and clothes, cities, theatres, pictures, but on what she calls 'serious things' she is an absolute rock. It is like finding a Roundhead delighting in Royalist sports and ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... to one. In the night she would lie on Jane's arm, and amid smothered sobs, would softly talk of her lover, and praise his beauty and perfections, and pour her pathetic little tale over and over again into Jane's receptive ear and warm responsive heart; and Jane answered with soft little kisses that would have consoled Niobe herself. Then Mary would tell how the doors of her life, at the ripe age of eighteen, were closed forever and forever, and that her few remaining years would be but years of waiting ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... comprising a corps of "persuaders" in the pay of business men? How do they influence them? The great fights waged to defeat certain measures are well known, and it is known that money was used. Certain congressmen have been notoriously receptive. I have seen the following story in print in many forms. I took the trouble to ask a well-known man if it was possible that it could be founded on fact; his reply was, "Certainly it is a fact." A briber entered the private room of a congressman. "Mr. ——, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... supper was laid. He had no more than cut a slice when tap-tap came to the door again. The minister had already learnt that this particular rhythm in taps denoted the fingers of his enkindling landlady, and the doomed young fellow buried his first mouthful under a look of receptive blandness. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Dean Graves was writing in careful and moderate language his not unseasonable warnings, thoughts representative of a new and deeper strain of theological feeling were passing through the mind of Samuel Coleridge. His was a genius singularly receptive of the ideas which emanated from the leading intellect of his age in England or abroad. He was probably better acquainted than any other of his countrymen with the highest literature of Germany, which found in him not only an interpreter, but a most able and reflective exponent. Few could be better ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... interpreter; and many Christian hearts turned toward them in their lonely captivity in a strange land. The trial was continued several months. During this time the anti-slavery friends provided instruction for the Africans. Their minds were active and receptive. They soon learned to read, write, and do sums in arithmetic. They cultivated a garden of some fifteen acres, and proved themselves ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... The men who stood highest socially, the Princes of the Captivity in Babylonia and the Patriarchs in Palestine, were not always those vested with the highest authority. Some of the Amoraim, again, were merely receptive, the medium through which tradition was handed on; others were creative as well. To put the same fact in Rabbinical metaphor, some were Sinais of learning, others tore up mountains, and ground them together ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... of psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise; for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can seldom or never be hushed to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... went along singing, for his heart was happy, and he felt the cheerful influence of the vernal air. The birds to him were prophets and choirs, and the murmur of the south winds in the trees was a sermon. A right and receptive spirit sees good in everything, and so Jasper sang as ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... chairs were formed in a crescent about one side of the stove. The Swede began to talk; he talked arrogantly, profanely, angrily. Johnnie, the cowboy, and the Easterner maintained a morose silence, while old Scully appeared to be receptive and eager, breaking in constantly ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... receptive soil, and from that day the art and pleasure loving citizen of the world became an earnest man with a purpose. But as he chose his purpose mainly from selfish motives it did not become an ennobling one. He now gave double attention to business and practical economy. He at once formed the project ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... stands, and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or litterateur, but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to make,—that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a little ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return. Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in earlier ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... admit it, but religion is a luxury which few of the hard-workers in this world can afford. But she still maintained that sense of conventional awe which strict religious training drives deep into a receptive mind. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... days He addressed the Theosophical Society, the Esperanto Society, and many of the students, including representatives of almost all parts of the East. He also spoke to two or three other large meetings in the bleak but receptive 'northern Athens.' It is pleasant to add that here, as elsewhere, many seekers came and had private interviews with Him. It was a fruitful season, and ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... of the mummers there was a new tone in him of arrogance and disdain. He used always to be genial and kindly even to those he laughed at; now he was openly contemptuous. The truth is that his extraordinarily receptive mind went with an even more abnormal receptivity of character: unlike most men of marked ability, he took colour from his associates. In this as in love of courtesies and dislike of coarse words he was curiously feminine. Intercourse with Beardsley, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of this law that thought transference is possible, and has become an established scientific fact, by virtue of which a person can so direct his thought-forces that a person at a distance, and in a receptive attitude, can get the thought much the same as sound, for example, is conducted through the agency of a ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... know when an adventure is going to begin. But on a train is a good place to lie in wait for them. So we sat down in the smoker of the 10 A.M. Eastern Standard Time P.R.R. express to Philadelphia, in a receptive mood. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... girl leaves school she is hardly old enough to enter service, and too often in the year or so that elapses before she 'goes out' much mischief is done. She is then at an age when the mind is peculiarly receptive, and the ways of the young labourers with whom she is thrown into contact are not very refined. Her first essay at 'service' is often as day-nursemaid at some adjacent farmhouse, taking care of the younger children in the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... portrait more than anyone hated it. He would have been almost ready to burn down Sneyd Castle in order to get rid of the thing. But it happened that on the previous evening, in the conversation with the magistrates' clerk, his receptive brain had been visited by a less expensive scheme than burning down ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... many evenings, walking soberly Along our street all dappled with rich sun, I please myself with words, and happily Time rhymes to footfalls, planning how they run; And yet, when midnight comes, and paper lies Clean, white, receptive, all that one can ask, Alas for drowsy spirit, weary eyes And traitor hand that fails ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... relationship, marriage and parenthood, should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine role and vice versa, the tragedy of compelled homosexuality, because of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... life. Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending metamorphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means of thought, recovers in inward profundity what it has lost in extension, and makes up for the rich accumulations of receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confusing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the severity of the conditions attached to the higher existence; but conscious and voluntary thought alone brings ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... acquiesce in the belief that this Hercules of the ara came from a Latin city,—from that Tibur which by tradition was of Greek origin—"Tibur Argeo positum colono,"—and which, like its neighbour Praeneste, was curiously receptive of foreign influence.[475] It is believed that the Greek traders from Campania and Magna Graecia made their way northwards through Latium, and thus eventually reached Rome with the deity whom they seem to have always carried with them. He ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... social occasions with a hungry mind as well as with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive—even more so than his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone, we should still do well to see that the table ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... and a superior brand of cigars to which Mr. Symes called particular attention, the conversation of his guests began to contain some degree of naturalness and their painful self-consciousness gradually vanished. When they seemed in a mellow and receptive mood he began to rehearse his achievements in the East and unfold his plans. As he talked, their imaginations stimulated by wine, they saw the future of Crowheart pass before ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... a model republic could have aided the circulation [40]of the pamphlet at the time, or at any later period, is to introduce an element unnecessary to explain the vogue of the relation. It passed simply as a story of adventure, and as such it fell upon a time when a wide public was receptive to the point of being easily duped. Wood asserts that the "Isle of Pines," when first published, "was look'd upon as a mere sham or piece of drollery; "{1} and there are few contemporary references to the relation of either Pine or Van Sloetten, ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... promise, the Calvin lumber was not delivered on time. The Reverend gentleman called to ask why. His manner was anything but receptive so far as excuses ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... a crime against nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those described in Leaves of Grass, but Whitman was a man of concrete, emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupies in his work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the "average ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Everett made an uncompromising speech. That is by far better than to make a hero out of a McClellan. But the misdeeds of the Administration easily confused such impressionable receptive minds as is ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... the effect of moderate doses of alcohol on mental work much difference of opinion exists. Many students find that, instead of helping them in their work, it hinders them. It dulls their receptive faculties. Others, on the contrary, find real help in moderate quantities of wine. These differences of effect would seem to depend greatly on differences in constitutional temperament. It is certainly ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... semen germinated in the positive male organ is projected into the negative uterus at conception, so ideas are generated by a positive Human Ego in the spirit-substance of the Region of abstract Thought. This idea is projected upon the receptive mind, and a conception takes place. Then, as the spermatozoic nucleus draws upon the maternal body for material to shape a body appropriate to its individual expression, so does each idea clothe itself in a peculiar form of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel |
