"Receptivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corresponding degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity which culminates in the state of being "controlled." An untrained psychic who is mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, may easily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor who is determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... for practical purposes she always looked well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat-and-skirt and a small hat of black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding sensitive receptivity. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... embarrassment, "your mind interests me exceedingly. It is not complex, nor subtle, but remarkably intuitive. You have imagination and humor, and great receptivity." ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... of this unexpected mood of receptivity, however unwilling, came a sharp corrective in the person of ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... wall-architecture perhaps excelled their instructors. Etruscan art is a remarkable evidence of accomplishments mechanically acquired and mechanically retained, but it is, as little as the Chinese, an evidence even of genial receptivity. As scholars have long since desisted from the attempt to derive Greek art from that of the Etruscans, so they must, with whatever reluctance, make up their minds to transfer the Etruscans from the first to the lowest place in the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... [220] should take up into itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write there. And was not this precisely ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120 degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... into the same condition of slightly exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,—talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now just ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state—a capacity to become something different under external influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a power; and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? The ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas must be inherent. I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain English word, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity,' employed by Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power(6) to receive ideas, whether in man or in any living thing by which ideas are received. A man and an elephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that took place round him, all that he had gone through in life, was meaningless to him now. It was all outlived, and he had nothing to think about. Neither had he any feelings, for all his organs of receptivity ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... that we are a nation of shopkeepers. "The traders' spirit, that is Englishdom." I confess that as an Englishman I have always felt there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in this sneer. We are surely a somewhat stodgy, money-making people with far too little receptivity for new ideas. "I have long thought and preached," wrote Lord Haldane in the Nation of August 7, 1915, "that the real problem in this country is the development of thought and ideas." Dr. Drill does ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... however, he speedily assigned to the girl's account. He continued, as at first, to ignore her. But in the slow rumination of the forest he became more and more irritably sensible of her presence. Sam's taciturnity was contrastedly sunny and open. He looked on things about him with the placid receptivity of an old man, and said nothing because there was nothing to say. The Ojibway girl remained inscrutable, helping where she could, apparently desirous ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... depends on the degree with which a man can estimate the receptivity of other beings with whom he deals. This knowledge of receptivity should include the thought and action of men all the way from the unskilled worker to the directors, and also that of all men in other organizations in any way ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... might love it in him. He was their master-conception, their true ideal, acting before them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions. This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching. Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Mowbray was strange with emotion, pale but brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare and perfect was ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... whose immortal parts she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them here; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come to them after the active time of life is past. The Greenwich pensioners might prove better subjects for true education now than in their school-boy days; but then where is the Normal School that could educate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short? Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the Prolegomena to AEsthetics? The Prolegomena to AEsthetics was not a work that one could set ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... isolated it could attain the highest civilization, or that if it did touch a high one it could long hold it in a living growth, cut off from the rest of the world. I do not believe it. For no state, however large, is sufficient unto itself. No state is really alive in the highest sense whose receptivity is not equal to its power to contribute to the world with which its destiny is bound up. It is only at its best when it is a part of the vital current of movement, of sympathy, of hope, of enthusiasm of the world at large. There is no doctrine so belittling, so ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... participate to that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According to their measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a few great mystics appear to have possessed—not indeed in its entirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, "one with the Reality of things." The greater the artist is, the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... receptivity to receive the Grace of God, as there is more or less life still in the germ formerly implanted. When He comes to the latter class there is nothing to work on. The foundations must be laid. A receptivity must be brought about, a new life must be inbreathed. In other words, in the conversion of the latter the Holy Spirit must do what He has already done in the former. The one is the conversion of a once regenerate but now lapsed one. ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... points. But an intuition can take place only in so far as the object is given to us. This, again, is only possible, to man at least, on condition that the object affect the mind in a certain manner. The capacity for receiving representations (receptivity) through the mode in which we are affected by objects, objects, is called sensibility. By means of sensibility, therefore, objects are given to us, and it alone furnishes us with intuitions; by the understanding they are thought, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... to visualize the inevitableness of cause and effect, combined sometimes with a sex-hyperesthesia and lack of self-control. Criminality in its worst forms is similarly due to a lack of appreciation of or receptivity to moral ideas. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... its repose never stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poor weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great sea, and 'according to our faith,' in the exact measure of our receptivity, does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless. It has no limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh in us. But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our capacity, and though that capacity enlarges by the very ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the eternal sort. While many of their neighbors ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... question; and one, I am disposed to think, which can receive its solution only by the idea, or the act and fact of justification by faith self-reflected. But, humanly considered, this position of Luther's provokes the mind to ask, is there no receptivity of faith, considered as a free gift of God, prerequisite in the individual? Does faith commence by generating the receptivity of itself? If so, there is no difference either in kind or in degree between the receivers and the rejectors of the word, at the moment preceeding ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... whisperings, emphasized by blows of the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their deepest impulses—their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their emotional receptivity—were used, with no conscious and deliberate Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the asceticism of Christianity, however much ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... Lincolnshire; and shortly after six o'clock we caught the first glimpse of the Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be larger than our receptivity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... human personal liberty, in due combination with restraints of law sufficient to, but not in excess of, the requirements of the general welfare. In this particular distinctiveness of characteristic, which has thus differentiated the receptivity of the Japanese from that of the continental Asiatic, we may perhaps see the influence of the insular environment that has permitted and favored the evolution of a strong national personality; and in the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... projects as outlined above there are a number of minor problems that are receiving some attention: such as the retention of the vitality of pollen, the period of receptivity, the seed production in hybrid fruits, and the time for and percentage of the germination of seeds. On all of these points we are accumulating considerable information that it is hoped may be of some practical value."—Journal ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... believed in life, in the goodness of things and in the future of humanity, just as Victor Hugo and Dumas pere, those other forces of Nature, did, at about the same time. A soul foreign to her own had entered into her, and it was the romantic soul. With the magnificent power of receptivity which she possessed, George Sand welcomed all the winds which came to her from the four quarters of romanticism. She sent them back with unheard-of fulness, sonorous depth and wealth of orchestration. From that time forth a woman's ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... saw it myself! I saw you kneeling beside it. I helped to sort it, afterwards. The actual heap on the floor was the broken chair, Ronnie mixed up with it; and, on top of both, that unholy Infant, whose precocious receptivity is responsible for the entire business. I exonerate the Florentine chair; I exonerate poor Ronnie. I shall always maintain that that confounded 'cello worked the whole show, out of ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... have the feminine quality of receptivity very remarkably developed. Mrs. O'James ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mightiest is brought before the eyes as if actually present in that medley of great and small things which is characteristic of human life. Genius is an independent gift of God: whether it is allowed to expand or not depends on the receptivity ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his work: L'essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, he developed Locke's ideas and contended that not only the soul, but also the senses, not only the art of fashioning ideas, but also the apparatus of sensual receptivity, are subjects of experience and usage. Consequently, the entire development of man depends upon education and external circumstances. Condillac was only supplanted in the French ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... temper, on the other hand, lets itself go with a more passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining and registering functions of the intellect does ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... religion. Even for a man of really strong and independent intellect it may be many years before the precociously dulled feelings become fresh again, before the fetters of routine fall off, and he is enabled at last to approach the Bible with fresh receptivity and to realize, for the first time in his life, the treasures of art and beauty and divine wisdom it contains. But for most that moment never comes round. For the majority the religious education of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to-day. But the poor folk whom we meet in association with our Lord are neither ignorant nor spiritually dull; and it would be a vast mistake to think of Blessed Mary as other than of great intelligence and spiritual receptivity, or as deficient in understanding of the details of her ancestral religion. We have no reason to be surprised that she should sing Magnificat, or to think that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her thoughts which were quite ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and color are intimately associated, and there are combinations of the two that can throw the spiritual body into a condition of safe receptivity, without which we should be deaf and blind even in the ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... crust and hinder it from its free radiation. Sulphur is to be regarded as a symbol of the expansive power, as individual initiative, as will. Mercury stands opposite to it as woman does to man, as that which goes to the subject from without, or as absolute receptivity. Salt is midway between both; in it the equilibrium between [Symbol: Sulphur] and [Symbol: Mercury] is found. It is a symbol of what appears as the stable being of man. In the first degree the purification of the salt is worked ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... new ones. To the north-east and north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perceive in proportion to their receptivity. Candor and intelligence will suffice to appreciate that the secret of M. Rodin's art is structural expression, and that it is this and not any superficial eccentricity of execution that definitely distinguishes him from the Institute. Just as his imagination, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Study is not to be approached by any high priori road; in other words, by setting out from abstract principles as to the nature of the mind's receptivity and the operation of book-reading upon that receptivity. A humbler line of approach will be more likely ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... back in his chair. "Of course we know that the human body has electrical capacity and that operators sometimes have to use metal shields to protect the tube from the influence of the hand. And in our loop aerial at Ocean Point you noticed that the receptivity of the tube was modified when we touched it with ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... certain for all and at all times. These are such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude; receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... to stem the wild devastating flow of Asiatic barbarism upon European civilization. The virtue of the Slavonic race is thus first of all passivity; and as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow, so the virtue of the Russian is first of all passive receptivity. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... law holds good of the conduct of life. Its natural method is rhythmic, intermittent, work alternating with rest, activity and receptivity succeeding one another, the rhythm of life. The steady strain, the continuous uniformity of life, is what kills. Work unrelieved by play, and play unrefreshed by work, grow equally stale and dull. Activity without reflection loses its grasp; meditation {19} without action ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... will find in the succeeding portions thereof, from time to time, certain general instructions regarding the cultivation of psychic receptivity and sensitiveness. These general instructions are also applicable to the cultivation of telepathic power, and may be properly applied to that end. There is really but one general principle involved in all the many forms of psychic receptivity, namely that ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... said, 'Look on us!' It was a strange preface, if only some small coin was to follow. It kindled some flicker of hope of he knew not what in the beggar. He expected to receive 'something' from them, and, no doubt, was asking himself what. Expectation and receptivity were being stirred in him, though he could not divine what was coming. We have no right to assume that his state of mind was operative in fitting him to be cured, nor to call his attitude 'faith,' but still he was lifted from his usual dreary hopelessness, and some strange anticipation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the promise of this early history was that of a Spirit which should fill the whole nature of the men to whom He was granted; filling—in the measure, of course, of their receptivity—them as the great sea does all the creeks and indentations along the shore. The deeper the creek, the deeper the water in it; the further inland it runs, the further will the refreshing tide penetrate the bosom of the continent. And so each ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on—the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his—and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... soup, the champagne that succeeded the sherry, helped to quicken in these men of thought the power to grapple with a reality. The aforesaid three or four who had been down at the river recovered their lost belief in the evidence of their eyes and ears. In the rest was a spirit of receptivity which, as the meal went on, mounted to conviction. The Sub-Warden made a second and more determined attempt to enlighten the Warden; but the Warden's eye met his with a suspicion so cruelly pointed that he ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... attracted a French-woman of the eighteenth century. Her maimed life had made her perforce an 'intellectual'; and in these letters, the man's natural poetry and force stirred her enthusiasm. Hence a new interest and receptivity in her, quickened by many small and natural incidents—books lent and discussed, meetings in picture-galleries, conversations in her father's house, and throughout it that tempting, dangerous pleasure ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... subject comes into existence and activity in the individual, which makes that subject, reacting upon mere sensations and ideas, its object, and, as a new immaterial subjective unity, acts determiningly upon that subject which has just become object. This new subject, considered from the side of its receptivity, we call self-consciousness; from the side of its spontaneity, free moral self-determination. Whether we consider this freedom predetermined or not, does not at all alter the described fact and the qualitative difference between ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... only an effect produced upon our senses by the motion of atoms,—that is to say, by our unceasing receptivity to sensations. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... through them and is the cause of their existence seems to well up from nowhere. But at any rate, since all particles in turn pass through each of them, it will be clear that it is thus possible for each in turn to evoke in all the particles of the body the power of receptivity to a certain set of vibrations, so that all the astral senses are equally active in all parts ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... quality of expressiveness, or clear response to thought in the voice, it will be observed, is secured through the ready service of all its powers under the influence of the mental concept. It is to be attained by the attitude of receptivity and the effort to think ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... as I stood, trembling and striving not to be tense, which destroys the receptivity, there came thrilling round and round my spiritual essence the throb of the Master-Word, beating steadily in the night, as doth that marvellous sound. And then, with all that was sweet in my spirit, I called with my brain ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Ambassador at Warsaw gets his instructions. French Ambassador opens himself largely, at Warsaw, by eloquent speech, by copious money, on the subject of Stanislaus; finds large audience, enthusiastic receptivity;—and readers will now understand the following chronological phenomena of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... things about Forster was his "receptivity." Stern and inflexible as he was in the case of old canons, he was always ready to welcome anything new or striking, provided it had merit and was not some imposture. I never met a better appreciator of genuine humour. He had been trained, ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, the more it is movable and offers surfaces to phenomena, the larger is the part of the world seized upon by man, and the more virtualities he develops in himself. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... rulers in those wild, unsettled times; as their successes, not merely in Britain, but also in Southern Italy and Syria, show. They had the idea of a strong, centralized Government; and more than that they had a marvellous capacity for receptivity. Thus we see that in England, after a period of rough tyranny, they blended the existing Anglo-Saxon Government—the strength of which lay in its local organization—with their own; and from the union of the two has come the British Constitution. So ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... to float his soul off its sandbars on the rising tide of spiritual reassurance and power. Every normal man needs two attitudes: one when he goes into action determined to do his work and to do it well, and the other when he subdues his spirit to receptivity and with the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... families; their exclusiveness; Cicero's attitude towards them; new type of noble; Scipio Aemilianus: his "circle"; its influence on the Ciceronian age in (1) manners; (2) literary capacity; (3), philosophical receptivity; Stoicism at Rome; its influence on the lawyers; Sulpicius Rufus, his life and work; Epicureanism, its general effect on society; case of Calpurnius Piso; pursuit of pleasure and neglect of duty; senatorial duties neglected; ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the ripple leaves its marks upon the sand. It is the connection between this under-mind and the consciousness that is so frequently at fault, so that we remain unaware of the tidings. Usually the consciousness is kept so busily engaged that it never has a minute to itself, and so peace, quiet, and receptivity are unknown. The subconscious tries hard to get in its modest word occasionally and edgeways, but the consciousness rarely stops talking: the whole business is one-sided. Plenty of material goes from the consciousness to the subconscious, but comparatively ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... he is apt to develop a tendency to withdraw himself from the impressions of the outer world. Yet such a step only leads to parching and withering the inner life; and he will go farthest who manages to retain an unchecked receptivity for all impressions of the outer world, while possessing the power to withdraw within his own inner self. It is by no means necessary to think only of the so-called important events of life: every one, in every sphere ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... of De Brosses' book was calculated to make a telling appeal to the French nation, with their love of eclat and their ready receptivity. It was made, too, in the age of Voltaire, when the great man was living at Lausanne; and when, too, another of equally enduring fame, Edward Gibbon, was, in the same neighbourhood, polishing those balanced periods in which he has related the degeneracy of the successors of ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... repeated, but more gently. She began to wonder now whether trouble had weakened the wife's brain, her power at least of receptivity. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... on the attitude of mind of the physician, and are largely the result of his own personal equation. They do not reflect in any way either on his judgment or on the special knowledge of his time, but are the index of his special receptivity and teaching habit. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... having attained that deep spiritual inwardness which we have been recently told is lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, "But if we are not to laugh at 'Don Quixote,' at whom are we, please, to laugh?"—a question which I, for one, would hardly dare to answer. Only, after r eading the following curious sentence, extracted from a lately published ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... investigated the remote and preparatory factors which give the mind of crowds a special receptivity, and make possible therein the growth of certain sentiments and certain ideas. It now remains for us to study the factors capable of acting in a direct manner. We shall see in a forthcoming chapter how ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... happiness, the more of a man he is, the larger is his capacity of enjoyment; for as a dog gets more enjoyment out of life than a zooephyte, and a man than a dog, so does the fully and symmetrically developed man exceed in receptivity of happiness him whose nature is imperfectly or abnormally developed. Now it is through the thorough training and faithful exercise of his moral faculties and powers that man is most capable of influence, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... which ought to spread with precisely the rapidity of thought, is tardy enough, owing solely to lack of receptivity in its only known medium, namely, the human subject. But—and here is the old-man fact of the ages— Light is inherently dynamic, not static; active, not passive: aggressive, not defensive. Therefore, as twice one is two, the momentum ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and distorted so that they may be enabled to justify triumphantly their original proposition, added to which, Frenchmen are, as a rule, very poor linguists. This, of course, is speaking broadly, but I fancy that the French mind is very definite and clear-cut, yet rather lacking in receptivity. The French suffer from the excessive development of the logical faculty in them. This same definite quality in the French language, whilst delighting both my ear and my intelligence, rightly or wrongly prevents French poetry from making any appeal to me; it is too bright and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton |
