"Instinctive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be easily guessable by the lowest human insight. Not that either of them ever mentioned precaution to the other; all its advantages would have vanished with open acknowledgment of its necessity. These arrangements were instinctive on the part of both, and each credited the other with a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... any particular strain or line but what irritates and antagonizes me in any environment is the presumption on the part of the creator of that environment that theirs is the only world-view. I suppose the really strongest thing in me is an instinctive spirit of contradiction, for I always rise spontaneously against anything and everything that is proclaimed to me as being so. This is perhaps rather sweeping but it is more or less so. People influence me never by what they tell me but by the general impression they make on me and ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... had only met Barthorpe Herapath once or twice, and who had formed an instinctive and peculiar dislike to him, for which he could not account, accepted the invitation to be brief. In a few words he told exactly what had happened ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... to establish, at his own expense, a public school in his native town. He meets with ostensible support from all, especially Padre Damaso's successor, a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara confesses to an instinctive dread. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... all new ideas and reforms of a moral and political order. They are adopted with the instinctive fear, the vague apprehension inspired by the new and unknown. There is much talk of their objectional features and dangers for the established order of things. You might think the firmament was going to crumble to pieces ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... to believe that I did not run away in the Argonne. I did my job, and got my wound, and my honorable record. But there I had a fighting chance, and here I had none; and maybe I was dazed, and it was the instinctive reaction of my tormented body—anyhow, I ran. I staggered along, with the blows and kicks to keep me moving. And then I saw half a dozen broad steps, and a big open doorway; I fled that way, and found myself ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... gentleman. This person, who was standing, with teacup and saucer in hand, at the farther side, screwed an eyeglass in his eye, looked across at John Storm, and then said something to the lady in the chair beside him. The lady tittered a little. John Storm looked back at the man, as if by an instinctive certainty that he must know him when he saw him again. He was engulfed in a high, stiff collar, and was rather ugly; tall, slender, a little past thirty; fair, with soft, sleepy eyes, and no life in his expression, but agreeable; ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... law sustains the husband's right to slay his faithless consort and her paramour, in such circumstances (vide p. 80), but provides that the lawful slayer shall be banished from the country. The principle of this law is based on Roman law, human instinctive reasoning, and the spirit of the law among the Latin nations of Europe. American law assumes this natural act of the husband to be a crime, but whilst admitting the validity of the Spanish Code in these Islands, the American ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... John looked at his shabby suit, his dusty, worn shoes. Unconsciously he tugged at his coat tail because of an instinctive fear that the patch was showing. An idea of waiting outside until the fete was over came ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... sensationalism in drama, as in anything else, is not a great one; it is not to be measured by its effect upon the mind, for the crudest appeal to our instinctive dread of death will often suffice to hold our attention spellbound. It deals in uncertainty, darkness, unsuspecting innocence, hair-breadth escapes, and an ever-impending but still delayed ruin. None of these are wanting to this play; in this respect the dramatist ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one;—a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... life, his brilliance would assuredly have sufficed to procure him prominence in opposition. As a minister he would have inevitably fallen a victim to the inconsistencies of his own attitude—inconsistencies due to the fact that his judgments were intuitional and instinctive, with prejudices reacting on them, too numerous and too strong to allow him to weigh things fairly and deliberately. Moreover, his mind was too much engrossed by the sole picturesqueness of phenomena to delve deep enough beneath ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... close surrounding darkness. Amid this darkness, however, were visible innumerable points of light, more or less brilliant—the stars—which no longer seemed to be spangled over the surface of a distant vault, but rather scattered immediately about me, nearer or farther to the instinctive apprehension of the eye as they were brighter or fainter. Scintillation there was none, except in the immediate vicinity of the eastern horizon, where I still saw them through a dense atmosphere. In short, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... did not miss the sudden and instinctive change on the face of her hostess or the impulsive start as if to draw back in distaste. Conscience evidently saw in this visit a violation of all canons of good taste. At all events she remained standing as if letting her attitude ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... favourite. She must show quickly that she had the brains and could work well. It took a very short time to make her realise that. For a moment she was inclined to be over-confident; but that mood collapsed before a side glance and a titter from two of the girls. Their instinctive ridicule warned and stiffened Sally. They did not know her. She would have to prove her qualities. She then concentrated upon Miss Summers, watching how she turned, how she smiled and frowned, and how ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... will be the chance of coming across Indians; and as those on the Veraguan coast are ranked among the "bravos"—having preserved their independence, and along with it their instinctive hostility to the whites—an encounter with them might be even more dangerous than with any alcalde. Struggling along in squads of two or three, they would run a risk of getting captured, or killed, ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... beneath his grizzled brows. His face was only capable of producing one expression—a shaggy weather-beaten fierceness. But, like a dog which can express more than many human beings, by a hundred instinctive gestures he could, it seemed, dispense with words on occasion and get on quite as well without them. He clearly disapproved of Desiree's marriage, and drew her attention to the fact that she was no more than a schoolgirl with an inconsequent brain, and little limbs too slight to fight a successful ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Duerer had in Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat grim but ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... amused to find how strangely mistaken was this authoritative lady as to her intuitions, how inevitably a faux with her penetrations and her instinctive guesses. Madame Frabelle said that she believed Edith was beginning to feel the dawn of love for someone, and was struggling against it. (The struggle of course in reality had long ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... "Ah!—a simply instinctive observation! Take care!—You are becoming too strictly logical, Monsieur Rouletabille; logic will upset you if you use it indiscriminately. You are right, when you say that Mademoiselle Stangerson fired her revolver, but you are wrong when you ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... I acquired the faculty to curb the instinctive feeling of fear which is inborn in all creatures and undoubtedly is a wise provision of nature, necessary to the continuance of life and conducive to self-preservation. Knowing that all men who ever lived and all who now live must surely die, I failed to see anything particularly ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... imperceptibly and steadily as icebergs melt when they drift southward. He always avoided any avowed or precipitate break with the old system of dogma,—partly from a personal sentiment associated with the faith of the fathers; partly from an instinctive preference of practical and emotional over intellectual methods; and partly from a studied regard to the most effective results,—a shrewdness ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... trying to beat, and the thing I saw in his face put fear into my heart and it has been there ever since. I have almost an unreasoning fear of that Jap, not because he has said anything or done anything. It's just instinctive. I may be wholly wrong in having come to you and in taking up your time, but there are two things I wanted to tell you. I could have told Donald, but if I did and his mind went off at a tangent thinking ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... flash could be seen distinctly. Several shells from the enemy's artillery swept by, cleaving the air many feet above us with that peculiar, fierce, rushing noise, which no one, I believe, can hear for the first time without a quickened beating of the heart and an instinctive impulse ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sharp turn to the right, the road almost doubling back upon itself, and there was a steep grade for a short distance, during which time Mary Louise caught herself leaning forward and holding her breath in an instinctive impulse to help the labouring car. And then they gained the top. Before them lay a tableland of many acres thickly covered with trees. The grass, in the open spaces between, was sparse, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... honour,—in recognition not so much of your brilliant and unsparing service to state and nation, as of your sympathetic insight into the institutions of popular government as the people intended them. An instinctive faith in the righteous intentions of the average man has endowed you with a singular power to discern the best intent of the public will. Men follow gladly in your lead, and are ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... learn to treat books with the respect which is instinctive amongst people of refinement in most European countries. To see a book rudely treated, or knocked about, is almost as distressing to many people as if it was an object sensitive to pain. But a book in the hands of even a cultivated ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... see no reason why they should not be, I was a natural-born kicker from the very outset of my career, and of very little account in the world, being bent upon making trouble for others. I had no particularly bad traits that I am aware of, only that I was possessed of an instinctive dislike both to study and work, and I shirked them whenever ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... shown, a room filled with art treasures whose appearance and significance were entirely strange to him, he felt a certain uneasiness which he was absolutely unable to understand. He was somewhat instinctive in his likes and dislikes, and from the first he most heartily disliked the room itself,—its vague perfumes, its subdued violet coloring, the faces of the grinning idols, which seemed to meet his gaze in every direction, ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was bidden by her parents to draw wine out of the hogshed, holding the vessel under the opening, before she poured the wine into the flagon, she sipped a little with the tip of her lips; for more her instinctive feelings refused. For this she did, not out of any desire of drink, but out of the exuberance of youth, whereby it boils over in mirthful freaks, which in youthful spirits are wont to be kept under by the gravity of their elders. And thus by adding to that little, daily littles (for whoso despiseth ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... an instinctive antipathy towards the guardian of midnight order, which at first prevented him from asking his usual question. But just when the man was about to vanish behind the corner, Robin resolved not to lose the opportunity, and shouted lustily after him, "I ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I—I confess—but by a species of involuntary and instinctive consideration I rallied instantly, and became cool. The grouse had seen me, and wheeled diverse; one darting to the right, through a small opening between a cedar bush and a tall hemlock—the other skimming through the open oak woods a little toward ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... turned away and covered his face with his hands. I could hear the tears in his voice. Mr. Morris, with instinctive delicacy, just laid a hand for a moment on his shoulder, and then walked quietly out of the room. I suppose there is something in a woman's nature that makes a man free to break down before her and express his feelings on the tender or emotional side without feeling ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... word "conspirators," jokingly uttered, gave her a queer, uncomfortable feeling. There had been something about those two sauntering figures, so close together, that had emphasised the dim, instinctive notion she had had before of something between the pair. Yet what was there strange in Lady Clifford's taking a short stroll with her ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... a person who achieves this in ways of his own. Not through brain-work alone, or most surely, can insight be won. A few have by nature a true yet instinctive self-knowledge. But that takes a pure soul. The tricks of self-deceiving are too many and ingenious for ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... wormed their way along inch by inch, reaching out their hand cautiously for each fresh grip on the uneven ground. Sometimes their hands encountered emptiness and they were warned that they were on the edge of a shell hole. At other times they drew back in instinctive repulsion, as they felt the rigid outlines of a dead body. But whatever detours they had to make, they managed by touch or whisper to keep together, and although their progress was slow it was still progress, and they knew that they were ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... warm with generous feeling, zeal, and devotion, a practical school of high political education, an admirable theater for available talent, noble careers open to legitimate ambition, in short, the small patrimony whose instinctive cult forms the first step out of egoism and a march onward toward thoughtful devotion to the large patrimony. Cut apart by geometrical shears, and designated by an entirely new geographical term, small sections of the province became so many factitious agglomerations ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not, like Murray, conduct the understanding ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sister's heart, for the poor little fellow had been wont to lie day and night in his mother's bosom, and she had been as uneasy without him as he now was without her. All her other babes had grown past her helpless instinctive tenderness, and Theodore's continued passiveness had been hitherto an advantage, which had always been called his ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... closely-confined artificial-gravity field. That field suddenly dropped to nothingness, and Bordman had the momentary sickish dizziness that flicked-off gravity always produces. At the same time his heart pounded unbearably in the instinctive, racial-memory reaction to the ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... different lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion. The "people," luckily, predominated; the faces of workers look best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them, each illuminated and singled out by ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... colour. It tells of Titian and Bonifazio and is unlike Tintoretto's later style. The colours are glowing and gem-like; carnations, orange-yellows, deep scarlet, and turquoise-blue. The crimson velvet of the judge's dress is finely relieved against a blue-green sky, and Tintoretto has kept that instinctive fire and dash which culminates at once and without effort in perfect action, "as a bird flies, or a horse gallops." It startled the quiet members of the Guild, and at the first moment they hesitated to accept it. The "Rescue of the Saracen" ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... difficult to offer any useful criticism on what you have written about Darwin, because, although it does not quite please me, I cannot exactly say how I think it might be improved. My own way is to write and rewrite things, until by some sort of instinctive process they acquire the condensation and symmetry which satisfies me. And I really could not say how my original drafts are improved until ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... youth's instinctive dread of the time when age shall quieten the bounding pulses, slowly but surely taking the savour out of things. She wanted to live first, to gather up the joy of life with both hands. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... magnanimity. She is not an angel, but a woman; yet she should shine with angelic qualities and aspire to angelic virtues, and prove herself, morally and spiritually, to be so superior to man, that he will render to her an instinctive deference; not a mock and ironical deference, because she is supposed to be inferior and weak, but a real deference, a genuine respect on which all permanent friendship rests,—and even love itself, which every woman, as well as every man, craves from the bottom of the soul, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... her nursling by ties of such pure affection as united Mlle. Armande to Victurnien, may love as much as a mother might; may be as careful, as kind, as tender, as indulgent, but she lacks the mother's instinctive knowledge when and how to be severe; she has no sudden warnings, none of the uneasy presentiments of the mother's heart; for a mother, bound to her child from the beginnings of life by all the fibres of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... of soul and body in union; and the body is therefore justly entitled to its own degree of thought and care. But the point, indeed, is not one to be argued; it is, as it appears to me, a matter of intuitive judgment and instinctive feeling; and I apprehend that this feeling and judgment have never appeared more strongly than in the noblest of our race. I hold by Burke, who wrote, 'I should like that my dust should mingle with kindred dust; the good old expression, "family burying-ground," ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... than gain and keep a difficult hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved for humanity during the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done unconsciously—that it was a gradual and instinctive process of becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... more confounded and helpless at first, though, when once directed, nothing could be more resolute and persevering! Brave fellows! I would not but have had it happen! One seldom has such a chance of seeing the Englishman's gallant heart of obedient endurance. It was curious to observe the instinctive submission. Some were men who would not for worlds have touched their hats to me above ground; yet, as soon as I tried to take the lead, and make them think what could yet be done, they obeyed instantly, though I knew ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the roof, at night, and carry off bad children. They learn from their little fingers—which whisper in their ears when they hold them near—who the bad children are, where they live, and what they have done. The instinctive faith of young children in their mother's truthfulness is so strong that no absurdity seems gross enough ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... instruction he had then received none; but something told him that it was mean to steal, and he was true to this instinctive feeling. Yet, if he had been arrested a year before, it would have brought him less shame and humiliation than now. Now he was beginning to enjoy the feeling of respectability, which he had compassed ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... hurried. But one or two men with good eyes, and hearts as good, had seen the leading hounds across the brook turning up the hill away from the bridge, and knew that two most necessary minutes might be lost in the crowd. Frank did as they did, having seen nothing of any hounds, but with instinctive knowledge that they were men likely to be right in a hunting-field. "If that ain't Nappie's horse, I'll eat him," said one of the leading men to the other, as all the three were breasting the hill together. Frank only knew that he had been carried over water and timber without ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... said. Then, with the same proud, impassive firmness, he made an appointment for the next day, got his hat and coat, bade his companions good-night, and went down-stairs into the cold night air. He could not realize as yet all that had happened, but his first quick, instinctive thought had been, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... the emotions natural to you in the forms which are also natural, so far as the accepted canons are not rules imposed by authority but have been so thoroughly assimilated as to express your own instinctive impulses. On the other side, it means that the literature must be produced by the class which embodies the really vital and powerful currents of thought which are moulding society. The great author must have a people behind him; utter both ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... hesitated, from instinctive repugnance and the traditions of absolutism, at anything that resembled an appeal to the people. He was won, however, by the precedent of Henry IV. and by the frank honesty of the project. The secret ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... bush ere the moon rose added to his difficulties. With no landmark to serve as a guide he had to rely absolutely upon his instinctive sense of locality, and kept steadily in the one direction, although that meant riding over the rugged ground, barred by tumbled boulders and thickly growing trees, which formed the almost precipitous sides of the gullies. ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... as pleased as a flattered bulldog, and understanding the compliment precisely in the same instinctive fashion. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... over society in floods. Men are to be moralised only by placing them in a position which shall contribute to develop in them those habits which are social, and to weaken those which are not so. A morality which has become instinctive is the true morality, the only morality which endures while religions and systems of philosophy ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... and twisted sideways, while his half-asleep mind struggled on an almost instinctive level against a ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... to be this quality which it shares with or derives from the taste—its immediate and spontaneous operation. It is, he seems to mean, a direct perception of beauty in character applied to the regulation of conduct. Virtue corresponds to an instinctive and so far ultimate appreciation of beauty of character. Mackintosh insists upon this intrinsic charm of virtue in the language which struck Mill as simply foppish affectation. The pleasure of 'benevolence' itself, says Mackintosh, is infinitely superior to the pleasures ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... objective-point is Richmond, take the road on foot. They have nothing to eat and no money. They are bound for their home in a city which, when they last heard from it, was in flames. What they will see when they arrive there they cannot imagine, but the instinctive love of home urges them. They walk on steadily and rapidly, and are not diverted by surroundings. It does not even occur to them that their situation, surrounded on all sides by armed enemies and walking a road crowded by them, is at all novel. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to the frivolous gabble of the guides. And his appearance had nothing extraordinary in it; but the hesitation with which he proceeded, stopping and listening with anxious attention at every step he took, convinced Franz that he expected the arrival of some person. By a sort of instinctive impulse, Franz withdrew as much as possible behind his pillar. About ten feet from the spot where he and the stranger were, the roof had given way, leaving a large round opening, through which might be seen the blue vault ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... extent an idealising of the past, the golden age of great law-givers and philosophers and saints. But very much more—mere inertia and torpidity in mind and body, a reluctance to take stock of things, and an instinctive treading in the old paths. "Via trita, via tuta." In the path from one Indian village to another may often be observed an inexplicable deviation from the beeline, and then a return to the line again. It is where in some past year some dead animal or some offensive thing has ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... is evil: for the child must receive impressions from without; and it is God's wisdom that he should receive these impressions from his parents, who have the strongest interest in his welfare, and who have besides that instinctive parental love which, more surely, as well as more purely, than any possible sense of interest, makes them earnestly desire their ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... there is the same earnestness of purpose, though stimulated by resentment altogether different. The latter only think of rescuing their dear ones, while the former are stirred by soldier pride and the instinctive antagonism which a Texan Ranger feels for a Tenawa. Many of them have old scores to settle with the Horned Lizard, and more than one longs to send a bullet through ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... to say how the knowledge had been acquired, but the signora had a sort of instinctive knowledge that Mr Arabin was an admirer of Mrs Bold. Men hunt foxes by the aid of dogs, and are aware that they do so by the strong organ of smell with which the dog is endowed. They do not, however, in the least comprehend how such a sense can work ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... point where she could neither turn round nor go further. The more she cogitated on her problem, the more insoluble it appeared to her. Yet her instinctive feeling told her that to refer it to Father Nicholas would be of no service. He was one of the better class of priests,—a man of respectable character, with literary proclivities, which had in his case the effect of keeping him from vice on the one hand, and of deadening his spiritual ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... want that there should. This knowledge left him rather dazed. He felt a good deal like a man who, walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds himself up to his neck in quicksand. And, like a person in such a quandary, Wade's first instinctive ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... first line of attack, on the right of the Scots. They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel—nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been "doped" for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out. They were ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... in almost all respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a wild eye, a man with an ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the "San Nicolas" at Cape St. Vincent, and was designated to command the ship in which the admiral's flag should next be hoisted, saying that he was well; and the same day, with that profound recognition of a personal Providence which was with him as instinctive as his courage, he sent to a London clergyman the following request: "An officer desires to return thanks to Almighty God for his perfect recovery from a severe wound, and also for the many mercies bestowed upon him. (For ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "What will then remain of actual art? Perhaps Berlioz will be its sole representative. Not having studied the pianoforte, he had an instinctive aversion to counterpoint. He is in this respect the opposite of Wagner, who was the embodiment of counterpoint, and drew the utmost he could from its ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... could not feel that her father's condition—much as it alarmed and distressed her—was, in itself, the reason of her own unrest and discontent. She felt, rather, in a vague, instinctive way, that the source of her parent's trouble was somehow identical with the cause of her own unhappiness. But what was it that caused her father's affliction and her own dissatisfied and restless mental state? The young ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... read both of the magnificent bravery of the Japanese soldiers in the late war as well as of their noble and humane treatment of their prisoners, may see in this story a proof that these virtues are hereditary and instinctive in the race. Returning to his own province the blind general sought for new worlds to conquer. He turned musician, and gathered a large following of persons similarly afflicted, finally forming them into a Society of Blind Musicians, and ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... opportunities than ever with Dorothy; for Lady Mottisfont was often indisposed, and even at other times could not honestly hinder an intercourse which gave bright ideas to the child. Dorothy welcomed her new acquaintance with a strange and instinctive readiness that intimated the wonderful subtlety of the threads which bind flesh ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... secret reason that, unsuspected, had long been stirring her to instinctive uneasiness, which had made her half ashamed, half impatient with this silly habit which already inconvenienced her. Yet even now she could not feel any real alarm; she could not understand that the fangs of a habit can poison when plucked ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... mosquitoes. The former are found chiefly in the woods, the latter are bad everywhere; by travelling against the wind a certain measure of relief is secured, northerly winds prevail, so the Caribou are kept travelling northward. When there is no wind, the instinctive habit of migration doubtless directs ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock between the battledores of Fortune. Whatever her destiny was to be, there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to the inevitable. Her little hands were folded across her heart in an instinctive attitude of submission. Folded hands are not always resigned hands; but Pepeeta's were. She submitted thus quietly not because she was weak, but because she was strong, not because she was contemptible, but because she was noble. In proportion to ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... thrown her down. Luckily, again, she was standing so near the wall that, though she was driven against it headlong, yet the shock was not heavy enough to knock all the breath out of her body. On the contrary, it helped her first instinctive attempt to ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... it all to Pelle, coarse and horrible as it was, with the instinctive confidence that the inhabitants of the "Ark" had placed in him, and which had been inherited by her from her mother and grandmother. What an abyss of horrors! And he had been thinking that there was no hurry, that life was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Shaman plucked his mistress by the sleeve, and the priest Oros, bowing to her, prayed her to be silent and cease to speak such ill-omened words into the air, which might carry them she knew not whither. But some instinctive hate seemed to bubble up in Atene, and she would not be silent, for she addressed our guide using the direct "thou," a manner of speech that we found was very usual on the Mountain ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... that?" was her own instinctive shuddering thought. Then, almost running, she rushed up ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... was a vain pretender to the superhuman:—for it was only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him, because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason (where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... boys are almost invariably ill-treated? I have often fancied that there must be in boyhood a pseudo-instinctive cruelty, a sort of "wild trick of the ancestral savage," which, no amount of civilization can entirely repress. Certain it is, that to most boys the first term is a trying ordeal. They are being tested ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... of the matter was that he had forgotten, but as his remembering would have made no difference, considering that he had never had the slightest intention of taking any notice of Mr. Sawyer's prohibition, his instinctive honesty forbade his giving his want of memory as ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... he was afraid of, but we suppose that instinctive dread which some people manifest in the presence of death, had completely overcome him. Certainly there was nothing to be afraid of, for a dead man is not half so likely to do a person an injury as a living one. But in ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... epidemic could no longer be concealed from the inmates, instinctive horror drove them from the neighborhood of the victims, and like frightened sheep they huddled in remote corners, removed as far as possible from the infected precincts, and loath to minister to the needs of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "And this instinctive love, this mixture of hatred and attraction, is the curious thing, the enigmatic thing about human nature. The intellect of each individual is, by ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... limits by a pair of leading-strings passed round the arm of a woman who sat in the shade of the doorway knitting. As M. Linders came up the narrow pathway she ran towards him to the utmost extent of her tether, uttering little joyous inarticulate cries, and bubbling over with the happy instinctive laughter of a child whose consciousness is bounded by ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... "My objection is what happened to the union. Unions were originally founded as an instinctive gathering together of employees to achieve as high a pay as they could get from the employer, with the strike as their weapon. But whatever the original purpose, and its virtue or lack of it, the union grew into something ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... tears so sweet in solitude, must be prostituted before the crowd, or altogether repressed. At last the wished-for opportunity did come. Mr Wilson, who had been away on service, came to congratulate me as soon as he heard the news, and with an instinctive perception of what might be my feelings, asked me whether I would not like to write my letters in his cabin, which, for a few hours, was at my service. I thankfully accepted the offer; and, when summoned by the captain, had relieved my overcharged ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... this will operate with our view of the future too, but only in a general way, to minimize ambition and anxiety. It produces, in fact, exactly the same effect as a perfect 'faith;' indeed, it is hard to distinguish the two, except that faith is the instinctive practice of ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... us that, though we have once passed them [in the preceding September], we almost despair of ever escaping from them without the assistance of the Indians.... Our guides traverse this trackless region with a kind of instinctive sagacity; they never hesitate, they are never embarrassed; and so undeviating is their step, that wherever the snow has disappeared, for even a hundred paces, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... forget that there is all the difference in the world between Herbert and his deistical successors. They connected religion with the 'intellectual and sensational,' and we with the 'instinctive and emotional' sides ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... respected, everything that is necessary to a clerk would be felt and considered on quite a different plane from anything which is a very great luxury to a clerk. This sane distinction of sentiment is not instinctive at present, because our standard of life is that of the governing class, which is eternally turning luxuries into necessities as fast as pork is turned into sausages; and which cannot remember the beginning of its needs and cannot get to ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... sigh now and then heaved his breast, as though some mental or physical suffering moved him, but his form was erect, and his step not that of one weakened by physical disease. And yet in looking upon him, an instinctive desire would have possessed the careful observer to offer him aid in ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... the combined attack of Jarrick and myself, was maintaining the argument. "There is no such thing as instinctive bravery," he affirmed, for the fifth time at least, "amongst intelligent men. Every one of us is naturally a coward. Of course we are. The more imagination we've got the more we can realize how pleasant life is, after all, and how rotten the adjuncts ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... those in which it is necessary to begin very young. He who has not been a cabin-boy will never arrive at being a perfect seaman, at least in the merchant marine. Everything must be learned, and, consequently, everything must be at the same time instinctive and rational with the sailor—the resolution to grasp, as well as ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... only tested in its errors. As we know the true might of the intellect by the rich resources and patient strength with which it redeems a failure, so do we prove the elevation of the soul by its courageous return into light, its instinctive rebound into higher air, after some error that has darkened its vision and soiled its plumes. A spirit less noble and pure than Harold's, once entering on the dismal world of enchanted superstition, had habituated itself to that nether atmosphere; once misled from hardy truth and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lies in more fertile soil, within her impassioned and impressible soil, than in man's. The Suffrage movement will leave her much better or worse than it found her. The phrase "the new woman," with the instinctive explanation that she "is as refined, or as good a wife, mother, sister, daughter, housekeeper," as ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... length on the bench. Mr. Peacock, now absorbed in a game of patience, vouchsafed no return to my parting salutation, and in another moment I was alone on the high-road. My thoughts turned long upon the young man I had left; mixed with a sort of instinctive compassionate foreboding of an ill future for one with such habits and in such companionship, I felt an involuntary admiration, less even for his good looks than his ease, audacity, and the careless superiority he assumed over a comrade so ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to religion.—The people of Christ's day were very religious. The world likes a flavor of religion. It makes a good background and screen, it serves to hide much that is unbecoming and questionable; it is respectable, and satisfies an instinctive longing of the soul. But the world manages its religion in such a way as not to interfere with its self-aggrandizement; but, in fact, to promote it. Christ, on the other hand, taught that religion was for the Father in secret; and consisted, not in the rigorous observance of outward ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... confidence, while in his evident education and social culture he had won her deepest admiration. She felt that he was all that Phil was, and more. There was in her feeling toward him, as he offered himself to her now, no hint of that instinctive repulsion and abhorrence with which she had received Professor Parkhill's declaration of spiritual affinity. Her recent experience with the Master of Aesthetics had so outraged her womanly instincts that the inevitable reaction from ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... of calling that land of silver and cactus, of the orange and the sage-hen, the land of snow. But imperfect as was the appreciation, at that day, of the possibilities which lay hidden in those sunset regions, there was still enough of instinctive greed in the minds of politicians to make the new realm a subject of lively interest and intrigue. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] At the first showing of hands, the South ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... her were all the years of glamour, of happy instinctive action, when a man or woman is worth just what they dream, when dream and act flow together. Could he give her anything worth her having in exchange for this sheer youth of hers? He saw before him a long and dusty ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an art highly developed only in explorers and newspaper reporters of the first order—adaptability; of being able to cast aside instantly the conventions of civilization and let down the bars to the primordial, the instinctive, and the natural. Thus the Cutty who stepped out beside Kitty into the drizzle was not the Cutty she had admitted into the apartment. She did not recognize this remarkable transition until later; and then she discovered that ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... old Barnacle," roared the Captain from the head of the procession, for though he could not see anything in the rear, still he seemed able to keep an instinctive tab ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... minutes, each keeping her present course, the two ships would have passed within pistol-shot of each other. I scarce knew the nature of the sudden impulse which induced me to call out to the man at the wheel to starboard his helm. It was probably from instinctive apprehension that it were better for a neutral to have as little to do with a belligerent as possible, mingled with a presentiment that I might lose some of my people by impressment. Call out I certainly did, and the Dawn's bows came up to the wind, looking to the westward, or in a direction ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... is a sin in the sight of God, is a disbelief in the primary faculties of the human soul; disbelief in the capability of man's reason to discriminate between truth and error in all departments of knowledge, sacred or profane; disbelief in the heart's instinctive power to distinguish good from evil; disallowance of the claims of conscience to pass a verdict upon matters of right and wrong, whenever and wherever brought up. They are the infidels who are untrue to the light they have; who deny the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... crossed Foster's mind. The man might be dying of his wounds. He spoke to him again in French and Spanish, but still got no reply! Then he listened intently for his breathing, but all was as silent as the tomb. With an irresistible impulse, yet instinctive shudder, he laid his hand on the man and passed it up until it reached the face. The silence was then explained. The face was growing cold ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... urbanity as if he had been surrounded by all the glittering furniture, and all the liveried attendance, of his governorship. I have always delighted in an old Frenchman, especially if he has served. Experience has made me a cosmopolite, and yet to this hour a young Frenchman is my instinctive aversion. He is born in coxcombry, cradled in coxcombry, and educated in coxcombry. It is only after his coxcombry is rubbed off by the changes and chances of the world, that the really valuable material of the national character is to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... read with great interest the theatrical criticisms and the details about actors in the newspapers. Finally, whether actuated by ennui or by an instinctive impulse, she bought a complete set of Shakespeare's works and, forthwith, was lost! She found that "something" for which she had sought so long; she found her hero, her aim, her ideal—it was the theater. She devoured Shakespeare with all the inherent ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the question before us? For what do you think we are stipulating? We are making a claim for five or six hundred thousand maidens, protected by their instinctive timidity, and by the high price at which they rate themselves; they understand how to defend themselves, just as well as they know how to sell themselves. The eighteen millions of human beings, whom we have excepted from this consideration, almost invariably ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... into them. He never lied. With him the truth was instinctive, masterful; it was the keynote of his religion. "Yes," he said. "You are a spiritual hindrance. I am a human man—you are a sensual woman. You have determined to do everything in your power to keep me ever mindful of the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... state of mind the offence she had taken at his acting in the charade became all the more odious. What a mean-minded girl she could be, to be sure; yet how perfectly he had risen above the situation. He had received her rudeness with an instinctive fineness that gave freshness to the Biblical admonition about the other cheek. He had returned good for evil, and in supporting her through the ordeal of the Uplift Plan he had proved himself ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... formal, more individual in his style, springing from a line of forbears who have preferred the thrust to the cut, the point to the edge, for centuries, is a more instinctive and less intellectual swordsman than the Frenchman. It is in his blood; he uses his rapier with a wild and ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and not ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... men who, with instinctive dread, Whenever Freedom lifts her drooping head, Make prophet-tripods of their office-stools, And scare the nurseries and the village schools With dire presage of ruin grim and great, A broken Union ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... glass. A small table separated him from the girl. Still staring at her, in the long seconds that elapsed before either spoke, he saw that she had swept her right hand behind her back, in a swift, instinctive effort to hide what it held. His self-possession returned. He had not been mistaken. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... stop and uproot impressions that are almost instinctive, to remember that our forefathers reached these shores by virtue of knowledge which they owed to the astronomical researches of Egyptians and Chaldeans, who inspired the astronomers of Greece, who inspired ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... represents, just as particularly, the idea of immortality. Nothing characterized it better, as all the ancients admit. That mysterious folk was looked upon as the privileged possessor of the secrets of death, and its unwavering instinctive faith in the persistence of life never ceased to be a cause of astonishment, and sometimes of fear, in the eyes of the heathen." The Gauls possessed an occult philosophy, and a mystic religion, which were destroyed by the ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... stood facing her on the other side of the table, a grey-haired man with crafty eyes that seemed to look in all directions at the same time. She took an instinctive dislike to him. He wore ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh! Why, the sacred girdle is as nothing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... am a mere animal, and instinctive emotions too often silence the suggestions of reason. Your note, I can scarcely tell why, hurt me, and produced a kind of winterly smile, which diffuses a beam of despondent tranquillity over the features. I have been very ill; Heaven ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... they sustain each other, fatality serving as the base, reason coming after, and liberty crowning the edifice. It is to know and penetrate fatality that human reason tends; it is to conform to it that liberty aspires; and the criticism in which we are now engaged of the spontaneous development and instinctive beliefs of the human race is at bottom only a study of fatality. Let ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... she says: 'Why, yes, and jump at the chance.' What difference does it make what we said, or whether we said anything at all? Why should we charge our memories with the recollections of those few and foolish months of mere instinctive sex-attraction when all that really counts came after, the years wherein low passion blossomed into lofty Love, the dear companionship in joy and sorrow, and in that which is more, far more than either joy or sorrow, 'the daily round, the common task?'" All that is wonderful ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... in relation to the fundamental problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive criticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead us far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more melancholy ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... went he whistled, whenever he found himself at a sufficient distance from the scattered houses which lined the roads. He was everywhere respectfully greeted, with an instinctive solemnity of a godly sort—a solemnity without fear. Men looked at him as he swung along, with right Scottish respect for his character and work. They knew him to be at once a man among men and a man ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... colour flashed everywhere, singing in wild joy, and tilted on the rising hedge before her, hunting berries and seeds. Their bubbling, spontaneous song was an instinctive outpouring of their joy over mating time, nests, young, much food, and running water. Their social, inquiring, short cry was to locate a mate, and call her to good feeding. The sharp wild scream of a note was when a hawk ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... revulsion engendered by the sight and sound of that grim, uncanny shape that he distinctly felt the gooseflesh rise over the surface of his body, and it was with difficulty that he refrained from following an instinctive urge to fire upon the nocturnal intruder. Better, far better would it have been had he given in to the insistent demand of his subconscious mentor; but his almost fanatical obsession to save ammunition ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... associations, musical tones in this case would be likely to call up vaguely and indefinitely the strong emotions of a long-past age. As we have every reason to suppose that articulate speech is one of the latest, as it certainly is the highest, of the arts acquired by man, and as the instinctive power of producing musical notes and rhythms is developed low down in the animal series, it would be altogether opposed to the principle of evolution, if we were to admit that man's musical capacity has been developed from the tones used in impassioned speech. We must suppose ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... men in general is to weigh at all in a matter of this kind, it does but corroborate these instinctive feelings. A convert is undeniably in favor with no party; he is looked at with distrust, contempt, and aversion by all. His former friends think him a good riddance, and his new friends are cold and strange; and as to ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... involuntary in their functions. The muscles employed in respiration are of this class, for we can breathe rapidly or slowly, and, for a short time, even suspend their action; but soon, however, the organic muscles assert their instinctive control, and respiration ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... freed from all instinctive compulsions. He transforms his need for human affection into aspiration for God alone, a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Ferdinand and his Consort. I cannot say that I actually regarded this tragedy as being the prelude which should lead ultimately to a great European convulsion, but in my own mind, and in view of my past experience, it created a feeling of unrest within me and an instinctive foreboding of evil. Then came a few weeks of the calm which heralded the storm—a calm under cover of which Germany was vigorously preparing for ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... arrange her grades of blue according to the Chinese colors of this oldest domestic art of the world, and be correspondingly happy in the result. Chinese design, however, had no influence in the growing practice of embroidery, and here also an instinctive law prevailed. She recognized that even the highly artificial landscape art of her idolized plates would not suit the flexible and broken surfaces of her equally cherished linen, or the surroundings ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... happiness, appears to lie much more, so far as the relations of love and [226] marriage are concerned, in becoming alive to the finer shades of feeling which arise within these relations, in being able to enter with tact and sympathy into the subtle instinctive propensions and repugnances of the person with whose life his own life is bound up, to make them his own, to direct and govern, in harmony with them, the arbitrary range of his personal action, and thus to enlarge his spiritual and intellectual ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... terrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towards the office and the waiters' quarters. By the time he had come under the eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man in every inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled among the servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seen in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the dinner party should pace all ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Straits, if the Sublime Porte should not promptly "throw up the sponge." "The communications would have remained closed to colliers and small craft by movable armament, if not also by mines. Forcing the pass would in fact have resembled bursting through a swing door. Sailors and soldiers alike have an instinctive horror of a trap, and they are in the habit of looking behind them as well as before them."[1] But according to Ambassador Morgenthau, who was probably in a better position than any one else to ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... faithful is the race to old tradition. The persecutions of the Middle Ages compelled them to wear rags, to snuffle and whine and groan over their poverty in self-defence, till the habits induced by the necessities of other times have come to be, as usual, instinctive, a racial defect. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... did enter, passing between us, was the Priest Captain. As he saw the wreck of the idol, and the opening in the wall behind where the idol had stood, he uttered an exclamation of alarm and rage; and in the same moment some instinctive dread of the danger that menaced him caused him to turn suddenly around. So, for an instant, he confronted us—and never shall I forget the look of malignant hatred that was in his face as in that instant he regarded us, nor his quick despairing ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... the commencement of the war, great exertions had been made to bring the Empress of Russia into the coalition. That sovereign had an instinctive dread of the French revolution and its principles; but imagining that she had but little to gain by becoming a party to the war in the west of Europe, she constantly declined joining the allies. At length, however, on the 18th ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... estimation of himself and his money, felt that this was very true, and therefore did not dispute the point. But the instinctive recognition of such a truth by the Major, and his plain avowal of it, were very able. It was a confirmation to Mr Dombey, if he had required any, of his not being mistaken in the Major. It was an assurance to him that his power extended beyond his own immediate sphere; and that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... held fast to his talent. But the necessary insight into his powers had first to be gained, for it was not one of those talents which, from the beginning, strut their little world with the assurance of the peacock. He was, it is true, gifted with an instinctive feeling for the value and significance of tones—as a child he sang by ear in a small, sweet voice, which gained him the only notice he received at school, and he easily picked out his notes, and taught himself little pieces, on the old-fashioned, silk-faced piano, which had belonged to his mother ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... instinctive vein of humour came back to him under the pleasure of the reunion, and he pointed out to the Prince that if he was ill in bed, he had taken the trouble to be ill in a bed of some celebrity. It was a bed that made sickness auspicious. King Edward had used it when he had stayed at ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... environment, the empirical man changes, his norms of beauty must vary, too. Ideas can change in interest and in value, but these energies lie much deeper than the idea, in the original constitution of mankind. They belong to the instinctive, involuntary part of our nature. They are changeless, just as the "eternal man" is changeless; and as the basis of aesthetic feeling they can be gathered into a system of laws which shall be subject to no essential metamorphosis. ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... said. "Instinctive. The technique is either self-learned or copied. When Baby begins killing his own prawns, see if he doesn't do it the way ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... Jones's birth-fairy had endowed him with one priceless gift: the power of inspiring an instinctive confidence in himself. Sylvia Graham felt, suddenly, that a hand, sure and firm, had been outstretched to guide her on a dark path. In one of those rare flashes of companionship which come only when clean and honorable spirits recognize ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... consciousness. The psychical life of the lowest animals consists of a few simple acts directed toward the securing of food and the avoidance of danger, and these acts we are in the habit of classing as instinctive. They are so simple, so few, and so often repeated, that the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he begins to live. He has nothing ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... The instinctive reverence of the peasantry has hitherto been a great preservative; but the spread of education has to a considerable extent impaired this kindly sentiment, and the progress of scientific farming, and the anxiety of the Royal Irish Academy to collect antiquarian trifles, ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... to her hair; added to the last observations, reminded her that it might be possible that he had some message from her lover, and she consequently seemed to waver a little, as if struggling against her strong, instinctive ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... forward without hesitation after the first moment, pulling off her hood, and stood before her visitor, blushing, in a way that perhaps Mrs. Carleton looked at as a novelty in her world. Fleda did not know how she looked at it, but she had, nevertheless, an instinctive feeling, even at the moment, that the lady wondered how her son should have fancied particularly anything that went about under ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... had been the strong and healthy one—I was in my prime, forty, and had a tremendous appetite for business—and I had always regarded her as fragile and delicate; and now she could have crushed me without effort! I had an unreasonable, instinctive feeling of shame at being so weak compared to her. I knew that I was leaving her badly off; we were both good spenders, and all my spare profits had gone into the manufactory; but I did not trouble about that. I was almost quite callous about that. I thought to myself, in a confused ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... birth, though a resident of the Continent at large since the age of fifteen. All Neapolitans can act; all are actors; comedians of the greatest, as every traveller is cognizant. There is a thing in the air of our beautiful slopes which makes the people of a great instinctive musicalness and deceptiveness, with passions like those burning in the old mountain we have there. They are ready to play, to sing—or to explode, yet, imitating that amusing Vesuvio, they never do this last when you are in expectancy, or, as a ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... in 1809, a confused but profound instinctive feeling throughout the world that the moment for resistance and for supreme efforts had arrived. The Archduke Charles had proved it in Austria by the fury of his courage; the English cabinet were bearing witness to it by the great ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... on this voyage, and escaping with him from San Juan de Ulloa, was "a certain Englishman, called Francis Drake." Reared in a Protestant family which had felt the effects of the reaction under Queen Mary, he had an instinctive hatred of the Roman Church, and his experience at San Juan de Ulloa inspired him at the age of twenty with a lifelong animosity toward all Spaniards. Renouncing the semi-peaceful methods of Hawkins, Drake devoted ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... that anxious, yearning eyes are following them, both Nancy Dampier and Gerald Burton feel an instinctive desire to get away from the house, and as far as may be from possible eavesdroppers. They walk across the stretch of lawn which separates the moat from the gardens in a constrained silence, she following rather than ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... they had been his private possessions. This was the first little girl he had ever known. The novelty appealed to him; the daintiness of her; the freshness and cleanness; the dependence of her on Bobby's ten years of experience—all this brought out the latent and instinctive male admiration of the child. He remained heedless of the other three boys hanging awkwardly in the middle distance. All his small store of knowledge he poured out before her—he told her everything, without reservation—of Duke, and the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... him. Everything about him was on the grand scale; his great hands were clasped and protruded over the edge of the Book; and his heavy dark face looked menacingly round on the crowded church; he had the air of a melancholy giant about to engage in some tragic pleasure. But Isabel's instinctive dislike began to pass into positive terror so soon ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... choirmaster, not wishing to show himself inferior to the organist in his instinctive hatred of plain chant, was delighted, when the Benediction began, to put aside Gregorian melodies and make ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... tawny collie came bounding toward her from the fold where he had just marshaled the sheep for the night. The dog was beautiful. And he meant her no harm. He even tried shyly to make friends with the tall and grave-eyed guest. Dorcas saw all that. Yet she shrank from him with instinctive fear—in spite of it. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... his standard of veracity was utterly different from hers. He was not very careful to keep his word. He was not scrupulous in money matters. With her, honesty, truthfulness, exactness in all affairs, were not only instinctive, but deliberate; for the pride of her birth was so great that she felt it incumbent upon her to be ten times more careful in these things than the ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... suffered very much, my brows peering at the utter darkness, and my heart shocked at its own rashness. I got to the first landing, and as I turned to ascend the second part of the stair, my left hand touched something icily cold: I made some quick instinctive movement of terror, and, doing so, my foot struck against something, and I stumbled, half falling over what seemed a small table there. Immediately a horrible row followed, for something fell to the ground: and at that instant, ah, I heard something—a voice—a human voice, which uttered ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... lump of sugar between his thumb and finger, and shook it, Stephanie uttered the wild note again, and sprang quickly towards him; then she stopped short, there was a conflict between longing for the sweet morsel and instinctive fear of him; she looked at the sugar, turned her head away, and looked again like an unfortunate dog forbidden to touch some scrap of food, while his master slowly recites the greater part of the alphabet until he reaches the letter that gives permission. At length the animal appetite ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... drew her down beside him. For an instant she would have resisted, as the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks attested,—and then, with the instinctive feminine baseness that compels every woman, when once she has met her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various |
