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More "Passive" Quotes from Famous Books



... at the first response to her cry for help. Sing was armed with a heavy revolver but he dared not attempt to use it for fear that he might wound either Bulan or the girl, and so he was forced to remain but a passive spectator ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... a wriggle or two, but, like most of his countrymen, he had a good deal of common sense and self-command, which made him remain passive after a bit; when, throwing myself on my back, I floated, dragging his head across my body, so that he might rest awhile and recover himself before trying to ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... consequences which seem likely to flow from Bulgaria's surrender. There remains the question of the future attitude of Bulgaria herself. Will she remain a passive spectator of these momentous happenings, or will she, striking in on the Allies' side, do her share toward bringing them to pass? The latter eventuality is more than possible. The Bulgarians, from ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... tenses for which there is no inflection in the active, and all those of the passive, are formed by the auxiliaries skal (shall), hafa (have), vera (be) with the infin. and ptc. pret., much as ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet

... Nils, and call the names of the children as usual," said the teacher. Those were no dainty little ones, accustomed to be dressed like passive dolls by careful nurses or over-fond mammas. They had but to receive their garments in the daily orderly way, and to put them on as they well knew how. There might sometimes be an obstinate string or button, but Nils was sure to be able to help in any such difficulty, ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker

... history soon began to develop. Out of the long turmoil came a whole new line-up in the business. It affected Charles Frohman less than any of his immediate associates in the big combination because, first of all, he was a passive member, and, second, he had a kingdom all his own. Yet the story of these turbulent years is so inseparably linked up with the development of the drama in this country that it is ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... nephew Louis XV., whom he resembled in many ways, that morbid weariness of life, that contempt for mankind and distaste for business. He was afflicted, moreover, with that fatal impotence of will which makes a libertine king the slave of his mistresses, and, a faithful husband the passive instrument of a charming queen who may happen to be prompted by the most skilful ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... was a signal; "but, by God," says he, "if things go ill, the first thing I will do is to shoot him." He discoursed largely and bravely to me concerning the different sort of valours, the active and passive valour. For the latter, he brought as an instance General Blake; who, in the defending of Taunton and Lime for the Parliament, did through his stubborn sort of valour defend it the most 'opiniastrement' that ever any man did any thing; and yet never was the man that ever made any attaque ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... special immunities and often something of a sacred character ... Neither public authority nor private persons can use any force, or do any violence to him, without offending against the law of nations." [Footnote: Except that if necessary for self-defense, passive resistance may be made.] This immunity extends to his house, furniture, and attendants. Except in extreme cases, he is exempt from civil ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... into trance," she said. "That is rare with me, rare with anyone, though often assumed for effect. Of you, I ask only that you remain quiet and passive. I'd ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin

... Mrs Desmond credit for being more passive than active in the whole affair," he concluded, since Paul seemed disinclined to volunteer a remark. "But the deuce of it is, that I feel sure Desmond knows less about the thing than any one else. Can you see him putting up with it ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... to Mr. Gladstone, put the case of Van Diemen's Land in a striking aspect. "Shall the fairest isle in the south be converted into one huge gaol? shall the free inhabitants be made the passive instruments of punishing these criminals? Is this the only capacity in which the British government will recognise the free colonists? The petitioners have laid their case before the legislature. They trust they have not appealed in vain—that they will not be driven from a land where ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable nervousness. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... seconds after the last echoes of the gun had rolled through the forest the girl lay passive in Nathaniel's arms, so close that he could feel her heart beating against his own and her breath sweeping his face. Then there came a pressure against his breast, a gentle resistance of Marion's half conscious form, and when she had awakened from her partial swoon he was holding her in the crook ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood

... from His being a sacrifice, the supposing that for Christ to be a priest and a sacrifice is all one and the same thing; and it may be it is, because they have not thought on this so well as they should—namely, that as He was a sacrifice He was passive, that is, led or had away as a lamb to His sufferings (Isaiah 53); but as a priest He was active—that is, He did willingly and freely give up His Body to be a sacrifice. "He hath given His life a ransom for many." This consideration being ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... bless you, and him too, whoever he be! But if you want a friend, I may be that friend, may I not? and try to prove that my words of regard were true, in a better and higher sense than I used them at first." And kissing her passive hand, he was gone and she ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... enforced the charge of a solecism by an expression in itself grossly solecistical, when, for one of those supposed blunders, he says, as Ker, and, I think, some one before him, has remarked, "propino te grammatistis tuis vapulandum[37]." From vapulo, which has a passive sense, vapulandus can never be derived. No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... unstable souls," so this second beast "maketh fire to come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of (credulous) men." (2 Tim. iii. 8; Exod. vii. 22; Acts viii. 9-11.) The venal ministry of the heathenized church, (ch. xi. 2,) inculcate passive obedience to the beast of the sea, as to the "ordinance of God;"—to "resist" which, subjects the recusant to "damnation." (Rom. xiii. 2.) Here, then, we behold the counterfeits of the two great ordinances of church and state, against which it is the special duty and arduous work of ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... are visible even in his most favored circumstances. Such is his bigotry, surpassing everything in a quiet passive form, that has been witnessed since the more active bigotry of the times of the Spanish Philips. Such, too, is the exclusive, limited range of his knowledge and conceptions of all political and social topics and relations. The Englishman, the cultivated ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more breathless than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that encompassed her. The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her rage of the previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility. Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she trembled and turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... charming as she could; and even if no one were going to see her, she never felt that she looked charming enough. She was—as Lady Casterley had shrewdly guessed—the kind of woman who spoils men by being too nice to them; of no use to those who wish women to assert themselves; yet having a certain passive stoicism, very disconcerting. With little or no power of initiative, she would do what she was set to do with a thoroughness that would shame an initiator; temperamentally unable to beg anything of anybody, she required love ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... him. He had arrived at a state of absolute indifference. He had so often rearranged his pliable nature to suit his changing environment that at last he found that he could be content in almost any circumstances. He had no pleasures, no cares, no ambitions, no regrets, no hopes. It was mere passive existence, an inert, plantlike vegetation, the moment's pause before the final decay, the last ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... of Mr. Walker's cottage was made known in the family, there was a passive acquiescence in the change on the part of all but Aunt ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur

... watchful of all that touches his country's prosperity, in which he has an individual lot, and interested in all that affects the advantages of business of which he is a factor, to be relegated to the level of a mere appurtenance to a great machine, with little free will, with no duty but that of passive obedience, and with little hope or opportunity of rising in the scale of responsible ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... Prime Minister that the Queen would not take one step without them. The clergy, who are always great examples of slavish servitude themselves, preached it to others under the plausible title of passive obedience. Thus both clergy and laity were, in an instant, ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... reasons for asking you.' She got up, for by the striking of the church clock she had just found out that it was later than she had thought, and she knew that her father would be at home by this time. She bent down and kissed Miss Browning's grave and passive face. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... and that time takes off from the lustre of virgins in all other eyes but mine. I appeal to my letters to herself whether I was your friend or not in the whole concern, though the part I designed to act in it was purely passive." He had even thought "it could not be decently broken," without disadvantage to the lady's credit, since he supposed it was known to the town; and he had always spoken of her in a manner far from discouraging. Though he knew many ladies of rank, he had "nowhere met with an humour, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... approve. En route. Esq. Graduate, use is graduated. Gents, use gentlemen. Hon. House, use House of Representatives. Humbug. Inaugurate, use begin. In our midst. Item, use particle, extract, or paragraph. Is being done, and all similar passive forms. Jeopardize. Jubilant, ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel

... It is a mortifying indication of the little importance that is attached to what we are saying; and there is something of the irritation that is produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye that is looking beyond you,—the grin that is not at anything funny in what you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... be similarly formed from the roots of "transitive" verbs, and indicate an action of the verb not immediately due to the subject's acting upon itself (as in the case of reflexive verbs, 41) and not caused by any direct agency (as in the case of the passive voice, 169): ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman

... the universe. Pantheism is generally the creation of brooding wonder and uncritical thought; Pantheism feels rather than thinks; it accepts rather than seeks to explain. It may be devout enough but its devotion is passive rather than active. Pantheism is never scientific in the accepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explains by personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to the temper which finds some animating spirit in all natural ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... loaded with shawls, Charlotte flourishing about. Poor Mary—it was much against her will—but she had no heart to refuse the wreath of geraniums that Amy's own hands had woven for her; and there she sat, passive as a doll, though in despair at their all waiting for her. For Laura's toilette was finished, and every one began dressing her at once; while Charlotte, to make it better, screamed over the balusters that all were ready but Mary. Sir Guy was heard playing the 'Harmonious ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... explanations that might endanger Birch, or Harper, or both. Unused to contention, and really much attached to her kinsman, the feeble objections of Miss Peyton gave way to the firmness of her niece. Mr. Wharton was too completely a convert to the doctrine of passive obedience and nonresistance, to withstand any solicitation from an officer of Dunwoodie's influence in the rebel armies; and the maid returned to the apartment, accompanied by her father and aunt, at the expiration of the time that she had fixed. Dunwoodie and the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... premonition of impending trouble, the mongrel bristled the yellow hair of his neck, and, retreating to the mouth of his kennel, stood guard; but otherwise the scene was to a detail as it had been in the morning. The woman lay passive within the bunk. The child by her side, holding her hand, did not turn. The very atmosphere of the place tingled with an ominous quiet,—a silence such as one who has lived through a cyclone connects instinctively with ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... just put forward in relation to the closed iron ring, and its passive character under the condition of becoming polarized, are more important than at first appears. It has been found that the secondary current wave of a closed iron circuit induction coil or transformer, whose primary circuit ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various

... or the individual and national rights of all other people—expressed in a collective and belligerent way. It is not, as said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast; but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so, and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically, therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the republic and the empire, or with the more modern Goths ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... the yielding burden lying so passive in his strong arms filled him with a rapture such as he had never known. The thought of sex was still far from his mind, and only was the manhood in him yielding to the contact, and teaching him through the senses that which his upbringing ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander about the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... which cases we could not use negligence; negligence in dress implies want of care as to its arrangement, tidiness, etc.; neglect of one's garments would imply leaving them exposed to defacement or injury, as by dust, moths, etc. Neglect has a passive sense which negligence has not; the child was suffering from neglect, i. e., from being neglected by others; the child was suffering from negligence would imply that he himself was neglectful. The distinction ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... upon the cushioned seat inert and passive. In the flash of each passing street-light her face showed waxen pale, a cameo against the dark background; so drawn and pinched were her features, that Brencherly, in panic, seized her pulse, in order to assure himself that ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... Could not have found an apter instrument For the performance of what you designe, Then I experience how much any man May become passive in obedience To the intent of woman, in my truth. Set the abstrusest comment on my faith Imagination can resolve, my study Shall mak't as easie as the plainest ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the passive resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... tenth of June. At last, however, when matters were growing serious, and when she had treated all the pressure that it was possible to put upon her with quiet indifference—for, as usual, her father declined to interfere, but contented himself with playing a strictly passive part—she suddenly of her own mere motion, abolished the difficulty by consenting to appear before the registrar on the eighth of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... turned swiftly to black tragedy, this passive spectator leaped into quick strenuous life. With a spring he was off his pony, and with another he was over the stone wall and flying swiftly across the field. Looking up from his victim, the great ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... a man act so?" he says. "There's my fellow-man. Look at him! I'm sorry for him. Most of him had hard luck to be born, and yet when he gets in my way I just walk all over him. I can't help it. He's leathery and he's passive, my fellow-man. He goes to sleep in the middle of the road. When I ketch one of him, I kicks a hole in his trousers first, and then it occurs to me, 'My sufferin' brother! This is too bad!' Why, Pete Hillary was one of the dumbdest and leatheriest, and here's ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... their beads—for nearly every man carries his string of jet or amber beads, which he mechanically tells, though without a thought of prayer. They walk with half-closed eyes, and whilst they seem to be thinking, they are but taking a passive pleasure in existence. They sit down together at their cafes which debouch upon the streets, and sip the sweetest of coffee, and light their cigarettes, and regard the world which passes slowly by. There are all manner of ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... an hour he had the delight of perceiving that Amine was in a profuse perspiration; gradually her breathing became less heavy, and instead of the passive state in which she had remained, she moved, and became restless. Philip watched, and replaced the clothes as she threw them off, until she at last appeared to have fallen into a profound and sweet sleep. Shortly after, Father Seysen and ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat

... gloom and listened to her mother's incessant moaning. When she attempted to move, her mother cried out at her. When she desired to ask if she might try to alleviate the pain, she was interrupted shortly. Somehow her sitting in passive silence within hearing of this illness seemed to contribute to her mother's relief. She assumed a posture of submission. Sometimes her mother projected questions concerning the local condition, and although she laboured to be graphic and at ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... very rare exceptions, found none in those badly-armed and worse-clothed bands who fought with a fixed idea; they were adventurers who wished for war for the sake of war; visionaries anxious for fortune; country lads from the fields, who in their passive ignorance had joined the factions, just as they would have stayed at home if they had had better counsels; simple souls who firmly believed that in the towns they were burning and destroying God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that society should not ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Friends, and never fail'd to be ungrateful; that if ever he committed a Murther, did it in cold Blood, because no body could prove he ever had any hot; who possess'd with a Poltroon Devil, was always wickeder in the Dark, than he durst be by Day-light; and who, after innumerable passive Sufferings, has been turned out of human Society, because he could not be kick'd or cuff'd either into good Manners ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... village, with its squalid and fetid huts, we caught the sound of bells, innumerable bells, tinkling at regular intervals. Many people trooped out from their houses to look at us, all flat-faced, all with oblique eyes, all stolidly, sullenly, stupidly passive. They seemed curious as to our dress and appearance, but not apparently hostile. We walked on to the low line of the monastery with its pyramidal roof and its queer, flower-vase minarets. After a moment's discussion they ushered us into the temple or chapel, which was ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... passive. She neither returned his ardor nor fought it. But when his hands began to stroke her back she pulled away from him and stood there looking at him. She took the necklace off and threw it at ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger

... be defined as a place where Man is passive and the rest of Nature active. Till quite recently Nature had her own sanctuaries, where man either did not go at all or only as a tool-using animal in comparatively small numbers. But now, in this machinery age, there is no place left where man cannot go ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... wild in a manner passive and still, had spoken no word; she attended Storri's wants in silence. When that sudden weariness came to claim him and he cast himself in slumber upon the couch, the San Reve, from where she stood statue-like in the center of the room, bent upon him her gray-green ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... been made for the Carlist leaders to meet at Lucerne in Switzerland. They are to discuss the situation. Many of them think that they have been passive long enough, and that it is now high time that a decided attempt should be made to secure the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 47, September 30, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... the celerity of naval operations correspondingly increased. Yet, the more we tried it, the more obviously did the dangers and difficulties caused, especially at night, by fastening two ships together, one of whom is necessarily a passive agent, stare us in the face. The union of the tug and the "towed" was not far distant. The advent of the war steamer, the swift battleship, independent alike of wind and sea, was close ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... outstretched arms two of the squatter party, his hands tightly grasping their collars. Yet I believe his touch was as gentle as with the violets. His face was preternaturally grave; theirs, to my intense astonishment, while they hung passive from his arms, wore that fatuous, imbecile smile seen on the faces of those who lend themselves to tricks of acrobats and strong men in the arena. He slowly traversed the whole length of one side of the house, walked down the steps to the ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... all her little power. All manner of devices passed through her head, but were rejected, because, if Love said "Do wonders," Timidity said "Do nothing that you have not seen other wives do." So she remained, scheming, and longing, and fearing, and passive, all day. But the next day she conceived a vague idea, and, all in a heat, rang for her maid. While the maid was coming she fell to blushing at her own boldness, and, just as the maid opened the door, her thermometer fell so ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... attended by considerable noise and some shifting of feet. Some laughed, for there are some to laugh everywhere at the most sincere emotions of the human breast. The judge rapped for order. A flush of anger mounted to his usually passive face; he turned to the sheriff with a ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... that patient merit of the unworthy takes,' without one spot of red in the cheek, one perturbation or flush of anger in the heart; and to do that might task us all to the utmost. But that is not all that Christ's ethics require of us. It is not sufficient to exercise the passive virtue of meekness; there must be the active one of mercifulness. And to call for that is to lay an additional weight upon our consciences, and to strain and stretch still further the obligation under which we come. We have not done what the worst men and our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... passes for a heap; A heap for none, that has a homely one! Where fashion makes the law—your umpire which You bow to, whether it has brains or not. Where Folly taketh off his cap and bells, To clap on Wisdom, which must bear the jest! Where, to pass current you must seem the thing, The passive thing, that others think, and not Your simple, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various

... place, and were subjected to the usual persecution; this, however, was now less prolonged than during the early days of their captivity, for they had now no longer strength or spirits to resent their treatment, and as no fun was to be obtained from passive victims, even the village boys soon ceased to find any amusement in ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... the house of commons. The speaker and four members only were present, and a motion of thanks and for printing the sermon was carried as a matter of course. When the sermon was printed, however, it was found to savour of the doctrines of passive obedience and the divine right of kings, and to contain principles in direct opposition to those which had placed the reigning family on the throne. This brought down a storm on the head of the preacher. Mr. Thomas Townshend ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... obeyed. When they join, the officers may ill-treat them, pull their hair, and strike them with impunity. The officers have generally a fair supply of professional knowledge, and some are highly educated. The men have a larger amount of passive courage than of dashing bravery; yet they will usually follow where their officers lead them. The private has a possibility of rising to the rank of an officer after twelve years' probation, and even ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... It was not that I was the sort of monk we are told the Devil would be, when he was sick, although my physical weakness may have lain—God knows!—at the root of it, once. No, I had changed. Those who have gone through some such change (and I wonder, sometimes, how many of the passive, unremarkable people I pass on the street, in the fields, in hotels, have gone through such) know how well I knew the truth of this matter and how little likely I was to deceive myself. I loved her, yes, and shall love her while consciousness remains with me, but it would never again be bitter ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... Philip of Macedon. This is the age which ushers in the last period of the nation, a mechanical state of the individual, when thought has so departed that the man is not able to attend even to his own life, and, like a passive machine, the state is impelled and directed in even the least things by one tyranny from without. It is hardly necessary to add that Alexander in Greece, Elagabalus in Rome, Louis XVI in France, were followed by a destruction as certain as the fact that God ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... of this work have been demanded in eighteen months. Among the new additions are: Colonic lavage and flushing, Hirst's treatment for vaginismus, Dudley's treatment of cystocele, Montgomery's round ligament operation, Chorio-epithelioma of the Uterus, Passive Incontinence of the Urine, and Moynihan's methods in Intestinal Anastomosis. Nothing is left to be taken for granted, the author not only telling his readers in every instance what should be done, but also precisely how to do it. A distinctly ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon

... he ever was with merely passive or negative views, Burke was led to attempt a solution of the problem. He had never been under any illusion as to the possibility of limiting colonial constitutional pretensions. A free government was ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison

... to the legal and religious ceremony, what gratitude could you feel to me later for a gift in which my goodwill counted for nothing? If during the time that I remained indifferent to you (yielding only a passive obedience, such as my mother has just been urging on me) a child were born to us, do you suppose that I could feel towards it as I would towards one born of our common love? A passionate love may not be necessary in marriage, but, at least, you will admit that there should be no repugnance. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... that he was the least anxious of any of us. He was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... in spite of herself as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, "Here we are at home!" and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it: it was no more than the passive acceptance of a greeting in the midst of an absorbing show. Was not all her hurrying life of the last three months a show, in which her consciousness was a wondering spectator? After the half-willful excitement of the day, a numbness had come over ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... eyes filled with tears, and his voice grew tremulous, as he took Salome's cold, passive hand, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... scene of this sort have I witnessed. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, in her sprightly letters from Turkey, longs for some of the advocates for passive obedience and unconditional submission then existing in England to be present at the sights exhibited in a despotic government. A thousand times, in like manner, have I wished that those European philosophers ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events, avoiding all connections ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson

... of talkers may be mentioned, viz., the man who forces his logic upon you in such a dogmatic manner as leaves you without any hope of reply. You give him all the glory of victory. For the sake of peace and safety you remain passive, and think this the best valour for the occasion. Cowper refers to him in the ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... disturb him, and he must be kept very quiet—oh! very quiet, Doctor Conway says. Come in here, if you wish to speak to me," and she led the way into her little room. "Will you sit down?" she went on, with the same passive gentleness; "you were good to come, but—but—it must ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... to write sonatas on her eyebrow—to borrow Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow"—and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit mistress for him—this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her. The women of his dreams were quite other—beautiful, voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty thought, with dark, amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... all thought of that—I will deliver myself into your hands absolutely; nay, more, I will give you my most solemn word of honour that not only will I make no attempt at escape, but that I will not allow any one to help me to do so. I will be a passive and willing prisoner if you, on the other hand, will ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... of this war tries our power of passive will, but I feel that everything is coming out as I was able to foresee. I think that these long spells of inactivity will give repose to the intellectual machine. If I ever have the happiness of once more making use of mine, it is ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee!"—If Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre be, "to a certain extent, Applied Christianity," surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely the Passive half: could we but do it, as ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... with an averted countenance, Venetia clinging to her hand, which she had caught when she rushed forward, and which now fell passive by Lady Annabel's side, giving no sign, by any pressure or motion, of the slightest sympathy with her daughter, or feeling for the strange and agonising situation in which they ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... whispered. But she had already recognised the fact that for the present meeting a passive part would become her well, and save her a deal of trouble. She had her lover there quite safe, safe beyond anything that Mr. or Mrs. Beckard might have to say to the contrary. She was quite happy; only that there were symptoms now ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope

... liking for those things which they have studied at great cost of time and intellect, and their proficiency in which has led to their becoming distinguished and successful. It is certain that out of this feeling arises, not only that passive blindness to their defects of which the example given by my Lord Tenterden was quoted in the last letter, but an active disposition to advocate and defend them. If it were otherwise; if it were not for this spirit of interest and ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens

... from Lisbon and Paris and Vienna. I am not proud of the power which undoubtedly lies in the palm of my right hand. On the other hand, I should be foolish if I did not remind you of these things at a time like this. I only ask you to take up a passive attitude. You escape in that way all trouble, and if you fancy that the climate of Paris would suit you or Mrs. Deane better than London, it would be a matter of a few months only; but—you must not advise the ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... could repress the enchanting sprightliness which made her so great a favorite elsewhere. After a time she displayed it only in the homes of her little friends. By the end of the first month she had learned to be passive in her cousins' house,—so much so that Rogron one day asked her if she was ill. At that sudden question, she ran to the end of the garden, and stood crying beside the river, into which her tears may have fallen as she herself was about to ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... may be either operative, or passive. To them it is an evil, but to us none. We have no more to do with the sins of the wicked and unconverted here than with those of an infidel Turk; for all earthly bonds and fellowships are absorbed and swallowed up in the holy community of the Reformed Church. However, if it ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... the free intercourse of mind with mind, which he established instead of the implicit submission which only ecchoed his own voice, how little of the pleasure that women were formed to give can be enjoyed, when they are considered merely as slaves to a tyrant's will, the passive subjects of transient dalliance and casual enjoyment. The pleasure which he took in the youthful beauty of ALMEIDA, was now endeared, exalted, and refined, by the tender sensibility of her heart, and by the reflexion ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth

... rarely, however, that the young lord allowed himself to be provoked into more than a passive share in these scenes. To the boisterousness of his mother he would oppose a civil and, no doubt, provoking silence,—bowing to her but the more profoundly the higher her voice rose in the scale. In general, however, when he perceived that a storm was at hand, in flight lay his only safe ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... nothing more to be said, and a poor man can put up with a good deal for twenty pounds a day, but I felt none the less that Lord Linchmere was acting rather scurvily towards me. He wished to convert me into a passive tool, like the blackthorn in his hand. With his sensitive disposition I could imagine, however, that scandal would be abhorrent to him, and I realized that he would not take me into his confidence until no other course was open to him. I must trust to my own eyes and ears ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... feeling toward Tom subsided until nothing was left of it except a kind of passive disregard of him. Organized resentment would not have been tolerated at Temple Camp and it is a question whether the scouts themselves would have had anything to do with such a conspiracy. But the feeling had changed toward him and was especially noticeable ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... understood that a girl who loves never addresses such a question; but the feminine heart was a book in which he was a very poor speller. He imagined that Reine was only asking him as a matter of form, and that it was from a feeling of maidenly reserve that she adopted this passive method of escaping from openly declaring her wishes. She no doubt desired his friendly aid in the matter, and he felt as if he ought to grant her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Individualism. Catholicism, instead, is communistic by its origin and traditions.... The Catholic Church, with her powerful organization, dating back over many centuries, has accustomed Catholic peoples to passive obedience, to a passive renunciation of the greater part ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... bring it into order, establishing a uniform rule for receiving money, for serving in war, for sitting on juries, for doing what each, according to his age, can do, and what occasion requires. I never advise we should give to idlers the wages of the diligent, or sit at leisure, passive and helpless, to hear that such a one's mercenaries are victorious, as we now do. Not that I blame any one who does you a service; I only call upon you, Athenians, to perform upon your own account those duties for which you honor strangers, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... Not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and silent ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... of abstruse in all these Beutelsbachers, from Ulrich with the Thumb downwards: a mute ennui, an inexorable obstinacy; a certain streak of natural gloom which no illumination can abolish. Veracity of all kinds is great in them; sullen passive courage plenty of it; active courage rarer; articulate intellect defective: hence a strange stiff perversity of conduct visible among them, often marring what wisdom they have;—it is the royal stamp of Fate put upon these men. What are called ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... the same time all hope for betterment from within must have ceased at the death of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, an avowed friend of the long-suffering nationalities. It is, therefore, no mere matter of conjecture that the passive attitude of the Rumanian Government at the beginning of the present conflict must have been a bitter ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... practice of showing Jesus's skill as a debater, makes him play a less passive part at his trial, he still gives substantially the same account of it as all the rest. And the question that would occur to any modern reader never occurs to him, any more than it occurred to Matthew, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... third regeneration. One hour within the radius of Madge Stanley's influence brought me to repentance. But repentance is an everyday virtue. Should I ever achieve regeneration? That is one of the questions this history will answer. To me, Madge Stanley's passive force was the strongest influence for good that had ever impinged on my life. With respect to her, morally, I was the iron, the seed, the cloud, and the rain, for she, acting unconsciously, moved me with neither knowledge nor volition ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... icy fetter clips The native freedom of the Saxon lips; See the brown peasant of the plastic South, How all his passions play about his mouth! With us, the feature that transmits the soul, A frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole. The crampy shackles of the ploughboy's walk Tie the small muscles when he strives to talk; Not all the pumice of the polished town Can smooth this roughness of the barnyard down; Rich, honored, titled, he ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... often from the imperceptible mechanism of political society—a subject of observation which seems at first view so little commensurate to our faculties, that it has been generally regarded with the same passive emotions of wonder and submission with which, in the material world, we survey the effects produced by the mysterious and uncontroulable operation of phisical sic causes. It is fortunate that upon this, as on many other occasions, the difficulties which had long baffled ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... that the teaching may make an adequate impression, it is necessary, if not to discard all these passive methods, at least to supplement them by exercises which call out the activity of the pupil. Some such exercises have already been experimented with, and others might be devised.[243] The pupil may be set to analyse engravings, narratives, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... ethnological life; and even the observer whose vision is limited by his own horizon in time and space marks a dependence, and speaks of cause and effect. All this follows from the existence and nature of man. Man is not inert, nor even passive, merely; and his activity will continually organize itself into facts and forms, ever changing in character, it may be, yet subject to a law as wise and fixed ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... ignores the fact that the Chancellor had previously sought to bribe England to condone in advance the invasion of Belgium by Germany, and that Germany had also coerced Luxemburg into a passive acquiescence in a similar invasion, and there is as yet no pretense that Luxemburg had failed in ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... found it old. Those lines were already evident which, when first noted, bring a stab of surprised pain to the breast of a child—the droop of the mouth, the wrinkling of the temples, the patient weariness of the eyes. Virginia's own eyes filled with tears. The subjective passive state into which a newly born but not yet recognized love had cast her, inclined her to gentleness. She accepted facts as they came to her. For the moment she forgot the mere happenings of the day, and lived only in the resulting mood of them all. The new-comer inspired ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... out his watch as if to look at the time, "it is just upon midnight; you know the governor's orders, so you must go." The men, habituated like all Russians to passive obedience, went without a murmur, and Gregory found himself alone with Ivan and the two other slaves of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... the luck of all things of the past to come down to us with some poetry about them; while from those of diurnal experience we must extract this poetry ourselves: and although all good men are, more or less, poets, they are passive or recipient poets; while the active or donative poet caters for them what they fail to collect. For let a poet walk through London, and he shall see a succession of incidents, suggesting some moral beauty by a contrast of times with times, unfolding some principle of nature, developing some attribute ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... our old pious fathers called "judicial blindness;"—which we, with our light habits, may still call misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current semblances of these. This is true ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... ain't a speeder of matrimony Opened a wider view of the world to him, and a colder Serene presumption The Pilgrim's Scrip remarks that: Young men take joy in nothing Threats of prayer, however, that harp upon their sincerity To be passive in calamity is the province of no woman Unaccustomed to have his will thwarted Women are swift at coming to conclusions ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger

... said the clergyman, recovering himself and grasping the passive hand of the young soldier with enthusiasm, though he could not help smiling at his obvious embarrassment, "you seem to have been raised up to ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne

... cheering hope! We are from Crete, Adrastus' sons, and I, the youngest born, Named Cephalus; my eldest brother, he, Laodamus. Between us two a youth Of savage temper grew, who oft disturb'd The joy and concord of our youthful sports. Long as our father led his powers at Troy, Passive our mother's mandate we obey'd; But when, enrich'd with booty, he return'd, And shortly after died, a contest fierce For the succession and their father's wealth, Parted the brothers. I the eldest joined; He slew the second; and the Furies hence For kindred murder dog his restless steps. But ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... its privileges, I understand the ordinances of Israel as appointed by God, and the people of Israel in as far as they were necessarily passive in the hands of their priests and rulers. The husbandmen manifestly represent the leaders, who at various periods had usurped a lordship over God's heritage. Extraordinary ambassadors were sent from time to time in the owner's name, to demand the stipulated tribute,—prophets ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... In a moment Ugh-lomi was clinging to a bush right underneath the bear, and in another he was hanging to its back half buried in fur, with one fist clutched in the hair under its jaw. The bear was too astonished at this fantastic attack to do more than cling passive. And then the axe, the first of all axes, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... decade of extraordinary activity the Grand Trunk had been neither content nor passive. Offended by the incursions into its best paying territory, it fought its younger rival in parliament and on the stock exchange, {179} but with no lasting success in either quarter. It was more successful in its own constructive policy of expansion. In 1879 it had made a good bargain by selling ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton

... stood with an averted countenance, Venetia clinging to her hand, which she had caught when she rushed forward, and which now fell passive by Lady Annabel's side, giving no sign, by any pressure or motion, of the slightest sympathy with her daughter, or feeling for the strange and agonising situation in which ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... of Buddhism from the fourth century before Christ to its final expulsion from Hindustan. "Abundant proofs," says Turnour, "may be adduced to show the fanatical ferocity with which these two great sects persecuted each other; and which, subsided into passive hatred and contempt, only when the parties were no longer placed in the position of actual collision."—Introd. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... the deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse—it was as if she had wished ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... slaughter against the people of GOD, who stood firm to his cause. But withal, this proclamation, enjoined an oath in the room of all oaths formerly imposed, to be taken by all that minded to share in his royal favor; wherein they swore, not only absolute subjection and passive obedience, never to resist him, not only on any pretense, but for any cause, let him do, or command to be done what he would; but also, absolute, active obedience, without reserve: "That they shall, to the utmost of their power, assist, defend, and ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... was reached, the snake lay perfectly passive. Beyond all doubt, it understood the game that ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... presents a somewhat different problem. It cannot be described as either 'active' or 'passive,' inasmuch as it does not express either an attitude or an event. There is no definite idea to be set forth, no point of concentration, as with the altarpieces and the portraits, for instance; and yet a unity is demanded. ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... antithesis of unrelated opposition. Each is correlative of the other, so to speak as the male and the female; the one is generative, formative, active, positive; the other is capable of being impregnated, receptive, passive, negative; but neither can realise itself ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... run this kind of saw is less than n x 1/4 H.P., on account of the number of passive parts. The most interesting application of the helicoidal saw is in the exploitation of quarries. Fig. 5 represents a Belgian marble quarry which is being worked by Mr. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various

... remembered they had always assumed when, as a little child, she used silently to hold up her face to him to be kissed. The miserable contrast between what she was now and what she had been them, was beyond the passive endurance, the patient resignation of the spirit-broken old man; the empty cup dropped from his hands, he knelt down by the side of the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... sovereign decisions, has no other conception of Fourierism. Has he not been appointed Fourier's vicar on earth and pope of a Church which, unfortunately for its apostles, will never be of this world? Passive belief is the theological virtue of all sectarians, especially ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... Liberty and Necessity; while, if the mental processes are the causes both of the cerebral processes and of one another (Spiritualism), the question before us becomes raised to a higher level. The causality in question being now regarded as purely mental, the will is no longer regarded as a passive slave of the brain, and the only thing to be considered is whether freedom is compatible with causation of a purely mental kind. Now, at an earlier stage of our enquiry I have argued that it is not; but this argument was based entirely upon ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... her head mournfully; and there was a long and painful silence. Never was wooing more strangely circumstanced than this,—the one lover pleading while the other was in view; the one, ardent, impassioned, the other, calm and passive; and the silence of the last, alas! having all the success which the words of the other lacked. It might be said that the choice before Sibyll was a type of the choice ever given, but in vain, to the child of genius. Here a secure and peaceful life, an ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... from the imperceptible mechanism of political society—a subject of observation which seems at first view so little commensurate to our faculties, that it has been generally regarded with the same passive emotions of wonder and submission with which, in the material world, we survey the effects produced by the mysterious and uncontroulable operation of phisical sic causes. It is fortunate that upon this, as on many ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... swung the hammock gently with his boot-heel, scraping a furrow in the sand. But she did not show any dimples, though his eyes and his lips smiled together when she looked at him, and when he took up her hand and kissed each finger-tip in turn, she was as passive as a doll under ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... so." Then added as in soliloquy, "Indeed, indeed, I was to blame in standing passive under such influences as that one-legged man's. My conscience upbraids me.—The poor negro: You see him ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... created a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the society has voices, receiving from this same act its unity, its common "I," its life, and its will. This body is the Republic, called by its members the state, the state when passive, the sovereign when active, a power in its relations with similar bodies. The partners are collectively called the people; they are citizens, as participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects as under obligation to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... kind enough, if never enthusiastic; the general overturn and loss of the usual equilibrium in his little world. It was no blame to Theo if his feelings went little further than this. His father had been no active influence in his life. His love had been passive, expressing itself in few words, without sympathy in any of the young man's pursuits, or knowledge of them, or desire to know,—a dull affection because the boy belonged to him, and satisfaction in that he had never got into any scrapes or given any trouble. And the return ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... the calm of this existence; the malady that was slowly consuming Madame Claes added to the household stillness, and in this condition of passive gloom the House of Claes reached the first weeks of the year 1816. Pierquin, the lawyer, was destined, at the close of February, to strike the death-blow of the fragile woman who, in the words of the Abbe de Solis, was well-nigh ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... operative, or passive. To them it is an evil, but to us none. We have no more to do with the sins of the wicked and unconverted here than with those of an infidel Turk; for all earthly bonds and fellowships are absorbed and swallowed up in the holy community of the Reformed Church. However, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... every regiment in Nova Scotia was brought up to the strength of one thousand men. By May the expedition was ready. Monckton, with two thousand troops, embarked at Annapolis Royal, and by June 1 the expedition was at Chignecto. In the meantime Vergor, the French commandant at Beausejour, had not been passive. He had strengthened his defences, had summoned the inhabitants of the surrounding districts to his help, had mounted cannon in a blockhouse defending the passage of the river, and had thrown up a strong ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty

... light of the accomplishment of a sacred duty. Among the barbarian nations every man who has surprised a woman in her nakedness is put to death. The queen believed herself exercising her right; only inasmuch as the injury had been secret, she was doing herself justice as best she could. The passive accomplice would become the executioner of the other, and the punishment would thus spring from the crime itself. The ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... were freed by operation of law; but that act was merged in the legislative provisions which were subsequently enacted on the subject of importation of slaves into the United States generally. Under the now existing laws, the individuals thus imported acquire no personal right, they are mere passive beings, who are disposed of according to the will of the different state legislatures. In this country they are to remain slaves, and TO BE SOLD FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE STATE. The plaintiff, therefore, has nothing to claim as a freeman; ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... perfectly had it been organized that it broke out almost simultaneously all over Europe—in France, Italy, Prussia and Austria. Just when the revolution was rife Pius the Ninth proclaimed an amnesty. That was soon after his election, and he vacillated into a sort of passive approval of the Young Italian party. It was even proposed that Italy should become a confederation of free states under the presidency of the Pope. No man in his senses believed in such a possibility, but at that time an unusual number of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... rheumatic pains which are augmented by pressure and motion, are diminished by faradization. This diminution is sometimes so considerable, that the joint, which prior to the faradization admitted of no movement, is able to execute passive and active movements ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig

... He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence. Should he by chance a knave or fool expose, That hurts none here, sure here are none of those. In short, our play shall (with your leave to show it) Give you one instance of a passive poet, Who to your judgments yields all resignation: So save or damn, ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve

... Remarkable to relate, the Englishwomen were not absolutely the worst offenders, but competed for the palm with the girl from Polzin, who was filled with the highest regard for her mission as a painter. Nevertheless Effi, who assumed a passive attitude, could have withstood the pressure of this intellectual atmosphere if it had not been combined with the air of the boarding house, speaking from a purely physical and objective point of view. What this air was actually composed of was perhaps beyond the possibility of determination, but ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... we do, into habitual striving for an excellence which remains beyond our reach. But on the other hand we shall have to guard against that peevish fastidiousness which narrows itself down until it can see nothing but defects and faults, and loses the power of humbly and genuinely admiring. This passive dissatisfaction which attempts nothing of its own, and only finds fault with what is done by others, grows very fast if it is allowed to take hold, and produces a mental habit of merely destructive criticism or perpetual scolding. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... out in the world, but the tutor continued to reside in the family, no uncommon circumstance in Scotland (in former days), where food and shelter were readily afforded to humble friends and dependents. The laird's predecessors had been imprudent, he himself was passive and unfortunate. Death swept away his sons, whose success in life might have balanced his own bad luck and incapacity. Debts increased and funds diminished, until ruin came. The estate was sold; and the old man was about to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various

... or a milor, draws instinctively back from a dirty fist, encompassed by a ragged wristband and a tattered cuff. But Attwood was in nowise so backward; and the iron squeeze with which he shook my passive paw, proved that he was either very affectionate or very poor. You, my dear sir, who are reading this history, know very well the great art of shaking hands: recollect how you shook Lord Dash's hand the other ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... which are visible even in his most favored circumstances. Such is his bigotry, surpassing everything in a quiet passive form, that has been witnessed since the more active bigotry of the times of the Spanish Philips. Such, too, is the exclusive, limited range of his knowledge and conceptions of all political and social topics and relations. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... soft senseless limbs, like sponge, as far, and as far down, as it could—but to get the salt out of the earth it has to sift all the earth, and taste and touch every grain of it that it can, with fine fibres. And therefore a root is not at all a merely passive sponge or absorbing thing, but an infinitely subtle tongue, or tasting and eating thing. That is why it is always so fibrous and divided and entangled ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... was both transitive and intransitive, as early as the sixteenth century: hence the passive is legitimate, and lays additional stress on the state ...
— Esther • Jean Racine

... who rule this passive Earth, 345 This world of loves, this ME; and into birth Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart Magnetic might into its central heart; And lift its billows and its mists, and guide By everlasting laws, each wind and tide 350 To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave; And lull ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... being in Delhi who knew of the hasty visit her secret lover had made in the night. The jeweled dagger of Mirzah Shah was now securely locked in a little chest where Alan Hawke kept a few articles hidden away in the humble home of the passive plaything of his idle hours. As he caught sight of the Marble House, with its gathered crowds, he saw the gleam of musket barrels, as a company of foot were picketing the vast garden inclosure, and forcing back the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... disagreement between their government and this, wish to prefer an appeal to the American people, they will hereafter, it is hoped, better appreciate their own rights and the respect due to others than to attempt to use the Executive as the passive organ ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson

... and the passage in Plutarch (Cato min. 44) introduces a new difficulty, for it indicates a court in which candidates after election are to purge themselves. Again, quae erant omnibus sortita is very difficult. Cicero nowhere else, I believe, uses the passive sortitus. But, passing that, what are the consilia meant? The tense and mood shew, I think, that the words are explanatory by the writer, not part of the decree. I venture, contrary to all editors, to take omnibus as dative, and to suppose that the consilia ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... made a religious visit to several of the society in Long Island. Here it was that the seed, now long fostered by the genial influences of Heaven, began to burst forth into fruit; Till this time he seems to have been a passive instrument, attending only to such circumstances as came in his way on this subject. But now he became an active one, looking out for circumstances for the exercise of ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson

... desire to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, the most frequent and most significant of all perversions, was designated in its two forms by v. Krafft-Ebing as sadism or the active form, and masochism or the passive form. Other authors prefer the narrower term algolagnia which emphasizes the pleasure in pain and cruelty, whereas the terms selected by v. Krafft-Ebing place the pleasure secured in all kinds of humility and submission ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... master, that this important document should be withheld till Wucicz and Petronevich, "the authors of the late disturbances," had left the country. The ministers of the Porte, unsupported by the ambassadors of France and England, who remained passive, had no alternative but to yield to this audacious act of intervention, which was communicated by Baron Lieven to the Servian kaimakams appointed during the interregnum. "As soon as the intelligence was spread among the people, the universal exclamation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... away with a rueful glance at the basket in which, divided only by the handle, sat two fat turkey poults and two chickens. One of the turkeys stirred and got a wing free, but it was remorselessly tucked in again and reduced to passive endurance, with "Keep quiet then, ne soyez ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... Captain with a gallant flourish of his tarpaulin, and then, bringing the rim to his mouth, with his head bowed, and his body thrown into a fine negligent attitude, stood a picture of eloquent but passive appeal. He seemed to say, Magnanimous Captain Claret, we fine fellows, and hearts of oak, throw ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... "The passive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned; And the same power that reared the shrine Bestrode the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... substituted writing for the knotted strings which before formed the only means of record. He was also the author of the Eight Diagrams,—each consisting of three lines, half of which are whole and half broken in two,—which by their various combinations are supposed to represent the active and passive principles of the universe in all their essential forms. Confucius edited the Yih-King, the Shoo-King, the She-King, and the Le-Ke, which constitute the whole of the ancient literature of China which has come down ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... the sun was again risen after the ages of night, for he felt on the back of his hand, which he experimentally exposed, the hot-and-cold mottling from the rays. The renewed opportunity for action after the passive misery of the night heartened him for a brief interval, and he bestirred himself eagerly with preparations for the day. First of all, he must have chips of bark for a fire, in order to make ready his breakfast. He had already, the night before, exhausted the supply within reach on the tree ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... only eighteen months after her marriage, and died two days after giving birth to a son, afterwards Edward VI. She was one of those passive women who make neither friends nor enemies. She indulged in no wit or repartee, like her brilliant but less beautiful predecessor, and she passed her regal life without uttering a sentence or a sentiment which has been deemed worthy ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... right,—the Lord's anointed,—and the divine miraculous original of government, with which the priesthood had inveloped the feudal monarch in clouds and mysteries, and from whence they had deduced the most mischievous of all doctrines, that of passive obedience and non-resistance. They knew that government was a plain, simple, intelligible thing, founded in nature and reason, and quite comprehensible by common sense.——They detested all the base services, and ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams

... Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offenses of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, "Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this." But examine the passions and feelings of mankind, bring ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... is crazy to go away from here, even to New Orleans; but like the rest, will be obliged to stand and await her fate. I don't believe Butler would dare execute his threat, for at the first attempt, thousands, who are passive now, would cut the brutal heart from his ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... officers may ill-treat them, pull their hair, and strike them with impunity. The officers have generally a fair supply of professional knowledge, and some are highly educated. The men have a larger amount of passive courage than of dashing bravery; yet they will usually follow where their officers lead them. The private has a possibility of rising to the rank of an officer after twelve years' probation, and even sooner by some dashing act of bravery; and several even thus have become generals. There are numerous ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... Courts, unless these views involve, in the language employed by Lord Granville in 1861, "a flagrant violation of international law." This is the beginning and end of the doctrine of contraband. A neutral Government has none other than this passive duty of acquiescence. Its neutrality would not be compromised by the shipment from its shores, and the carriage by its merchantmen, of any quantity of ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... will be done! As for slavery, the last defense which it had in this country was on religious grounds: that God had ordained it and that it was blasphemous to oppose his ordination. In a word, this spirit of passive resignation has been so deeply ingrained in religious thinking that it has become oftentimes a serious reproach to ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... come to terms of peace. In cases where the women must yield 'par force majeure,' then it is to be with an ill grace and in such a way as to afford the minimum of gratification to their partner; they are to lie passive and take no more part in the amorous game than they are absolutely obliged to. By these means Lysistrata assures them they will very soon gain their end. "If we sit indoors prettily dressed out in our best transparent silks and prettiest gewgaws, and with our 'mottes' ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... according to which the sins of believers were to be punished by civil authority, distressing to their consciences. They drew up a plantation covenant, promising to subject themselves "in active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements" as might be made for the public good in an orderly way by the majority vote of the masters of families, "incorporated together into a town fellowship," but "only in civill things." Thus ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... aside—the rich robe placed in the armoire, and the frilled and embroidered robe de nuit placed upon her, and fastened with its gold buttons about her neck and wrists, with no more motion on the part of that passive figure, than if it had been a doll in ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... have a label according to the part he plays in this transaction. But the two labels are applicable in a larger and more philosophic way. In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... mere helplessness that one lies so remote from all but surface sensation, day after day gazing at the address of letters that come, with a passive wonder of how soon she is to vacate her name? Also a friend calls to say that to-morrow he travels afar. It seems then that he will be too much missed, and the parting has its share of unutterable longing. But by the morrow it is not the one left who is sorry. The new sun shines on an earth miles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... during those next few days, events of the Earth, Venus and Mars swirled and raged around Georg as though he were engulfed in the Iguazu or Niagara. Passive himself at first—a spectator merely; yet he was the keystone of the Earth Council's strength. The Brende secret was desired by the publics of all three worlds. Even greater than its real value as a medical discovery, it swayed the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... it the work of accident, or effect of an occasional transaction, that by which the sea had covered our land? Or, Was it the intention of that Mind which formed the matter of this globe, which endued that matter with its active and its passive powers, and which placed it with so much wisdom among a numberless collection of bodies, all moving in a system? If we admit the first, the consequence of such a supposition would be to attribute to chance the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... Obedience to Law, Equality with Subjection to Authority, and Fraternity with Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will of the Present, expressed by the Vote of the People, and the Passive Stability and Permanence of the Will of the Past, expressed in constitutions of government, written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and authority; which is represented by ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... humiliating circumstances; their fertility of resources; their cheerfulness under hunger and privation; and, above everything else, their submission to law with every temptation to break it,—proved that the spirit of the nation was unbroken; that their passive virtues rivalled their most glorious deeds of heroism; that, if light-headed in prosperity, they knew how to meet adversity; and that they had not lost faith in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... been subserved by it. There the great numbers gave us a hint as to their purpose. In this case, however, nearly all observers conclude that it was a religious work. Mr. MacLean, after describing these three figures, propounds this query: "Does the frog represent the creative, the egg the passive, and the serpent the destructive power of nature?" Not a few writers, though not acquainted with the presence of the frog-shaped figure, have been struck with the combination of the egg and the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... deliver myself into your hands absolutely; nay, more, I will give you my most solemn word of honour that not only will I make no attempt at escape, but that I will not allow any one to help me to do so. I will be a passive and willing prisoner if you, on the other hand, will effect Mademoiselle ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... standing on the side of the reformers, the orthodox could not fight in the open. They entrenched themselves behind a passive resistance. In this struggle, as was observed above, Gordon occupied the foremost place. Thenceforth a single idea animated him, opposition to the enemies of light. His bitter, trenchant sarcasm, his caustic, vengeful pen, were put at the service of this cause. Even his ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... dualism has nothing to do with any "mind" that I may be supposed to possess; it exists in exactly the same sense if I am replaced by a photographic plate. We may call the two places the active and passive places respectively.* Thus in the case of a perception or photograph of a star, the active place is the place where the star is, while the passive place is the place where the ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... sit quiet and passive while Catharine bound up the long tresses of her hair, and smoothed them with her hands and the small wooden comb that Louis had cut for her use. Sometimes she would raise her eyes to her new friend's face, with a quiet sad smile, and once she took her hands within her own, and gently pressed ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... his brother, planned in cold blood by a woman who was at that moment inhabiting the same house with him. While, to make the fatality complete, Agnes herself had innocently provided the conspirators with the one man who was fitted to be the passive agent of ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins

... hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion upon such familiar and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the passive voice of the verb edo, there exists necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realise at first ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... hear him talk, but with the exception of a few "veramentes" and "grazies" he remained passive and silent. By way of saying something he asked me if I ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... otherwise determined, and Jerome was so passive an instrument in her hands that he began the study of Hebrew as a discipline only, and without any conception of the task he was to fulfil, still less of the scope of its fulfilment. I could joyfully believe that the words of Christ, "If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... soldier's wife? She had remained a passive spectator of all that occurred. When the voice of her defender first broke on her ear, she turned and looked at him for a moment, then, as if indifferent whether his defense was successful or not, she turned her head away and listlessly gazed at the crowd. She cared not now for freedom and ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius. She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it were of upward aspiration,—the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,—a ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... them all by their names; for that he is strong in power, not one faileth." That was in Faith's mind along with other words—"The Lord knoweth them that are his." Her mind was in a passive state; things floated in and floated out. It was some time before Mr. Linden said anything—he let her be as silent and still as she would; but at last he bent over her ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... became again serene under the composing influences of daily routine. A desultory, very desultory correspondence, dragged on between Sally Hall and Darton, who, not quite knowing how to take her petulant words on the night of her brother's death, had continued passive thus long. Helena and her children remained at the dairy-house, almost of necessity, and Darton therefore deemed it advisable ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... He was passive, submissive, indifferent. He knew nothing of the one wild moment of Jenny's break-down. He had never been allowed one hint of where his blessed head had been pillowed that bitter November night. The girl had pledged ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King

... vibrate faintly in unison with the music of a more favored neighbor; it would bring a sensation of the possibility of music. The stronger harmony is caught up and carried on forever in endless sound waves, but the slight responsive murmur of the passive strings is ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... pilot blacked out at the start of an offensive approach. He lost contact before recovering—you realize how quickly that happens at interplanetary speeds. On several other ships, there were passive mutinies. One was destroyed; how, we do ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe

... nothing which I have decided since alters that in any way. If you still want me after the war—if we find that neither of us has made a mistake—I can still help you, Derek, I hope. But, my dear, it won't be quite a passive help, if you understand what I mean. I've got to be up and doing myself—actively; to be merely any man's echo—his complement—however much I loved him, would not be enough. I've come ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... horror that he knew into words. He waited to consult his brother; but Sweyn did not, or would not, notice the signal he made, and kept his face always turned towards White Fell. Christian drew away from the hearth, unable to remain passive with that dread ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... common, not only to all divisions of the human species, but to quadrupeds, birds, fish, and even flora; that brings into existence cripples and idiots, the blind, the deaf and dumb; and watches with passive inertness the most acute sufferings, not only of adults, but of sinless children and all manner of helpless animals. No! It is impossible to conceive that such incompatibilities can be the work of one Creator. But, supposing, for the sake of argument, we may admit the possibility ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... by his breath that is more miserable. Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm With favour never clasp'd, but bred a dog. Hadst thou, like us from our first swath, proceeded The sweet degrees that this brief world affords To such as may the passive drugs of it Freely command, thou wouldst have plung'd thyself In general riot; melted down thy youth In different beds of lust; and never learn'd The icy precepts of respect, but follow'd The sugar'd game before ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]

... water; each of the vessels has a metallic plate, and communicates by wires with a galvanometer with its needle. Now the theory is, that if you clutch the cylinder firmly with the right hand, leaving the left perfectly passive, the needle in the galvanometer will move from west to south; if, in like manner, you exert the left arm, leaving the right arm passive, the needle will deflect from west to north. Hence, it is argued that the electric current ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Magyar music you must apprehend the Magyar's character. He is a singular mixture of East and West, habitually passive and melancholy, yet easily roused to the wildest excitement. His step is slow, his face pensive, his manners imposing and dignified; yet when once roused he rushes forward with a furious impetuosity which his enemies have learned to estimate and dread. His eloquence is wonderful, and after success ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... all good men, those who sat in judgment on them. Something of this is due to the native nobleness of the men themselves, of whom the world was not worthy; something of it to their long discipline in the passive virtues under bitter persecution in their native land and in exile in Holland and in the wilderness; much of it certainly to the incomparably wise and Christ-like teaching of Robinson both at Scrooby and at Leyden, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... place three days later. Evelina was buried in Calvary Cemetery, the priest assuming the whole care of the necessary arrangements, while Ann Eliza, a passive spectator, beheld with stony indifference this ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... disappeared. When he returned Mamie could see him very plainly. He had a stick of dynamite and a fuse. Mamie saw him glance at his watch and measure the fuse. Then, leaping from log to log, he approached the one in midstream which lay passive, blocking the advance of all the others. With splendid skill and daring he adjusted the dynamite upon the small rock which held the log, and lit the fuse. He returned as he had come, and Mamie could hear the cheers of the men upon the ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... right, yes, sir; but I am not going to do any thing now. M. de Boiscoran tells us that the facts are improbable. I should, therefore, in all probability, soon be astray; but, since we are now bound to be passive till the investigation is completed, I shall employ the time in examining the country people, who will, probably, tell me more than Anthony did. You have, no doubt, among your friends, some who must be well informed,—M. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau

... call of friends or business carries them back to their own land; they are strangers all their days in the mission district. Nevertheless, they are generally the moving, active force; upon them progress seems to depend. It is strange, but it is true generally: the permanent is the passive element, the impermanent is the active. Here we simply state the fact to excuse or condemn the placing of the missionary force first in our ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen

... Paris, and by the end of the 14th century there were thousands of students in attendance. Oxford responded quickly to the Renaissance, and by the time of the Reformation 13 colleges were founded. Her Protestantism stood firm through Mary's reaction, sank into passive obedience under the Stuarts, but woke up to resist James II.'s Catholic propaganda. Thereafter followed a serious lapse in efficiency, but this century has seen a complete revival. Oxford has now 21 colleges, among which are Balliol, Christ ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... entails might perhaps be borne; but the last seven months have proved that the objects with which Austria-Hungary and Germany went to war are unattainable in the present state of Europe. Austria-Hungary, even with the active aid of Germany and Turkey, cannot prevail in Serbia against the active or passive resistance of Serbia, Russia, Rumania, Greece, Italy, France, and Great Britain. Germany cannot crush France supported by Great Britain and Russia, or keep Belgium, except as a subject and hostile province, and in defiance of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... Verbs have no passive voice. If a native desires to state that a fish was swallowed by a pelican, he would say, "A ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews

... of the Scriptures upon a certain point, and he was there simply to know what the Presbytery would do. Rev. Drs. Brinsmayd and Fewsmith then prayed, but Dr. See's frame of mind was not in the least changed. He still insisted that his was the passive part, to sit and see what they would do with his case. Rev. Dr. Wilson thought that if Brother See did not desire to do anything contrary to the usages of the church, he might say so. Brother See said it was a question of whether ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... lay between them, and gave transit to her senses from that other plane. They encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course. It was a kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that they should meet and take a path together, he at least was aware. Hilda asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said "Absolutely" with a shade of emphasis. She charged him with having been a remarkable ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... forward, and pressed the passive hand that lay upon the coverlet. The two old friends and companions—for such they were, though they were man and child—held each other in a long embrace, and then the little scholar turned his face towards the wall, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... Those who serve under an established government know exactly their present weight in the scale of worldly rank, and the extent of their future expectations; they have accustomed themselves to bound their ambition accordingly: and feeling conscious that passive obedience is the surest road to advancement, are led quietly, here or there, to be slaughtered at the will and caprice of their superiors. But the leader of the disaffected against an established government has a difficult task. He has nothing to offer to his followers ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... The mob was kept passive by the archers' steel rather than by Denys's words, and growled at intervals with flashing eyes. The municipal officers, seeing this, collected round, and with the archers made a guard, and prudently carried the accused back ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... treachery. I wonder what will be the outcome of it all; if after all this turmoil and bloodshed China will really become a different nation? It is hard to change the habits of a nation, and I think that China will not be changed by this convulsion. The real Chinese will be the same passive, quiet, slow-thinking and slow-moving toiler, not knowing or caring whether his country is a republic or whether he is ruled by the Son of Heaven. He will be a stable, peaceable, law-abiding citizen or subject, with respect for his officials so long as they ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper

... were such an impatient blasphemer, however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth, that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in the most passive acceptance,—if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out around me at this moment the new June,—the leaves say June, though the calendar says May,—and we must needs hail our young relatives again, though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... noon sometimes, for want of nervous impulse, and my food was tasteless and innutritious, even when I forced myself to eat a portion of what was placed regularly before me. It seemed to me that, long ere this, Wardour Wentworth must have ascertained my fate, and the thought that he might be passive when my very soul was at stake, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... Hannah resumed her shrunken duties, and when these were finished sat awhile, before going to bed, her hands lying listless in her lap. She seemed to have lived for centuries, to have exhausted the gamut of suffering which, save for that one wild outburst, had been the fruit of commonplace, passive, sordid tragedy that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... barrier confessed its frailness in every drooping line. Again it was the involuntary submission of her whole poise—she had actually leaned a little further toward him when he started, even as her hand went up. But the helpless misery in her eyes was still a defense, passive but sufficient. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the earth's overpopulation. Hostility is classified as active and passive; as (respectively) the feeling of a woman for her female friends, and that which she entertains for all the rest ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... existence—and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... moment those delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather

... fast when you take into consideration that a spermatozooen is only 1/300 of an inch long. Many of the spermatozoa, weaker than the others, perish on the way, and only a few continue the journey up through the uterus to the tube. When near the little ovum, which remains passive, their movements become more and more rapid, they seem to be attracted to it as if by a magnet, and finally one spermatozooen—just one—the one that happens to be the strongest or the nearest, makes a ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... his right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful oath that he would be 'Gormed' if he didn't cut and run for good, if it was ever mentioned again. It appeared, in answer to my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... he stood still, and pulling the donkey's rein, caused him to stand still also. The beast required very little persuasion to be so guided, and obligingly remained meekly passive. ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... undisturbed possession of Cyprus and Egypt. During the progress of these events, the states which formed the Confederacy of Delos, with the exception of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos, had gradually become, instead of the active allies of Athens, her disarmed and passive tributaries. Even the custody of the fund had been transferred from Delos to Athens. The purpose for which the confederacy had been originally organised disappeared with the Persian peace; yet what ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... a sacred character ... Neither public authority nor private persons can use any force, or do any violence to him, without offending against the law of nations." [Footnote: Except that if necessary for self-defense, passive resistance may be made.] This immunity extends to his house, furniture, and attendants. Except in extreme cases, he is exempt from ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... struggles as a Reformer. For this communion with God he never thought it necessary, as the mystics maintained, to renounce one's personality and retire altogether from the world and things temporal: a purely passive attitude towards God, and a blessedness consisting in such an attitude, was not his highest or ultimate ideal. A man's personality, he held, should only be destroyed so far as it resists the will of God, and dares to assert its self-righteousness and merits before Him. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... its lowest and most brutal form, and man respected nothing but force, the disabled member of society, if man, was disposed of by stab or blow; if woman, and valuable as breeder of fresh fighters, simply reduced to slavery and passive obedience. Marriage in any modern sense was unknown. A large proportion of female infants were killed at birth. Battle, with its recurring periods of flight or victory, made it essential that every tribe should free itself ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... safe, from a moral point of view, so far as concerns the knowledge of life that the adolescent gets. The only real danger from the "movies" and the theatres is likely to be the cultivation of the habit of passive entertainment. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave's grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the profession of grandmother—for example by sitting up to unchristian hours with ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... no time to throw a gun on Cherokee where he's consoomin' flapjacks at the O. K. House, an' tell him the committee needs him at the New York Store. Cherokee don't buck none, but comes along, passive as ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis

... dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact, the natural man's attitude to these things does not differ much from the attitude of the great artists. It is only that a certain lust for creation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on to something beyond passive resignation. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... in itself a quite undoubted one, is the possession by man of a certain special and important feeling, which, viewed from its passive side, we call sympathy, and from its active side, benevolence. It exists in various degrees in different people, but to some degree or other it probably exists in all. Most people, for instance, if they hear an amusing story, at once itch to tell it to ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... or two more and the recumbent position had become unendurable as too passive to correspond with the inward energy. She clambered back, and, standing upon level ground, turned, facing the width of the bare clearing and the rough buildings on it, and looked toward the downward slope and the wild lake, whose cold breath of water was agitated by the wind. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... ROSE. Contrast this active exuberant pleasure not unmixed with pain with the passive meditative joy that ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... settled footing, and make a roadway to move forward upon. Often these obstacles are viewless to others, and the combat is unsuspected; the site of many a Penuel remains untraced; but none the less these are the pivots on which entire personal histories turn. Hawthorne's comparatively passive endurance was of infinitely greater worth than any active irruption into the outer world would have been. It is obvious that we owe to the innumerable devious wanderings and obscure sufferings of his mind, under the influences ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... palpably for the sole and most amiable purpose of amusement, and succeeding in this purpose, how should we deal? How but receive it with a passive acquiescence equally amiable, content solely to be amused, and giving all severer criticism—to him who to his other merits may add, if he pleases, that of being the first critic. Most especially let us not be carping and questioning as to the how far, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... a sort of scene began to ensue: The ladies,—who by no means had been bred To be disposed of in a way so new, Although their haram education led Doubtless to that of doctrines the most true, Passive obedience,—now raised up the head, With flashing eyes and starting tears, and flung Their arms, as hens ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... convened for his trial, and it was unanimously resolved to chain him to a tree, where he was to be left exposed to the elements until he starved to death. The passive and silent fit had again come over Gallego. I implored that the sentence might be softened, but I was laughed at for my childish pity, and ordered home to the rancho. The command to chain him having been executed, the Spanish outcast was left to his terrible fate. One of the men, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... vehemently. "Why cannot I feel even decently angry with you? You torment and charm in the same breath. At times I say to myself, 'She is cold, heartless, unfeeling,' and then a word, a look—Molly," seizing her cool, slim little hand as it lies passive in her lap, "tell me, do you think you will ever—I do not mean to-morrow, or in a week, or a month, but in all the long years to come, do you think you will ever love me?" As he finishes speaking, he presses his lips with passionate tenderness to ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... night. Those blue eyes never met his. No step responsive to his came from that door. It seemed to have been so long unopened that it had grown as fixed and hard as the stones that held its bolts in their passive clasp. He dared not watch in the daytime, and with all his watching at night, he never saw father or daughter or domestic cross the threshold. Little he thought that, from a shot-window near the door, a pair of blue eyes, like Lilith's, but paler ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... is a dream; In all things heads of houses are supreme {9} Proctors are perfect whosoe'er they be; Logic is reason in epitome: Examiners, like kings, can do no wrong; All modern learning is not worth a song: Passive obedience is the rule of right; To argue or oppose is treason quite:{10} Mere common sense would make the system fall: Things are worth nothing; words are ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... confusion of the storm to steal from the acorn stores of the woodpeckers. One of the golden eagles made an impressive picture as he stood bolt upright on the top of a tall pine-stump, braving the storm, with his back to the wind and a tuft of snow piled on his broad shoulders, a monument of passive endurance. Thus every storm-bound bird seemed more or less uncomfortable, if not in distress. The storm was reflected in every gesture, and not one cheerful note, not to say song, came from a single bill. Their cowering, joyless endurance offered striking contrasts to the spontaneous, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... is 'Erastianism,' it is of an unusual kind. The idea of Knox is that in a Catholic State the ruler is not to be obeyed in religious matters by the true believers; sometimes Knox wrote that the Catholic ruler ought to be met by 'passive resistance;' sometimes that he ought to be shot at sight. He stated these diverse doctrines in the course of eighteen months. In a Protestant country, the Catholics must obey the Protestant ruler, or take their chances of prison, exile, fire and death. The Protestant ruler, in a Protestant ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... indignities to which he subjected his unfortunate wife, for the avowed purpose of forcing her to make a will entirely in his favor, and of course disinheriting her daughter. These persecutions failed of their object. An unexpected, quiet, passive, but unconquerable resistance, was opposed by the, in all other things, cowed and submissive woman, to this demand of her domineering husband. Her failing health—for gently nurtured and tenderly cherished as she had ever been, the callous brutality of her husband soon told upon ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... "Oh Selene, I pulled you out of the water, and since that night I have never ceased to think of you and I must die for love of you. Have your thoughts never, never met mine on the way to you? Are you still and always as cold, as passive as you were then when you belonged half to life and half to death? For months have I prowled round this house as the shade of a dead man haunts the spot where he had left all that was dear to him on earth, and I have never been able to tell you what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe's collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... primary seat of these affections, but in the latter stages of their course, the right side also is liable to become involved, and, as a consequence, there then exists great disturbance of the venous circulation, with a damming back of the blood in the veins, and passive congestion of the liver, kidneys and brain, followed by dropsy, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... smasher hat from the grass, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... states of mind in which I formed—and indeed executed—the sudden project of breaking something. These were, I believe, simply the result of an excessive sense of responsibility. I am not one of those who conceive that the duty of deity is to sit passive beside the cup of nectar. Here on this island, in the permanent absence of that refreshment, I reflect (I perceive that I shall have very frequent opportunities for reflection) that I was perhaps only too anxious to preserve ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus unconsciously by our passive enthusiast? ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... thought, viz., the duty of all free countries to resist the spread of absolutism. Pre-eminently this duty was upon America. "Republican America," said he, "and all-overwhelming Russian absolutism cannot much longer subsist together on earth. Russia active,—America passive,—there is an immense danger in the fact; it is like the avalanche in the Alps, which the noise of a bird's wing may move and thrust down with irresistible force, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... our political existence; and as they have a common interest in being our carriers, and still more in preventing our becoming theirs, they would in all probability combine to embarrass our navigation in such a manner as would in effect destroy it, and confine us to a PASSIVE COMMERCE. We should then be compelled to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequaled spirit of enterprise, which signalizes the genius of the American merchants and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... this is provoking. It is a mortifying indication of the little importance that is attached to what we are saying; and there is something of the irritation that is produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye that is looking beyond you,—the grin that is not at anything funny in what you say,—the occasional inarticulate sounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... his time, notably his own brother John, who himself was probably not entirely free from blame in the matter. Hunter is said to have excused his own irritability on the grounds that being an anatomist, and accustomed to "the passive submission of dead bodies," contradictions became the more unbearable. Many of the physiological researches begun by him were carried on and perfected by his more famous brother, particularly his investigations of the capillaries, but he added much to the anatomical ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened to Rene's insidious whispers—Rene, who could not endure the captivity to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... to the brotherly protestations of his admirer, and exchanged only such words with him as their occupations required. Old Angus, however, was not so passive an observer of his new and unlooked-for housemate. "He's a good for nought sort of a fellow, slenken frae place to place wi' nowt but a sark to his back," Angus would say to his wife. Mr. Wilson's physical imperfections were an offence in the dalesman's ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... His argument did not lead him to a Creator of the world, for the universe, no less than the prime mover, was eternal, and the latter is nothing more than a principle of reason immanent in the world—pervading it, not distinguished from it—and the author of motion only in a passive way, after all, as a sort of magnetic object of desire.[20] In other places Aristotle makes passing references to different forms of the argument to prove the existence of the gods,[21] but it is evident that his own interest centered around this unmoved final cause, and it is in his proof of its ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole

... helplessness that one lies so remote from all but surface sensation, day after day gazing at the address of letters that come, with a passive wonder of how soon she is to vacate her name? Also a friend calls to say that to-morrow he travels afar. It seems then that he will be too much missed, and the parting has its share of unutterable longing. But by the morrow it is not the one left who is sorry. The new sun shines on an earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... the man sat staring stonily before him, rigid as a statue, while the woman lay passive ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... it, we get no benefit whatever from it, and may as well throw it aside. (2) Read actively, not passively, putting the book under cross-examination as we go along—asking questions regarding it, weighing arguments. Mere passive reading may do no more good than the stream does to the iron pipe through which it flows. Novel-readers are often mere passive recipients of the stories, and thus get no real benefit from them. (3) Read ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees

... of the objects that had taken his brother's attention, and for a few moments the boys seemed passive spectators of ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... You have called a meeting in the Coliseum to protest against the bread-tax. What if the Government prohibits it? Your principle of passive resistance will not permit you to rebel, and without the right of public meeting your association is powerless. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... cabin locked," he told her in a perfectly passive voice, but in a manner that halted her suddenly, angry as she was. "I don't want no woman messin' with my berth nor with my duds. That door's no more locked against you than it is against my niece. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... his good circulation, and in the morning it seemed quite natural. But at night, why should there be this difference between him and the acres of land that cooled all round him until the sun returned? What lucky chance had heated him up, and sent him, warm and lovable, into a passive world? He had other instincts, but these gave him no trouble. He simply gratified each as it occurred, provided he could do so without grave injury to his fellows. But the instinct to wonder at the night was not ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... the teaching may make an adequate impression, it is necessary, if not to discard all these passive methods, at least to supplement them by exercises which call out the activity of the pupil. Some such exercises have already been experimented with, and others might be devised.[243] The pupil may be ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... for her sister-in-law. Used to be wheedled by an idolizing mother, and to reign over her court of parasites, he had no notion of obeying, and a direct command or opposition roused his sullen temper of passive resistance. When he found 'that little nobody of a Mrs. John Dusautoy' so far from being a flatterer, or an adorer of his perfections, inclined to laugh at him, and bent on keeping him in order, all the enmity of which he was capable arose in his mind, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of the association is the general meeting, in which every member possesses an equal active and passive vote. The general meeting carries its motions by a simple majority of votes; a majority of three-fourths is required for the alteration ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... favour of the female by the fascination of their odour, or brilliant colour, or song, or grace, or strength, as revealed in what are usually mock-combats. The female is, in these respects, comparatively unaccomplished and comparatively passive. With her rests the final decision, and only after long hesitation, influenced, it seems, by a vaguely felt ideal resulting from her contemplation of the rivals, she calls the male of her choice.[48] A dim instinct seems ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... wide-spread. Nothing so fresh, or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The spell employed was novelty—or, at most, wonder—and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... man to claim for himself, but there is nothing that I should like better than to be able to think when I boasted that my friends, like the friends of Hermogenes, were many and cared for me, that I had helped to make them so because in a world so full of passive friends I had at any rate tried ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... tio Mariano was one of the big men about town. He had been a smuggler in the happy days when revenue agents, from Captain of the Port to ordinary patrolman, had hands but never eyes. And even now, when things were not so lax, he would take a passive share in some enterprise of the sort. But his principal activity was doing charity—lending the fishermen, or their wives, advances on their pay at fifty per cent a month; and this had given him a grip on the throats of the poorest elements along shore, so that he could deliver their vote bodily ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... should be reconciled to this. No! It is hard enough to be reconciled to the blows God has dealt me, without accepting what my husband and son see fit to give me in this." Her hand was cold and passive, and her voice ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... first produced always evoked the word "ingenuous," those to whom his face was familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man of experience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance this freshness was all un-brushed. His foot had begun to stumble, but he was full of big intentions and of sweet Maud Stannace. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... of existence for some days, until something happened which roused him from his state of passive misery into ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... twofold meaning, one active, 'one who does no harm' (noxa), and a passive, 'one who is not injured,' 'one to whom no harm is done,' qui non afficitur noxa, and in this latter sense it is used in this passage. [200] 'In order that, when in office, they themselves might guide the populace more gently,' ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... Rattlin is very singular. All clever boys are. He knows already his five declensions, and the four conjugations, active and passive. Come, Master Rattlin, decline for the lady the adjective felix—come, begin, nominative hic ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it. Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium—unless German—with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance, persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... for women was mingled indeed often with profound pity; pity for the sorrows and burdens that nature had laid upon them, for their physical weakness, for their passive role in life. That beings so hampered could yet play such tender and heroic parts was to him perennially wonderful, and his sense of it expressed itself in an unconscious homage that seemed to embrace the sex. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... from her husband. He has contracted the infection in licentious relations before or since marriage. 'The cruelest link in the chain of consequences,' says Dr. Prince Morrow, 'is the mother's innocent agency. She is made a passive, unconscious medium of instilling into the eyes of her new-born babe a virulent ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... wherein if they condemne me, they utterly cancell both the gratifying of the action, and the gratitude, which thereby would be due to me. Whereas the active well doing should be of more consequence, proceeding from my hand, in regard I have no passive at all. Wherefore I may so much the more freely dispose of my fortune, by how much more it is mine, and of my selfe that am most mine owne. Notwithstanding, if I were a great blazoner of mine owne actions, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... victor; but, as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might be asking himself whether after all it had been worth while. For the active beauty of the Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have here, then, the passive beauty of the victor. But the later incident, the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and work of Polycleitus. He is already something ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... communication with Cromwell, and had done some diplomatic business for him in Paris. On his return in 1654, and for the next few years, he was in the closest relations with the Protector, thereby carrying out the principle he had probably adopted from White, of a "universal passive obedience to any species of government that had obtained an establishment." His Royalist friends made an outcry, and so did the Puritans; but Digby was confident of obtaining from Cromwell great advantages for the English Catholics, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... duty to lay clearly before you, that if you wish to introduce any alteration in our Danish system of farming, that it would not be successful. There would be a passive antagonism with the people, who, if you let them be steered by a good bailiff, would give you no trouble. In the direction of any improvement, however, new agricultural implements from England of the simpler ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary

... the Cape to Pietermaritzburg, but they might have conspired to assemble on the Cambuscan as a protest against high hopes and dreams of a promised land. The protest, let me add, was an entirely passive one. They stood aloof, watching the flashy gaieties of the hurricane-deck from their own sad penumbra—a dejected, wistful, whispering throng. "They simply don't occur," one of the be-diamonded ladies remarked ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... it's useless. If ever patience is counselled to us, it is when accidents befall us, for then, as we are not responsible, we know we are in other hands, and it is our duty to be comparatively passive. Perhaps I may say that in every difficulty, patience is a life-belt. I beg of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... little sort of market-place where the roads met in the village, under the castle, and where the men stood in groups and talked, talked, talked. This was where Ciccio belonged: his active, mindful self. His active, mindful self was none of hers. She only had his passive self, and his family passion. His masculine mind and intelligence had its home in the little public square of his village. She knew this as she watched him now, with all his body talking politics. He could not break off till he ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... gave a wriggle or two, but, like most of his countrymen, he had a good deal of common sense and self-command, which made him remain passive after a bit; when, throwing myself on my back, I floated, dragging his head across my body, so that he might rest awhile and recover himself before trying ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... have their backs up now, and grumble at the fate that chains them to a passive defence, when they would wish for nothing better than to try conclusions with their foes at close quarters. Sir George White knows best the part that he is expected to play in the general strategy of this campaign, and there may be reasons for ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... mandate issued, see the tour begun, And all the flock set out for Islington. Now the broad sun, refulgent lamp of day, To rest with Thetis, slopes his western way; O'er every tree embrowning dust is spread, And tipt with gold is Hampstead's lofty head. The passive husband, in his nature mild, To wife consigns his hat, and takes the child; But she a day like this hath never felt, "Oh! that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew." Such monstrous heat! dear me! she never knew. Adown her innocent and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... morning, and the bright sun was looking down upon an ocean as calm and peaceful as if its passive bosom had never been disturbed by the ensanguined tumults of warring men, or the commotions ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination; and it was so to-night with Adam. While his muscles were working lustily, his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama: scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future, floating before him and giving place one to the other in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... a state of mind in which a kind of passive expectation—a sort of blind submission to fate—was the chief feature. She had shed tears when her husband spoke of his approaching end, because her gentle heart was grateful to him, and by its own sacrifices had grown used to his presence, and because she suddenly felt that she had comprehended ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... question a man who does just one thing over and over becomes expert at his particular job; but does he not in time, because of his very expertness, lapse into a machine whose hands move automatically and whose mind is idle? Such a result is fatal both to his intellect and his will. He becomes passive until at length all initiative is destroyed. For many years the colored people of the South reaped precisely this harvest of mental inertia. Now, thank heaven, they are rousing out of the lethargy that has been their inheritance and their brains are getting to work. It will, however, take years, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett

... the manager's glance in kind; Barnes' candor and simplicity were apparent antidotes to the other's taciturnity and constraint. During the country dance the soldier had remained a passive spectator, displaying little interest in the rustic merry-making or the open glances cast upon him by bonny lasses, burned in the sunlit fields, buxom serving maids, as clean as the pans in the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... sorry I said it,' returned Greif penitently. He took her passive hand in his, hoping to make the peace as quickly as he had broken it, but she did not return the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... are the beginnings also of faith and love; when the new character receives, as it is forming, the Christian seed, and the man is also the Christian. And, then, this second beginning of life, resting on faith and conscious principle, and not on mere passive innocence, stands sure for the middle and the end: those who so watch and pray as to escape out of this critical period, not merely unharmed, but, as it were, set clearly on their way to heaven, will, with God's grace, escape out of the things which shall befal ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... I was not to possess her after all, what then? Should I be consolable? An angry denial leapt to my lips. There was no question of first or second. These two passions for this woman and for my own success were coordinate forces, and their very equality it was that kept me passive, without decisive ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... daughters, despite her sister's passive obedience, had been the mother's favourite. Her obedience was by no means passive. She inherited all her mother's self-will, and more than her mother's impulsiveness. Much the handsomer of the two, she was dressed up, flattered, indulged, and petted in ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... Commandment. Thus faith goes out into the works and through the works comes to itself again; just as the sun goes forth unto its setting and comes again unto its rising. For this reason the Scriptures associate the day with peaceful living in works, the night with passive living in adversity, and faith lives and works, goes out and comes in, in both, as Christ says, ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther

... unction and hospitality when he met Lily in the hall. At dinner he was brilliant, witty, the gracious host. Akers played up to him. At the foot of the table Elinor sat, outwardly passive, inwardly puzzled, and watched Lily. She knew the contrast the girl must be drawing, between the bright little meal, with its simple service and clever talk, and those dreary formal dinners at home when old Anthony sometimes never spoke at all, or again used his caustic tongue ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... an actual state rather than a passive, it is preceded by the sign of past tense, the ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... and pressed the passive hand that lay upon the coverlet. The two old friends and companions—for such they were, though they were man and child—held each other in a long embrace, and then the little scholar turned his face towards the wall, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... leave the Persians in undisturbed possession of Cyprus and Egypt. During the progress of these events, the states which formed the Confederacy of Delos, with the exception of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos, had gradually become, instead of the active allies of Athens, her disarmed and passive tributaries. Even the custody of the fund had been transferred from Delos to Athens. The purpose for which the confederacy had been originally organised disappeared with the Persian peace; yet what may now be ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood—the culture of ennui for its own sake—is certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... the screaming baby to a bedpost and reduced him to subjection by dipping his fingers in sorghum, then giving him a feather. The absorbing occupation of plucking the feather from one sticky hand to the other rendered him passive for an hour. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... perhaps in that of the human mind, the institution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and even to convert this newly-discovered instrument of human freedom into one which might serve to perpetuate that system of passive obedience which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the universe. It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian astuzia and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well as on the persons of authors; and in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... at this terrible passive game of fixed tension she would beat him. Her fixed female soul, her wound-up female will would solidify into stone—whereas his must break. In him something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... himself, as soon as he is sure that he cannot make it good. But no man is strong from reason, but from passion. Love and passion are like distant relations: they rarely go together. Olivier loved: he was only strong against himself. In the passive state into which he had fallen he was an easy prey to every kind of illness. Influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, pounced on him. He was ill for part of the summer. With Madame Arnaud's assistance, Christophe nursed him devotedly: and they succeeded in checking his illness. But against ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... were neglected. What did it matter where a shell hit me now, a weak useless thing at the bottom of a trench? Let it come, blow me to atoms, tear me to pieces, what did I care? I felt like one in a horrible nightmare; unable to help myself. I lay passive and waited. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... that touches his country's prosperity, in which he has an individual lot, and interested in all that affects the advantages of business of which he is a factor, to be relegated to the level of a mere appurtenance to a great machine, with little free will, with no duty but that of passive obedience, and with little hope or opportunity of rising in the scale of responsible and ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... held, nowadays, that he misjudged the German temperament, that remembering the vigorous attempts of the Allies on Sebastopol—he was, as we know, in the Crimea, at the time—he imagined that the Germans would make similarly vigorous attempts on Paris. He did not expect a long and so to say passive siege, a mere blockade during which the investing army would simply content itself with repulsing the efforts of the besieged to break through its lines. He knew that the Germans had behaved differently ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... destiny, and nothing which I have decided since alters that in any way. If you still want me after the war—if we find that neither of us has made a mistake—I can still help you, Derek, I hope. But, my dear, it won't be quite a passive help, if you understand what I mean. I've got to be up and doing myself—actively; to be merely any man's echo—his complement—however much I loved him, would not be enough. I've come to ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... were the only members of the Committee who actively endeavoured to ascertain whether Yoga Rama's experiments depended for their success on trickery or on other causes. The other members of the Committee remained passive spectators. As regards the lady members with whom Yoga Rama tried a few experiments, they declared themselves, at the conclusion of the performance, to be believers in his ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally

... engage our attention; those which result from the intricate and often from the imperceptible mechanism of political society—a subject of observation which seems at first view so little commensurate to our faculties, that it has been generally regarded with the same passive emotions of wonder and submission with which, in the material world, we survey the effects produced by the mysterious and uncontroulable operation of phisical sic causes. It is fortunate that upon this, as on many other occasions, the difficulties ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... Dubravnik. I am of the opinion—and I did not think of it until since the commencement of this interview—that you are not what you seem to be, and that your mission in Russia is in some way connected with the Government police; that you are more than a passive enemy of nihilism—that you are, in short, an active one. If I am right there exists all the more reason why I must appeal to your manhood, your honor, your sense of justice, to your bravery and chivalry. ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... she spread the cloth and produced from various cupboards cold meats and pastries, bread and cakes, and many kinds of delicate preserves and sweetmeats. Her large, shapely hands among the gold-and-white china fascinated him, while her calm, noiseless, unhurried movements induced a feeling of passive repose that it required an effort to dispel, when she said ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... there cannot be more than one Infinite: Nor to ascribe to him (unlesse Metaphorically, meaning not the Passion, but the Effect) Passions that partake of Griefe; as Repentance, Anger, Mercy: or of Want; as Appetite, Hope, Desire; or of any Passive faculty: For Passion, is Power ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... the other Catholic courts. Austria gives her consent, as do Sardinia and all the other Italian states; only the court of Spain has declared itself the friend and defender of the Jesuits, and for your sake has France hitherto remained passive on this most important question, and has affected not to hear the demands of her subjects; for your sake has France stifled her own convictions and joined in your support. Therefore, think well of what you are about to do! To break off your friendly relations with ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... can be discovered only in the recesses of his own spirit,—not by that man, therefore, whose imaginative powers have been ossified by the continual reaction and assimilating influences of mere objects on his mind, and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex, the passive fancy!—not by him in whom an unbroken familiarity with the organic world, as if it were mechanical, with the sensitive, but as if it were insensate, has engendered the coarse and hard spirit of a sorcerer. The former ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... has darted from my hold, And, with the intemperate energy of love, Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel; But, ere it reach them, the keen sanctity, Which, with its effluence, like a glory, clothes And circles round the Crucified, has seized, And scorch'd, and shrivell'd it; and now it lies Passive and still before the awful Throne. O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe, Consumed, yet quicken'd, by ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... pledged to the passive part, could not long sustain it without rebellion. To "hang round" the shut door of his hopes seemed, after two long days, more than even his passion required of him; and on the third he despatched a note of goodbye to his friend. He was going off for a few ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton

... men. By May the expedition was ready. Monckton, with two thousand troops, embarked at Annapolis Royal, and by June 1 the expedition was at Chignecto. In the meantime Vergor, the French commandant at Beausejour, had not been passive. He had strengthened his defences, had summoned the inhabitants of the surrounding districts to his help, had mounted cannon in a blockhouse defending the passage of the river, and had thrown up a strong breastwork of timber along the shore. On June 3 the British landed. They had little difficulty ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty

... does not deny the capacity of fallen man for salvation, it is careful in defining that this is not an active, but a passive capacity. That is to say: Man is utterly incapable of qualifying himself for, or of contributing in the least toward, his own spiritual restoration; but what is impossible for man is not impossible with ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... king declared, To ease the nation's grievance, With his new wind about I steer'd, And swore to him allegiance: Old principles I did revoke, Set conscience at a distance; Passive obedience was a joke, And pish for non-resistance. And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various

... two words 'He was . . . He became,' imply another thing, and that is, that Jesus Christ who died because He chose, was not passive in His being born, but as at the end of His earthly life, so at its beginning exercised His volition, and was born because He willed, and willed because of 'the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... making further conquests. In England his main object was the same as that of his predecessors, to establish the king's authority over the great barons. What especially distinguished him was his clear perception of the truth that he could only succeed by securing, not merely the passive goodwill, but the active co-operation of those who, whether they were of Norman or of English descent, were inferior in wealth and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... love, but cannot return it; he feels, he admires, but he shrinks from any step demanding resolution or self-devotion. Hence, instead of conferring happiness, he makes victims,—victims not of an active, but of a merely passive and negative egotism. A conjunction of circumstances brings him to a sudden and vivid realization of his condition and its results. Instead of escaping by suicide, as might be expected,—and as would probably have been the case if Werther had not forestalled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... which is pretty fast when you take into consideration that a spermatozooen is only 1/300 of an inch long. Many of the spermatozoa, weaker than the others, perish on the way, and only a few continue the journey up through the uterus to the tube. When near the little ovum, which remains passive, their movements become more and more rapid, they seem to be attracted to it as if by a magnet, and finally one spermatozooen—just one—the one that happens to be the strongest or the nearest, makes a mad rush at it with its head, perforates it, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... another reason, too. For generations now, you men have had a monopoly of physical courage. You have faced storms at sea, and charged up hills, and pulled out drowning children, and footed it up fire-ladders, till you think that bravery is a male characteristic. You've always handed out the passive suffering act to us. We had any amount of compliments as long as we stuck to silent suffering. But now we want to see what shells look like. As long as sons and brothers have to stand up to them, why, we're ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... household on the Knap became again serene under the composing influences of daily routine. A desultory, very desultory correspondence, dragged on between Sally Hall and Darton, who, not quite knowing how to take her petulant words on the night of her brother's death, had continued passive thus long. Helena and her children remained at the dairy-house, almost of necessity, and Darton therefore deemed it ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... definite direction. This is a true process of self-education; but you see it is no mechanical process of mere aggregation. It requires activity of thought—but without that what is any reading but mere passive amusement? And it requires method. I have myself a sort of literary bookkeeping. I keep a day-book, and, at my leisure, I post my literary accounts, bringing together in proper groups the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer

... was passive in her hands, and submitted to have a big handkerchief put over his head for a cap, to hold on his arm the baby she improvised from a sofa-cushion of costly plush, around which she arranged as a dress an expensive ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... influences, developed its full independence during his struggles as a Reformer. For this communion with God he never thought it necessary, as the mystics maintained, to renounce one's personality and retire altogether from the world and things temporal: a purely passive attitude towards God, and a blessedness consisting in such an attitude, was not his highest or ultimate ideal. A man's personality, he held, should only be destroyed so far as it resists the will of God, and dares to assert ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... alliance between these two figures. The lady looks upon her empire as founded upon the divine right of beauty (and full as good a divine right it is as any king, emperor, or pope, can pretend to); she requires, and commonly meets with, unlimited passive obedience. And why should she not meet with it? Her demands go no higher than to have her unquestioned preeminence in beauty, wit, and fashion, firmly established. Few sovereigns (by the way) are so reasonable. The ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... however did not prevent the Chevalier de Lorenzy from proposing to me to write something in praise of that lady, insinuating that I might acquire some advantage by it. The proposition excited my indignation, the more as I perceived it did not come from himself, knowing that, passive as he was, he thought and acted according to the impulsion he received. I am so little accustomed to constraint that it was impossible for me to conceal from him my disdain, nor from anybody the moderate opinion I had of the favorite; this I am sure ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... himself on not having been in Paris on the 18th Brumaire, and I believe that had he been there he might well have opposed the actions of General Bonaparte, but in the army, at the head of a division facing the enemy, he was content to adopt the passive obedience of the soldier. He even rejected proposals, which were made to him by a number of generals and colonels, to march on Paris at the head of their troops. "Who," he said to them, "will defend our frontiers if we abandon them? And what will become of France ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... upon the timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander about the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... result of more active exertions than the other's passive self-denial. She sat up one night till two o'clock to dress a doll. Every fall a few hundred dolls were distributed to be dressed by the girls for the Christmas tree at the Settlement House in the city. Some of the students took dolls and paid other girls to make the clothes. Berta earned ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... child will take the bitterest draught from a father's hand. "This cup which Thou, O God, givest me to drink, shall I not drink it?" Be it mine to lie passive in the arms of Thy chastening love, exulting in the assurance that all Thy appointments, though sovereign, are never arbitrary, but that there is a gracious "need be" in them all. "My Father!" my Covenant God! the God who ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... class a relationship which only one or two of the children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the mass were left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she was placing herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed authority of Mr. Harby, so that the scholars could more safely harry her. She did not know, but her instinct gradually warned her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr. Brunt. On it went, jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it nearly drove her mad: ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother's hands. Her mother seemed actually passive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life, and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive resignation to the domination of ignorant ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... activities—to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... are first of all to be distinguished from those of the physical sense-world by being active organs. Whereas the eye and ear are passive, allowing light and sound to work upon them, it may be said of these perceptive organs of the soul and spirit that, while functioning they are in a perpetual state of activity, and that they seize hold of their objects and facts, as it were, in ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... value, and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods qua citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised in the ius divinum; and by passive obedience to these authorities he gradually began to deaden the sense of religio that was in him. And this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as time went on became more and more the rule; ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... of passive endurance was past; action had begun. The Cullerne Water Company threatened to cut off the water, the Cullerne Gas Company threatened to cut off the gas. Eaves, the milkman, threatened a summons unless that long, long bill of his (all built up of pitiful little pints) ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... silent at this, gazing at her hands, the beautifully made pointed fingers bare of rings. On their backs the veins, blue-violet, were visible; and there was a delicate tracery inside the bend of her arms. But her face, Lee reflected, was too passive, too inanimate; her lack of color was unvaried by any visible trace of emotion, life. She was, in fact, plain if not actually ugly; her mouth was too large; on the street, without the saving distinction of her dress, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political—to aid some ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... matter how good the curriculum or how renowned the faculty, you cannot be educated without the most vigorous efforts on your part. Banish the thought that you are here to have knowledge "pumped into" you. To acquire an education you must establish and maintain not a passive attitude but an active attitude. When you go to the gymnasium to build up a good physique, the physical director does not tell you to hold yourself limp and passive while he pumps your arms and legs up and down. Rather he urges you to put ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson

... nature to suit his changing environment that at last he found that he could be content in almost any circumstances. He had no pleasures, no cares, no ambitions, no regrets, no hopes. It was mere passive existence, an inert, plantlike vegetation, the moment's pause before the final decay, the last ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... the majority by which a Liberal Government is supported, it is unable to pass any legislation unless it can procure the agreement of its political opponents. Observe the position in which the present Executive Government is consequently placed. Take only the question of passive resistance. The action of the House of Lords at the present time forces the Executive Government to lock up in prison men with whose action they entirely sympathise and whose grievance they have faithfully promised to redress. Such a position ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... was now to be employed in creating some of the new posts of defence, by which all such dreams of attack were to be dispelled. The strategy was passive, but it paved the way for the offensive undertaken ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst

... chief merit was their family connections or borough interest, he retired into the country; and, not knowing what to do with himself—married. In his family, to regain his lost consequence, he determined to keep up the same passive obedience, as in the vessels in which he had commanded. His orders were not to be disputed; and the whole house was expected to fly, at the word of command, as if to man the shrouds, or mount aloft in an elemental ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... of the eternal oneness of all being. For it compelled him to retain belief in a Creator distinct in essence from Creation. Such a belief Spinoza entirely rejected. For though his "Natura Naturans," or Nature Active, may in a manner be called the Creator of his "Natura Naturata," or Nature Passive, these are consubstantial and co-eternal, neither being before or after the other. Thus for him there was no beginning of the Universe and there could be no end. There was no creation out of nothing, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... lasted but a short time, but it had seemed to me hours. Manuel bandaged my head and arm. The two soldiers remained perfectly passive, suffering from severe blows. The one felled by ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... gravity was fairly overcome, and he got a heavy fit of coughing in his pocket-handkerchief. Captain Armytage gazed keenly at Andy for a moment, during which he might as well have stared at a plaster bust, for all the discoveries he made in the passive simple countenance. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... her arms passionately round his neck. He was embarrassed sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection. He would have preferred her to be more passive. It shocked him a little that she should give him so marked a lead: it did not tally altogether with his prepossessions about the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... repetition of itself but a snatch of varied melody which showed it to be no echo, although evidently an answer. There have been few moments in my life more crowded with happiness than that one. And it was not a passive feeling of enjoyment, but one that spurred me to action. The swift pace which we had all by this time reached was now too slow for me. Seized again by the same fierce passion which took possession of me at my first acquaintance with Mona's voice, I started in her direction ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... as plans of campaign and combine the science of the tactician with that of the administrator, are bound to live in a state of ignorance; the most boorish peasant in the most backward district in France is scarcely in a worse case. Such men as these bear the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells timber in the forest. Violent physical exertion is succeeded by times of inertia, when they repair the waste. They fight and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... male organism is said to be more katabolic. In the female the rapidity of organic change is less; hence the female is said to be more anabolic. Put in more familiar terms, the male tends to expend energy, is more active, hence also stronger; the female tends more to store up energy, is more passive, conservative, and weaker. These fundamental differences between the sexes express themselves in many ways in the social life. The differences between man and woman, therefore, are not to be thought of as due simply to social customs ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... before and passive; now of a sudden he grew violent again, but in a different way. He flung himself upon his knees before Sir Crispin, and passionately he pleaded for the sparing of his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... the Archduke without beating hearts. He was capable of flying out at people and terrifying them to such a degree that they lost their heads completely. He often took their fright to be obstinacy and passive resistance, and it irritated him ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... had not counted on his clinging. It was as if, in their undivided substance, he had had knowledge of her purpose and had prepared himself to fight it. He hung on desperately; he refused to yield an inch of the ground he had taken from her. He was no longer a passive thing in that world where she had brought him. And he had certain advantages. He had possessed her for three nights and for three days. She had made herself porous to him; and her sleep ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair

... gods and goddesses are created together. All the forces divined by human intelligence are doubled into two persons, closely united, the one the complement of the other. The one has the active, the other the passive role. Egypt, Chaldaea, Greece, all had these divine couples; Apsou, or, as Damascius calls him, Apason and Tauthe; Anou and Antou, the Anaitis of the Greek writers; Bel and Belit, or Beltu, perhaps the Greek Mylitta; Samas, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... wanted to help poor Fyne; and as I could see that, manlike, he suffered from the present inability to act, the passive waiting, I said: "Nothing of this can be done till to-morrow. But as you have given me an insight into the nature of your thoughts I can tell you what may be done at once. We may go and look at ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... and not by words have they written their definition of anarchism, and I am taking and using the term in this volume in the sense in which it is used most commonly by people in general. If this offends the anarchists of the non-resistant or passive-resistant type, it cannot be helped. It is the meaning that the most active of the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... so adroitly managed his affairs that when peace came he was able quickly to recover much of the ground lost during the war. With a rare genius for adapting himself to new conditions, he accepted the changed order of things with a passive resignation, but with a stern determination to make the most out of any good that might be ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... giving our worthy governess credit for somewhat milder feelings upon this subject than she actually entertained; the overseers in question, accustomed to such circumstances, harbouring no stronger sentiment than a cold, passive indifference towards the parish boy, whilst she, good sort of woman as in general she was, did certainly upon this occasion cherish something very like an active ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford

... concern. For if we inquire, who corrupt the natives? the answer is, our vile and worthless population, the very scum of mankind, whom we have cast out as evil from the bosom of their native land. But a further question naturally offers itself. Who were, in many instances, the passive, if not the active, corrupters of these very corrupters themselves? Who have neglected to provide means for their christian instruction, and so let them grow up to be worse than heathens, until they could be endured no longer in the land? What nation had within a single century more than doubled ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... the sagacity of the horse; passive and obedient, they are easily trained; bring them up the way you want them to go, and they'll go it! The horse in his old age does not forget the precepts of his youth. A very touching anecdote is told of ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... it is with the most painful reluctance that its summons is obeyed. When they join, the officers may ill-treat them, pull their hair, and strike them with impunity. The officers have generally a fair supply of professional knowledge, and some are highly educated. The men have a larger amount of passive courage than of dashing bravery; yet they will usually follow where their officers lead them. The private has a possibility of rising to the rank of an officer after twelve years' probation, and even sooner by some dashing act of bravery; and several even thus have become generals. There are ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... hollowed by disease. It seemed as if Bartolommeo sought to kill some enemy sitting at the foot of his bed by the intent gaze of dying eyes. That steady remorseless look was the more appalling because the head that lay upon the pillow was passive and motionless as a skull upon a doctor's table. The outlines of the body, revealed by the coverlet, were no less rigid and stiff; he lay there as one dead, save for those eyes. There was something automatic about the moaning sounds that came from the mouth. Don Juan felt something ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac

... Razumov saw a white shapely hand extended to him. He took it in great confusion (it was soft and passive) and heard at the same time a condescending murmur in which he caught only the words "Satisfactory" and "Persevere." But the most amazing thing of all was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of the white shapely hand just ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... Lee Fu sharply. I started, whirled around. His voice had lost the level, passive tone; it had taken on the timbre ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... together.' It was a national rebellion, a flood which swept away even some faithful, timid hearts. No voices ventured to protest. What were the elders, who shortly before 'saw the God of Israel,' doing to be passive at such a crisis? Was there no one to bid the fickle multitude look up to the summit overhead, where the red flames glowed, or to remind them of the hosts of Egypt lying stark and dead on the shore? Was Miriam cowed too, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... local officials and the capitalists of the department. Du Croisier's salon, a power at least equal to the salon d'Esgrignon, larger numerically, as well as younger and more energetic, made itself felt all over the countryside; the Collection of Antiquities, on the other hand, remained inert, a passive appendage, as it were, of a central authority which was often embarrassed by its own partisans; for not merely did they encourage the Government in a mistaken policy, but some of its most fatal blunders were made in consequence of the pressure brought ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... sundry conversational encounters which they had had with the natives of the district. They gave themselves the usual airs which people who have been laboriously amusing themselves inflict upon those wiser individuals who prefer the passive pleasure of repose, and made a merit of having exposed themselves to the meridian sun, in the pursuit ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... The word "passive" is used in three ways. First, in a general way, according as whatever receives something is passive, although nothing is taken from it: thus we may say that the air is passive when it is lit up. But this is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... community apart, consist of "nowhere people," of dreamers who live constantly in expectation of some stroke of luck, some kindly smile from fortune, and of wastrels who, intoxicated with the abundant bounty of the opulent region, have fallen passive victims to the Russian craze for vagrancy. These folk tramp from hamlet to hamlet in parties of two or three, and, while purporting to seek employment, merely contemplate that employment lethargically, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... The new movement in the North-west, in the lower Rhenish districts, and the adjacent Westphalia sprang up and extended itself, therefore, under the domination of this idea of the reign of the saints in the approaching millennium and of the notion that passive non-resistance, whilst for the time being a duty, only remained so until the coming of the Lord should give the signal for the saints to rise and join in the destruction of the kingdoms of this world and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes,—when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... which had been lately issued, and had incurred excommunication; the imperialists insisted that he should be proceeded against for contempt, and that the excommunication should at once be pronounced. However great might be his own personal reluctance, it was not possible for him to remain passive; and if he declined to resort at once to the more extreme exercise of his power, the hesitation was merely until the emperor was prepared to enforce the censures of the church with the strong hand. It stood not "with his honour to execute such censures," ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude









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