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More "Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quatrains, whose four verses rhyme among themselves. The Filipino rhyme, however, consists in the last letter being a vowel or a consonant.... They read all their verses in a singing tone, and the quatrains of the twelve-syllable verse are read with the motif of the comintan, which is their national song. The custom of singing when reading poetry is a practice of China, and of all the Asiatic peoples whom I have visited. The kind of versification which I have just cited is evidently anterior to our conquest, as is also ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... the historical records of other nations. But the Hebrew possessed one characteristic which differentiated him from all other people. He was a monotheist, and he saw his God in every thing, every event, every place. His concept of God was his life-motif. This concept evolved slowly, painfully, throughout the centuries. The ancient Hebrew patriarchs saw it as a variable God, changeful, fickle, now violently angry, now humbly repentant, now making contracts with mankind, now petulantly destroying His own handiwork. He was ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... his wife with serious attention. Lighting his pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an air which had for its sole motif the undynamic suggestion: ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... piece is but doubtfully ascribed to Theocritus. The motif is that of a well-known Anacreontic Ode. The idyl has ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... les fouilles ne devront etre accordees qu'aux personnes qui offrent des garanties suffisantes d'experience archeologique. Aucune des Puissances mandataires ne devra, en accordant ces autorisations, agir de facon a ecarter, sans motif valable, les ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... behind line and colour. Theirs was the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran's little story, in which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in the first instance is purely a matter of feeling—exactly what we speak of as "motif" in ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Epicurus gave expression by placing them in the empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... The Love-Motif. On the one hand, there is the persistent desire to be attractive, which manifests itself in the subtlest ways. How many of the yearnings and activities of human life have their roots in this ancient and honorable desire! The love of pretty clothes,—however it may seem ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... chosen for their easy adaptability to use in the first natural period of art— expression, the Colossal period. They are selections with an easily distinguishable theme. Throughout these chapters the mind of the student should be engaged with the motif of the selection as it first catches the mind. Nothing in later study can make up for the loss of the first glow, the undefined answering response to the animating spirit of a writer's message. His differentiated meanings, his elaborations of theme for the ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... More guests had gone. In a cleared circle in the heart of the lanternlight Mrs. Kent was performing one of the more expurgated and perfunctory of her dances for the benefit of the select audience that remained, to scattered, perfunctory applause. The motif of it was ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... translated into more languages than any modern performances I ever heard of." A French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared three years after the publication of the novel and a little later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all classes and conditions of mankind were ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a mere decorative border, I now realized was a motif I have seen all my life! A tiny lighthouse sending forth a beam! The trademark of ...
— With a Vengeance • J. B. Woodley
... of the artist. He must start by having a definite objective, what in studio phrase is called a "motif"; something that has given him a certain impression which he wants to convey to others, but which cannot be stated as an isolated fact without any surroundings. Then the surroundings must be painted so as to have a natural relation to the main motif; they must lead ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... a kind of RTLD motif throughout the stanza. The assonance is even more striking. The stressed vowel sounds (which are of course the most important[79]) line by line are ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... The musicians of the orchestra had given the signal; some of them did not conceal their hilarity. The audience, certain then that the music was laughable, rocked with laughter. This merriment became general; it increased at the return of a very rhythmical motif which the double-basses accentuated in a burlesque fashion. Only the Kapellmeister went on through the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... treating of her career and her love affairs with a realism that is convincing, but free of offence. The heroine allures and for a long time retains the devotion and affection of a typical solitary Londoner, who is not less devoted to the bon motif; but the inevitable break occurs. There is plenty of humour and of first-hand knowledge in this study of upper Bohemian life of to-day, and ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found—it had been put there for him by Amanda—among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. "What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... chance to be beautiful. And in time these new beauties have become worn away like the trite metaphors that are now no longer metaphors, but part of the "funded capital." That was a ridiculous device of Schumann's, who found a motif for one of his loveliest things by using the letters of his temporary fair one's name—A B E G G; but it may not be so utterly unlike the procedure by ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... your mother is an old novel-reader! My agents have ever since been on your track, but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should be ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... make an excursion three or four times a week. So that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps she got ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... played. It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... in 1793, and probably as early as 1785, produced sauceboats, urns, tea sets, tankards, and so on. His flatware is usually distinguished by a shell motif, and gadroon edges finish and decorate many of his pieces. His work is very similar ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... feet high, from which at intervals other corridors branched. Held by one arm, and ever and again turning helplessly over in his horizontal transit, Keith caught glimpses of walls covered with intricate designs on a basic eight-armed motif—designs of artistic value, that gave ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... it in a London theatre. That laugh, now, when she doubles over at the hips—who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves her hand, too. She's at her best in the second act. She's really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... and are therefore more acceptable to customers." As prostitutes are frequently married by their patrons, it is believed that not a few women from "special villages" are taken to wife without their origin being known. Unwitting marriage with an Eta woman has long been a common motif in fiction and folk story. Many members of the "special tribes" go to Hokkaido and there pass into the general body of the population. The folk of this class are "despised," I was told by a responsible Japanese, "not so much for themselves as for what their fathers and grandfathers ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... noticed it in designs. On the Mahakam few are the Oma-Suling and Long-Glat houses which are not decorated with an artistic representation of this antoh. Among the Penihings in Long Tjehan I never saw a sword hilt carved with any other motif. On the knife-handle it is ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... at Salonika may well have a heartening influence upon all men in uniforms who waver in the path of duty—especially in these days of vast military operations when a whole world is in arms. It belongs in patriotic literature by the side of Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country." The motif is the same—that of obligation and service ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... affluence. The outside public engaged in speculation to a degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... Shakespearean influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... inevitable earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went home. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... furnished the basis for the beautiful mansion I put up. Moved by nostalgic memories of my lost Southland I built a great and ample bungalow of some sixty rooms—stucco, topped with asbestos tile. Since the Spanish motif natural to this form would have been out of place in England and therefore in bad taste, I had timbers set in the stucco, although of course they performed no function but that of decoration, the supports being framework ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... through the steady throb and swing of the heavier stringed instruments? Ah! why does the rhythm stop? A few chords breaking up the dream, the sound of a bugle calling you away, and the valse goes into the farewell motif with its tender longing and passionate anguish. Good-bye! you will be true? Your heart is mine, good-bye, sweetheart! Stop! that discord of angry notes—she is false to her soldier lover! The stars are pale, the ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... d'un de mes concitoyens les plus distingues, avec une correspondance touchant une matiere a laquelle il me semble que le Danemark ne soit guere moins interesse que ne le sont les Etats Unis; le premier y ayant contribue le digne motif, l'autre en ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... world, a fact to which Epicurus gave expression by placing them in the empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... The Ballad of the White Horse had come to Gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." But it is hard to say when the motif of the White Horse, the verses ringing in his head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many think the greatest ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... elsewhere, there have been legends similar to the story of Audunn, where a man, after having been to the Norwegian king with a tame bear, decides to present it to the king of Denmark. However, we know of no earlier source for this motif than the story of Audunn. Whatever its value as historical fact, it could well be the model to which the other versions might be traced. This story is preserved in the Morkinskinna, an Icelandic manuscript written in the second half of the thirteenth century, as well as in several ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... repetition. Since it takes two to keep an argument going, Thompson's beginning was but the beginning of a monologue which presently died weakly of inattention. When he gave over trying to inject a theological motif into the conversation, he found MacLeod responsive enough. The factor touched upon native customs, upon the fur trade, upon the vast and unexploited resources of the North, all of which was more or less ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register—it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... should be of white and blue beads—large beads that will catch glitter from the sun. About her head a band of tan, and a white quill. The embroidery about the neck of her Indian robe is of pearls. The basket which she carries should be white, with a motif of rich blue and scarlet. She wears a tan (dressed deerskin) girdle, heavily embroidered in red beads. Her stockings and moccasins are tan-colored also, the moccasins embroidered in scarlet. The ends of her braids ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... Man" is Mr. Duncan's first full-sized novel having a distinct motif and purpose since "Doctor Luke of The Labrador." The tale of the big woods has for its hero, John Fairmeadow—every inch a man whom the Lumber Jacks of his parish in the pines looked up to as their Sky Pilot. Human nature in the rough ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
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