"Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail. They ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... and therefore all the brood of heart-burnings and hatreds, engendered on Earth by the strife of man with man, is unknown to the people of Mars, save from the study of our planet. When I asked if there were not, after all, a lack of spontaneity, of sense of freedom, in leading lives fixed in all details beforehand, I was reminded that there was no difference in that respect between the lives of the people of Earth and of Mars, both alike being according to ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Charm, sweetness, spontaneity, Marguerite had them all, and I was forced from time to time to admit that I had no right to ask of her anything else; that many people would be very happy to be in my place; and that, like Virgil's shepherd, I had only to enjoy the ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... hostess, who was talking with the others; very little, I noticed, with her young Inglese. She is altogether charming—full of frankness and freedom, of that inimitable disinvoltura which in an Englishwoman would be vulgar, and which in her is simply the perfection of apparent spontaneity. But for all her spontaneity she's as subtle as a needle-point, and knows tremendously well what she is about. If she is not a consummate coquette . . . What had she in her head when she said that I should not have gone away?—Poor little Stanmer didn't go ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... Indeed, I begin to think them peculiarly wise. There is the spontaneity of animals about their play, and a good deal of the unembarassed movements of animals—with something very human superadded. One reads often enough about the love-light in the eyes of lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... 'fine shades' of feeling. But it is certainly much more difficult to carry conviction in inventing letters for fictitious persons than in making them converse. In the latter case there is a background; there is the life and movement of the various characters, the spontaneity of question and reply, and the running interchange of talk, all helping to keep a spell upon the reader. The letter gives much less chance of illusion, and we may very soon become conscious of the author—instead of the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... deeply. Isabel's Aunt Lydia had made this discovery long before, and had mentioned it to her niece; but Isabel had flattered herself at this time that she had a much richer view of things, especially of the spontaneity of her own career and the nobleness of her own interpretations, than poor stiffly-reasoning Mrs. Touchett. Madame Merle had done what she wanted; she had brought about the union of her two friends; a reflection which could not fail to make it a matter of wonder that she should ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... That we must do, because he did foreknow, Or that, foreknowing, yet our choice is free, Not forced to sin by strict necessity; This strict necessity they simple call, Another sort there is conditional. 530 The first so binds the will, that things foreknown By spontaneity, not choice, are done. Thus galley-slaves tug willing at their oar, Content to work, in prospect of the shore; But would not work at all if not constrain'd before. That other does not liberty constrain, But man may either act, or ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... nothing I dread more than Mr. Seward's ridicule. I would rather walk up to the cannon's mouth than encounter it." "I too am with you," "And I," said two or three others who had been silent at the table. I never had a more serious, heartfelt conversation than with these ladies. Mrs. Seward's spontaneity and earnestness had moved them all deeply, and when the Senator appeared the first word he said was, "Before we part I must confess that I was fairly vanquished by you and the Judge, on my own principles ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... act with a certain degree of spontaneity on their environment, and they likewise react effectively to surrounding stimuli. Animals come to have definite "answers back," sometimes several, sometimes only one, as in the case of the Slipper Animalcule, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... full of material that the labor was mainly that of selection. Creative work, when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... no play makes Jack a dull boy. And it is this same lack of play that produces so many dull men and women; for the spirit of play is the spirit of youth and spontaneity and joy. Yet work and play have so much in common that it seems unfortunate indeed that all of us have not learned to retain our youth when ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... is putting it a bit too strongly." Sheldon laughed, but the strain in his voice destroyed the effect of spontaneity. "You know yourself how impossible ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... disconcerting quickness, he came into the room, she hardened again in spite of herself. She simply could not display her feelings. Upbringing, habit, environment were too much for her, and spontaneity was checked. Had she been alone with a dog she would have spent herself passionately on the dog, imaginatively transforming the dog into Louis; but the sight of Louis in person congealed her, so that she became a hard mass with just a tiny core ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... like a hammock, with an exhilarating motion. For some while I was so extremely pleased with these particulars that I thought I could never be weary of beholding them: then dropped of a sudden into a causeless sadness; and then, with the same swiftness and spontaneity, arrived at the conclusion that I was drunk and had better ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... Hadleyburg'. Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... said, "that modesty PROVES you are a genius! Heavens, what would I not give to have you spontaneity, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... recently, and it was painful to see how many were ruined by Kipling before this War began. Kipling was original, and his tricks of manner, often irritating, and his deplorable views of human society, were usually carried off by his genius for observation, and the spontaneity of the drama of his stories. But when his story was thin, and he was wandering in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he was usually facetious. As an obvious and easily imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by his ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... expression will often be broken and faulty, partly because of the immaturity of the pupil, and partly because of the newness and difficulty of the theme. Do not let the endeavour to secure excellent expression check a certain freedom and spontaneity that should be encouraged in the pupil. When the teacher desires to place special stress on excellent presentation, it is wise to assign topics beforehand, so that each pupil may know definitely what is expected of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... spontaneity before all other qualities in a dramatic artist was characteristic of herself, though not of her nation. Thus it was that Madame Dorval, the heroine of Antony and Marion Delorme, won her unbounded admiration. Even in Racine she clearly preferred her to Mlle. Mars, as being ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... wool proceeds from the flower-bearing anthers, which moves spontaneously in the anther, while it drops its dust like atoms. Murray, Syst. Veg. See note on Collinfonia for other instances of vegetable spontaneity. Add to this, that as the sleep of animals consists in a suspension of voluntary motion, and as vegetables are likewise subject to sleep, there is reason to conclude, that the various actions of opening and closing their petals and foliage may be justly ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... enjoys his dolce far niente while his wife does his work— what work there is, but that is not much. There is an air of neglect that impresses you; an air of spontaneity about the picture—for the yams and the melons, and the chile-plants, half choked with weeds, seem to grow without culture, and the sun gives warmth, so as to render almost unnecessary the operations of the spindle ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... detail, with the conscientiousness which always appeared in her when speaking of her work. It was not the tone of one who delights in teaching; there was no spontaneity, no enthusiasm; but every word gave proof of how seriously she regarded the duties she had undertaken. And she was not without pride in her success. The little school had grown, so that it now became a question whether ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details, as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a 'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite qualities in the monad man, he has proved ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... other members of the class suffered no such uncertainty. They voted solidly for spontaneity in a self ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... leisure; which compels the frequent, "I didn't think, or I would not have done it!" The impulsive person may undoubtedly have credited up to him many kind words and noble deeds. In addition, he usually carries with him an air of spontaneity and whole-heartedness which goes far to atone for his faults. The fact remains, however, that he is too little the master of his acts, that he is guided too largely by external circumstances or inward ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... ancient. Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... literature broke away from the artificial rules and the one-sided intellectual tone of the "classical" school,—that school which had prevailed through the influence of the French writers of the age of Louis XIV. The new era was marked by more spontaneity, and a return to nature, and by a more free rein given to imagination and feeling. "Romanticism," a general designation of the results of this new movement as contrasted with the "classical" period, sometimes ran out ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... permanent impression upon the forms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science and philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of individual beings endowed with spontaneity and freedom, we must grant that exterior conditions are not omnipotent in the formation of national character. Still the free causality of man is exercised within a narrow field. "There is a strictly necessitative limitation drawing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and sent a start through Willie's wasted body. The reader resumed; but perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary. Marcella's stormy presence worked in them both, like a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nature, to bring any novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily; and a despondent tone about society, politics, and the whole drift of modern life. Judged by our fiction, we are in an irredeemably bad way. There is little beauty, joy, or light-heartedness in living; the spontaneity and charm of life are analyzed out of existence; sweet girls, made to love and be loved, are extinct; melancholy Jaques never meets a Rosalind in the forest of Arden, and if he sees her in the drawing-room he poisons his pleasure with the thought that she is scheming ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Whig was the devil. If his intellect was wider, his heart was as warm as Johnson's, and in conversation he merited the generous applause and warm emulation of his friends. Johnson was never tired of praising the extraordinary readiness and spontaneity of Burke's conversation. "If a man," he said, "went under a shed at the same time with Burke to avoid a shower, he would say, 'This is an extraordinary man.' Or if Burke went into a stable to see his ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... help you, brother," replied Frantz through his clenched teeth; and an angry flush rose to his brow at the idea that any one could have suspected the open-heartedness, the loyalty, that were displayed before him in all their artless spontaneity. Luckily he, the judge, had arrived; and he proposed to restore everything to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... believe they will not make me swerve from equity. I shall exact neither service nor affection from my spouse. The value of these, and, indeed, not only the value, but the very existence, of the latter depends upon its spontaneity. A promise to love tends rather to loosen than ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... flesh, to the glorious content of the unshackled spirit revelling in the freedom of its own nature? Thus the cultivated Reason returns, with a touching appreciation of the Beautiful and the Fit, to the simple couch of childish spontaneity. Mankind, after long confinement in marble palaces, sepulchres of their inner being, retrograde to the golden age. The wisdom of the world lies down to sleep under the open sky. Such a beautiful comparison! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... have already, makes a large share. It seems to me that it consoles me to make that gift to you. From a literary point of view he was not a man of the first rank, one loved him for his goodness and spontaneity. Less occupied with affairs and philosophy, he would have had a charming talent. He left a ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... consciousness be a chain of successive ideas or emotions, a twofold nature within the one experience is meaningless. The view of conscious states as discrete leads inevitably to determinism. The place of one state in the chain is conditioned by its predecessor. There is no room for the spontaneity and the creative power which characterise conscious life. Associationism cannot countenance the unforeseen and incalculable. So it is out of sympathy with Christian psychology. A function of the divine in Christ is to introduce the element of the unforeseen and incalculable ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... a pageant, he passed, in review scene after scene, turning it over, and wondering at significances that he had not before, imagined. He recalled their first meeting, that instantaneous attraction, and he asked himself what had caused it. Her spontaneity, freshness, and utter lack of conventionality, he supposed, but that did not seem to explain all. He wondered at the change that had even then come about in himself that he should have been so entranced by her, He went over his early hopes and fears; he thought again of conversations ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... could express no more than the possibilities of his nature. It was not the fine and essential difference between man and woman, but that more fatal gulf in which there would appear no certain glimpses of a royally endowed love in all its spontaneity, its glow of feeling, its variation of rich emotions. How would she, with her versatile, changeful soul, with its cycle of moods, ever live in the strong, steady ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... such a general doctrine should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... allow him to protest with effectiveness. The truth was, he could not say these things naturally. He had to compose them, and then pronounce them, and the result failed in the necessary air of spontaneity. He could not help thinking what marvellous self-control women had. Now, when he had a headache—which happily was seldom—he could think of nothing else and talk of nothing else; the entire universe consisted solely ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... simile), the result would have been still more marvellous. As it was, the material at his disposal was a poor set of dance forms, with the one exception of the fugue, the involved utterance of which precluded spontaneity and confined emotional design to very restricted limits. It is exactly as if Wagner had been obliged to put his thoughts in quadrille form with the possible alternative of some mathematical device of musical double bookkeeping. As it is, Bach's innovations ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... they had to subdue every one who doubted it or hoped to improve upon it. So wrangle, dispute, faction, feud, plot, exile, murder and Sherlock Holmes absorbed the energies of men and paralyzed spontaneity and all happy, useful effort. The priest caught us coming and going. We had to be christened when we were born and given extreme unction when we died, otherwise we could not die legally—hell was to pay, here ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... forgave it, because at least it was founded on humour. And when he took her to the train, she forgave it on another score, because she realized that not since last autumn had she seen him so fundamentally boyish and irresponsible. She was glad that so much of his spontaneity had come back to him, but at the same time she was puzzled, for it didn't seem altogether like Henry, as she had analyzed him, to gloat so thoroughly over mere ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... study, appears to be a better method than seeking to wrest from the brain, as it were by force, things that are not there; and it is a fact that in the other arts as well, but above all in that of writing, lack of spontaneity is only too easily recognized, and also, so to speak, over-elaboration ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... century was academic and prosaic, lacking the spontaneity, joyousness, and intensely artistic feeling of Italian Art—a heritage from previous centuries which had not been lost, and in which France had no part. The works of Poussin, which have been likened to painted reliefs, afford an excellent example of French Art in his time—1594-1665—and ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Athens. Sophocles had every element of character and person to fascinate the Greeks,—beauty of face, symmetry of form, skill in gymnastics, calmness and dignity of manner, a cheerful and amiable temper, a ready wit, a meditative piety, a spontaneity of genius, an affectionate admiration for talent, and patriotic devotion to his country. His tragedies, by the universal consent of the best critics, are the perfection of the Greek drama; and they moreover maintain that he has no rival, Aeschylus and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... five years earlier, she had schooled herself into unmurmuring resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. She asked little more than not to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... went about this new affair that bit so poignantly. To show her, so indurately, that she was nothing, that, despite her magnificent sacrifice, she had never been more than a convenience, was maddening. There was no spontaneity in his heart; his life was a calculation to which various sums were added or subtracted. With all her beauty, intellect, genius and generosity, she had not been able to stir him as this young girl was unconsciously doing. She held no animosity ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... is the story of a mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and reticences, not easily putting herself ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Spontaneity must be the soul of such a movement. "It was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they should develop their own." One by one centers are being formed. The ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... to shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bundle of notes, without a reflection beyond the thought that money was in his hand; and wondering at the apparition of the curricle, Evan was joined by Harry Jocelyn, and Harry linked his arm in Evan's and plunged with extraordinary spontaneity and candour into the state of his money affairs. What the deuce he was to do for money he did not know. From the impressive manner in which he put it, it appeared to be one of Nature's great problems that the whole human race were bound to set their heads together to solve. A hundred pounds—Harry ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... discussion, which Colonel Benton likened to "shooting on the wing." So deficient is Mr. Schurz in this talent, that he has been known to use a manuscript in an after-dinner response, a style of speech whose chief merit consists in its spontaneity, with apt reference to incidents which could not possibly ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Dance, who designed the Mansion House and Newgate Prison, at London—the latter a vigorous and appropriate composition without the orders—close the list of noted architects of the eighteenth century. It was a period singularly wanting in artistic creativeness and spontaneity; its productions were nearly all dull and respectable, or at best dignified, but ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... have enjoyed it," he said. "It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table always an inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... deceive her this time. But he could say no more. Many a strong man would in that moment have sobbed aloud and shed tears, but Giovanni was not as other men. Under great emotion all expression was hard for him, and the spontaneity of tears would have contradicted ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... of the Mabinogion is rather romantic than epic. Life is treated naively and not too emphatically. The hero's individuality is limitless. We have free and noble natures acting in all their spontaneity. Each man appears as a kind of demi-god characterised by a supernatural gift. This gift is nearly always connected with some miraculous object, which in some measure is the personal seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which this ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he initiated tells us how hard it is for ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... provincial."] are as intense and packed with suggestive ugliness as anything in Remizov, but lack the master's unerring linguistic flair and his profound and inclusive humanness. Zamyatin's stories are most emphatically made, manufactured, there is not an ounce of spontaneity in them, and, especially in the later work where he is more or less free from reminiscences of Remizov, they produce the impression of mosaic laboriously set together. They are overloaded with pointedly suggestive metaphor and symbolically expressive detail, and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... "genius" out of it. Audrey is a very genial person; she also, in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the more necessary that we should ask ourselves what it is that is demanded of us, if we would fit our qualities to meet the new tests. Let us remind ourselves that to be human is, for one thing, to speak and act with a certain note of gentleness, a quality mixed of spontaneity and intelligence. This is necessary for wholesome life in any age, but particularly amidst confused affairs and shifting standards. Genuineness is not mere simplicity, for that may lack vitality, and genuineness does not. We expect what we call ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... of Bronson Howard's thoroness as a workman and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of spontaneity. ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... encouraged by many agencies, its greatest significance and importance arises from the fact that, for the most part, community organization of many diverse types is springing up in rural communities throughout the country as a means of meeting their local needs. This spontaneity of the movement is the best evidence that changing conditions have brought about a real need for some better machinery for ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... register for time, ripens, and grows old. Despite all resemblances, the living body always remains, in some measure, an absolutely original and unique invention, for there are not two specimens exactly alike; and, among inert objects, it appears as the reservoir of indetermination, the centre of spontaneity, contingence, and genuine action, as if in the course of phenomena nothing really new could be ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... sat since he had called out "That is false": his tall figure was recognized; and, with that electric spontaneity of crowds, he was straightway the leader of the meeting, men darting from their seats with waving hats, sticks, arms, and vociferous mouth, the chairman half standing, with a shivering finger directed upon Hogarth, shrieking to the police: but too late—Hogarth had brushed ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... be classified as fanciful, realistic, and idealistic according to the character of the material used. Fanciful productive imagery is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. It is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. Little children's imaginations are of this type—it is their play world of make-believe. The incongruity and ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... of this literature is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim, but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. They give us ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... all art as being derived from the play instinct. It has been said that play is the overflow of life. Life, love, joy, all noble ideals, must awaken spontaneity or they will not grow. All parts of man's nature must have expression and not be repressed. Play is given to stimulate and to express the spontaneous in us, to manifest emotion and imagination and ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... had the facts before them. And "the people of Spandau turned out in force to wish us 'Godspeed' on our departure for home; and the send-off they gave us was astonishing in its enthusiasm, arresting in its spontaneity, and touching in its ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... admitting that it is a beautiful series of sounds, enheartening, noble, an utterance worthy of a great and ancient university at a crisis, even then one is bound to remember that its essential quality should be its spontaneity. Enthusiasm cannot be created at the word of command, nor can heroes be inspired by cheers artificially produced under megaphonic intimidation. Indeed, no moral phenomenon could be less hopeful to heroes than ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... quietly, with an accent of indulgence. It was the habit of her world to find everything Madame de Sevigne did or said charming. Even her frankness was forgiven her, her tact was so perfect; and her spontaneity had always been accounted as her chief excellence; in the stifled air of the court and the ruelles it had been frequently likened to the blowing in of a fresh May breeze. Her present mood was one ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... forward a chair for her, and put cushions at her back, and pour out her tea and wait on her. He tried by a number of careful, deliberate attentions to make up for his utter lack of spontaneity. And she sat there, drinking her tea, contented; pleased to be back in her happy home; serenely unaware that anything ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've never touched. Compared with any of the hulas, set and fixed in each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by a wind and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ceremonies the tendency is to mass and organize them—they are made to occur at regular times and under fixed conditions, as in the Christian Lent, the Moslem Ramadan, and the Creek Busk. Such arrangements give orderliness to outward religious life, but are likely to diminish or destroy spontaneity in observances. Ceremonies of this sort have great vitality—they are handed on from age to age, the later religion adopting and modifying and reinterpreting the forms of the earlier. In such cases the lower conceptions survive in the minds of the masses, and ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... concentrated. (How good, for instance, is good butter, good sugar. But to be eating nothing but sugar and butter all the time! even if ever so good.) And though the author has much to say of freedom and wildness and simplicity and spontaneity, no performance was ever more based on artificial scholarships and decorums at third or fourth removes, (he calls it culture,) and built up from them. It is always a make, never an unconscious growth. It is the porcelain figure or statuette of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter—and a very choice ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Chancellor of the ex-Savoyard, GEORGE GROSSMITH, now entertaining "on his own hook"), doesn't seem to be a born Savoyard, non nascitur and non fit at present. Good he is, of course, but there's no spontaneity about him. However, for an eccentric comedian merely to do exactly what he is told, and nothing more, yet to do that, little or much, well, is a performance that would meet with Hamlet's approbation, and Mr. GILBERT'S. Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... it no longer. I was a proud, high-spirited girl, you've made of me a colourless social automaton, a slave of your stupid worldly traditions. I'm turning into a feeble, complaining, discontented wife! And I refuse to be it. I'm going home—where at least there's some human spontaneity left in people; I'm going back to my father!'—And I went and looked up the next ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... voice in the gallery exclaimed, "Hurrah for Blaine!" Instantly the audience was on fire. The burst of applause brought out by Smith's opening reference to the "never vanquished hero of Appomattox" had been disappointing because it lacked spontaneity and enthusiasm, but the sound of the magic word "Blaine," like a spark flying to powder, threw the galleries into a flame of cheering which was obstinate in dying out. Conkling, in closing the debate on the resolution, showed his customary audacity by hurling bitter ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... dramatized Gerda Lyberg's initial dinner, it would probably have been considered exceedingly droll. As a serious episode, however, its humor, to my mind, lacked spontaneity. Letitia had asked her to cook us a little Swedish meal, so that we could get some idea of Stockholm life, in which, for some reason or other, we were supposed to be deeply interested. Unfortunately I was extremely hungry, and had ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... boulders of a mining region, and in the first darkness drew up at Guadalajara, second city of Mexico. It is a place that adorns the earth. Jalisco State, of which this is the capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by "propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... by this uncovering of the mechanism of the art—by the discovery of the coarse and painful toil, the grossly physical basis, of what had seemed to him all idealism. He had been full of the delusions of spontaneity and inspiration, like all laymen, and all artists, too, except those of the higher ranks—those who have fought their way up to the heights and, so, have learned that one does not achieve them by being caught up to them gloriously in a fiery cloud, but by doggedly ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon tendencies ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... in England that is free, that is spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent;—but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England—I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... his race. Intelligence, strength of purpose, fortitude, and moral power are there; they impress us at the first glance. At twenty-eight he must have been a serious young man, little given to laughter; indeed, spontaneity is perhaps the only good trait we miss in studying his face. He was a thinker who had not yet found his purpose—a thinker in leash, for at this time James Robertson ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... none of the culture, the spontaneity, the suavity, the reticence, the abandon, the heating power, the cooling power, the light, the shade, or any of the other ingredients referred to by the great Small in his noble work ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... moving slowly down the crowded main aisle to join the delegation of his county. His friends had planned a demonstration for his entrance, and in calling it an ovation the newspapers hardly magnified its apparent spontaneity and volume. The man who had undertaken the herculean task of driving Morton Bassett out of politics was entitled to consideration, and his appearance undoubtedly interrupted the business of the convention for fully five minutes. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... cried, her face alight with joy and fine enthusiasm. All her spontaneity, her love and admiration were aroused. And she kissed him with so frank and glad a love that Stern felt his heart jump wildly. He thought she never yet had ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... has done this kind of work with finer poetic grasp or more convincing truthfulness than Felix Gras.... This new volume has the spontaneity, the vividness, the intensity of Interest of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... grown younger in a smooth-skinned, full-lipped way—so much younger that it was spoken of. Something girlish in figure, in spontaneity, in the hesitation of her smile, in the lack of that hard, brilliant confidence which once characterised her, had developed; as though she were beginning her debut again, reverting to a softness and charm prematurely checked. Truly, her youth's discoloured blossom, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald, there is a note of tragic ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... that consciousness, sensation, thought, and the spontaneous power of the will, so peculiar to man and to the higher animals, are altogether so many outcomes of certain conditions of matter and nothing else, makes at best merely a subjective statement. He cannot help acknowledging that spontaneity is not a quality of matter. He is then driven to the contention that what we believe to be spontaneous in us, is, after all, an unconscious result of external impulses only. His contention rests then on the basis of his own inner experience, or what he believes ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... unanimity with which they come here; the fact that without organization, almost as a matter of spontaneity, 35,000 names should have been gathered and sent to this Capitol to a committee, whose voluntary duty it was made to receive them; the fact that other names are now coming in at the rate of some 500 a day; that from California 10,000 more ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... colleges for women (in The Association of Collegiate Alumnae) have seriously discussed the question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of Harper's Monthly has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective construction" in certain American authors was only made possible, probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The Century Magazine has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single writer of original ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... money! That is the secret of the whole criminal business. Money controls art. Money rejects art. Money's a sensitive thing, too. It rejects force, spontaneity, originality. It wants repetition, immutability, things calculable. Money... You can talk with satisfaction of money controlling Butcher after our heavenly day with the sweet air ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity, as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... to be hoped that some day stories will be told to school groups only by experts who have devoted special time and preparation to the art of telling them. It is a great fallacy to suppose that the systematic study of story-telling destroys the spontaneity of narrative. After a long experience, I find the exact converse to be true, namely, that it is only when one has overcome the mechanical difficulties that one can "let one's self go" in the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force. Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... and insistence on non-essentials, is a deterrent from which the robust are free. Over-attention to the mechanics of voice production is a kindred deterrent. Both deterrents prevent that prime characteristic of expression—spontaneity. ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... all the difference between this conception of freedom {158} and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... self-consciousness we apprehend the fierce, blind, headstrong sexual impulse as the most powerful motion of concentrated will. The act is marked by the spontaneity, impetuosity, and lack of reflection which characterises the agent, will being by nature unenlightened and unconditioned. And yet that which in our inner consciousness is a blind, vehement impulse, appears in our outer ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... is statuesque without being studied; an inherent laziness which commands the respect of no one, but a gentle nature that wins the affections of all; poor as he is honest, jolly as he is poor, unfortunate as he is jolly, yet possessed of a spontaneity of nature that springs up and flows along like a rivulet after a rain; the man who can not forget the faults of the character which Jefferson pictures, nor feel like taking good-natured young Rip Van Winkle by the hand and offering a support to tottering ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult to imagine a first cause for all motion. For my own part, I feel myself so thoroughly convinced that the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... is precisely the same as led him to write the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... reflection is not to be found in what may be called the mythical creation of nature, which is the necessary result of the spontaneity of the intelligence, both in man and animals; it is developed after long duration of barbarism and ignorance. M'Lennan and others have shown how the era of reflection and hypothesis begins in the evolution of human intelligence. Sekesa, an intelligent Kaffir, said to Arbrousset,[13] ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... it was not at all a surprising thing when Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest charm. She searched among the music upon the top of the piano, flicking the untidy scattered leaves until she found ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... (unfavourable), though with more or less ambiguity, and that Panurge, with equal obstinacy and ingenuity, invariably twists the oracles according to his own wishes. But what no reader, who came fresh to Rabelais and fasting from criticism on him, could anticipate, is the astonishing spontaneity of the various dealings with the same problem, the zest and vividness of the whole thing, and the unceasing shower of satire on everything human—general, professional, and individual—which is kept up throughout. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... "awfully. Now—er—let's see—oh, yes. Did you notice how unhealthy the children looked? Race is undoubtedly dying out; fact. No hope. Weak. No spontaneity either—rather languid, did you notice? Yes, and their heads—small and narrow—no brain capacity. They can't concentrate; notice how some slept when Dr. Boldish was speaking? Mr. Cresswell says they own almost no land here; think of it? This land was worth ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... peoples. There is no doubt that in many respects we are what we call ourselves—the most highly civilized people in the world. But do we not pay too high a price for much of our civilization? If it is such that it fails to enable us to conserve our health, our powers of enjoyment, our spontaneity, our mental vigor, our spirituality, and the exuberant radiance of our life—bodily, mental, spiritual—I feel that we need to examine it carefully and find out wherein lies its inadequacy or ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... or nothing of the science of voice as we know it to-day. They did know, however, the great fundamental principles of singing, which are freedom of form and action, spontaneity and naturalness. They studied Nature, and learned of her. Their style of singing, it is true, would be considered superficial at the present day, but it is generally conceded that they did make a few great singers. If the principles of the old school had not been ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... control religious impulses by laws, to rule thoughts by thoughts. In the place of the mechanical, appears the regulated course of thinking; in the place of the psychical rule of caprice, the monarchical control of higher laws and principles, and the spontaneity of the ego as the kernel of the personality. By the aid of apperception, therefore, we are lifted gradually from psychical bondage to mental and moral freedom. And now when ideal norms are apperceivingly active in the field of knowledge and thought, of feeling and will, when they give laws ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... in America we have no educational system—that spontaneity is the dominant feature of American education. This is certainly true of farmers' institutes. So it has transpired that numerous special features have come in to use in various states—features of value and interest. It may be worth while to suggest some ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... to the enthusiast smitten with his own reveries; to the fellifluous fanatic enslaved by his prejudices; to the vain glorious mortal puffed up with his own presumptuous ignorance; to the voluptuary devoted to his pleasures; or to the wily reasoner, who, disingenuous with himself, has a peculiar spontaneity to form illusions to his mind. Blessed, however, with a heart, gifted with a mind such as described, man will surely discover this rara avis: thus constituted, the attentive philosopher, the geometrician, the moralist, the politician, the theologian himself, when he shall sincerely seek truth, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... written, 'is for ever interesting to man; nay properly there is nothing else interesting.' In which light also, may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome? Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible developement of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer's time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody Battles ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... subjects having no bearing whatsoever on the conference. These stories were written in the ebullition of youth, inspired by the ecstasy which rises from the possession of a steady job; a perfect deluge from the well springs of spontaneity. There wasn't a single fact in the entire series, and yet The Sun syndicated these stories throughout the United States. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... the contrary, will have for its end an administration of things; it will need a decentralized organization, practical men of science, industrial forces over which spontaneity and initiative will be required ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... to pay is payment, and Napoleon was one of these. He was equally childish in regard to the knotty social question which confronted him, apparently believing that his personal volition, as the expression of political power, was or ought to be equivalent to popular spontaneity. The mixture of the old and new aristocracies had, in spite of all efforts, been mechanical rather than chemical, except so far as that the former was rather the preponderating influence giving color to the compound. In order to make the blending real, the Emperor ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate, minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity, imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the fixed forms and restricted measures. The very metropolis of this lyric realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples, the sunlit silver of the fountains, the ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity of it he was startled. He turned quickly, as though some one at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation. He looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... forgery could not have failed to notice this; the consequence is that if we were to have a forgery, we should have a very close reproduction of this style of expression, and it would show itself to be forgery, by being without the boldness, spontaneity and novelty of the original; it would be timid, forced, and elaborately close and cramped. Now just this copying of a fabricator is what we find in the Annals. Exactly corresponding, to Tacitus's "wounds" instead of "the wounded," is seeing blood streaming ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... progress of physical science means, and has in all ages meant, the extension of the province of matter and causation,' it is certainly not true that, as he proceeds to predict, the same province will ever be extended sufficiently to banish from the region of human thought not 'spontaneity' simply, but likewise 'spirit.' In one direction at least, limits are clearly discernible which scientific investigation need not hope to overleap. How much soever we may eventually discover of the changes whereby inorganic matter becomes gradually adapted for the reception of ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... artistic sense. He was by profession a connoisseur of things beautifully done. Rickman's behaviour, as described by Lucia, revived his earlier amused admiration for his young disciple. It was so like him. In its spontaneity, its unexpectedness, its—its colossal ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... often some virtue in spontaneity which is difficult to define; perhaps it bears more convincing witness to the artist's integrity than slower and longer labours, from which it is difficult to ward all duplicity of intention. The finishing-touch ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... in 1837, is the last novel we have by Mary Shelley; and as we see from her letter she had been passing through a period of ill-health and depression while writing it, this may account for less spontaneity in the style, which is decidedly more stilted; but, here again, we feel that we are admitted to some of the circle which Mary had encountered in the stirring times of her life, and there is undoubted imagination with some fine ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness—not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his tribute to the Reliques: 'I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.' While failing often to catch the gusto of ancient ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... well represented both by prose and by verse, the most interesting of her pieces being possibly the essay entitled "Poetic Spontaneity", wherein more arguments are advanced in her effort to prove the inferior importance of form and metre in poesy. According to Mrs. Renshaw, the essence of all genuine poetry is a certain spontaneous ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of sexual indulgence, removed the foil which had given grace and delicacy to the tender freedom of the young Christians. In the second place, the austerities which the early Christians had gladly practised for the sake of their soul's health, were robbed of their charm and spontaneity by being made a formal part of codes of punishment for sin, first in the Penitentials and afterwards at the discretion of confessors. This, it may be added, was rendered the more necessary because the ideal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Since you are going to be a literary giantess it is well that you should be initiated into the mysteries of producing what I shall call the illusion of spontaneity. Now take this story here. Here on this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... lion of the season, and he had not discovered his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life. No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christian heresy,' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... remarkably fluent and correct; but deriving its strength not from fluency, choice diction, wit, or sentiment, but from accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment; together with rhetorical finish, it had an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment: so that he says, 'I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking "like a book" was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it.' The excitement of the presence of living persons seems to have energised her ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various |
