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More "Prone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... issues: many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; water-borne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... sense not to make duty to him an excuse for indolence and dislike of responsibility. You have often disappointed yourself by acting precipitately; and now you are throwing yourself prone upon him, in a way that is unwise ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... how many false reports must fly about: in such multitudes imagine how many disappointed men there must be; how many chatterboxes; how many feeble and credulous (whereof I mark some specimens in my congregation); how many mean, rancorous, prone to believe ill of their betters, eager to find fault; and then, my brethren, fancy how the words of my text must have been read and received in Pall Mall! (I perceive several of the congregation looking most uncomfortable. One old boy with ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forest a little wearisome and to wish for a change, when the trees suddenly stopped, and before them lay a sunny interspace full of tall grass with here and there a fallen tree, and on these trees prone great lizards sunned themselves, nodding their heads in a motion ever the same. Something had died in that beautiful interspace, for a vulture rose sullenly and went away over the top of the trees, and Azariah begged Joseph not to pursue his search but to hasten out of the smell of ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... confer spontaneous empire over men and those abilities which lure them on by opening a way for the fulfilment of their interested hopes. And as for himself, by the stealthy growth of selfishness, which is so prone to become developed when circumstances are tempting, he every day made his personal fortunes of greater and greater account in his views and his conduct. His ambitious appetite grew by the very difficulties it encountered as well as by the successes it fed upon. The Count ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... effect; they kindled chivalry in hearts that, after all, were nothing if not prone to chivalry—according to their own lights—and presently something very near enthusiasm prevailed. But the supercilious and very ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... has been often remarked by musical teachers who have had experience with these islanders that as singers they are prone to flat the tone and to drag the time, yet under the stimulus of emotion they show the ability to acquit themselves in these respects with great credit. The native [Page 172] inertia of their being demands the spur of excitement to keep them up to the mark. While human nature everywhere shares ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Leif, wiping his brow, "because thoughts, if kept long in the brain, are apt to hatch, and the chicken-thoughts are prone to run away at the moment of birth, and men have a tendency to chase the chickens, to the utter forgetting of the original hens! What ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... lived at the lower end of the village, was well to do, a leading cranberry grower, and very prominent in the church. A mild, easygoing person was Mr. Snow, with an almost too keen fear of doing the wrong thing and therefore prone to be guided by the opinion of others. He was distinctly ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... spot, motionless and confused. Montigny, according to some, but, according to others, the Count of Soissons, who happened to be near him, laid hands upon him, saying, "Here is the assassin, either he or I." Henry IV., always prone to pass things over, pooh-poohed the suspicion, and was just giving orders to let the young man go, when the knife, discovered on the ground close to Chastel, became positive evidence. Chastel was questioned, searched, and then handed, over to the grand provost ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his horses, for they also seemed imbued with the languidness of the season. He let them rest frequently, especially at the end of the furrow where there was a grassy bank on which the plowman could lie prone on his back and look into the dreamy distances of the hills or up ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... midst of a naturally unrighteous community, can only be forced and temporary. When, instead of reaping advantages, interests and passions are injured by acting rightly, these notions of justice, unsustained by innate integrity suddenly fail. Contrary to universal belief, criminals are very prone to betray their companions and accomplices, and are easily induced to act as informers in the hope of gaining some personal advantage or of injuring those they envy or suspect of treachery ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... so congruous, so consistent in every detail, came trippingly and without the least hesitancy from her tongue. Andreuccio remembered that his father had indeed lived at Palermo; he knew by his own experience the ways of young folk, how prone they are to love; he saw her melt into tears, he felt her embraces and sisterly kisses; and he took all she said for gospel. So, when she had done, he answered:—"Madam, it should not surprise you that I marvel, seeing that, in sooth, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and provocative rudeness; which do never work otherwise upon masculine souls than so as to procure disdain and resistance. Such persons, knowing the benefit of a good name, being wont to possess a good repute, prizing their own credit as a considerable good, will never be prone to bereave others of the like by opprobrious speech. A noble enemy will never speak of his enemy ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... well without the intrusion of such a person as Quisante. Thirdly there was the small but gradually growing group which inclined to think that there was something in Dick's notions and a good deal in his friend's head. A reinforcement came no doubt from the persons who were naturally prone to love the new and took up Quisante as a welcome change, as something odd, with a flavour of the unknown and just a dash of the mystery-man ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... heather—fortunate mortals, who, banned from the murder of partridges and grouse, have for the last few days of our contemporary, been dwellers in merry London! What exulting faces! What crowds of well-dressed, well-fed Malvolios, "smiling" at one another, though not cross-gartered! To a man prone to ponder on that many-leaved, that scribbled, blurred and blotted volume, the human face,—that mysterious tome printed with care, with cunning and remorse,—that thing of lies, and miseries, and hypocritic gladness,—that volume, stained with tears, and scribbled over and over with daily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... tell he had discounted all this, knowing what an impetuous lot his followers were, and how prone to push aside all thought of personal danger when tempted to perform some act that might redound to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... nature of this anomaly. Some writers, and among them Masters in his "Vegetable Teratology" consider the deviations to be merely accidental. According to them some species are more subject to this anomaly than others, and the houseleek is said to be very prone to this change. Goeppert, Hofmeister and others occasionally found the pistilloid poppies in fields or gardens, and sowed their seeds in order to ascertain whether the accidental peculiarity was inheritable or not. ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... conversant with his study of the military aspects of the Revolution and had noticed the careful attention paid by Mr. Belloc to military matters in various books could scarcely have been prepared for such an avalanche of highly-specialized knowledge. For we are all prone to the mistake of confusing a man with ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... thus we are all prone to reason, gauging the tide of each other's feelings by the ebb and flow ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... people of Sauveterre thought he did not look stern and solemn enough for his profession. To be sure he was very highly esteemed; but his optimism was not popular; they reproached him for being too kind-hearted, too reluctant to press criminals whom he had to prosecute, and thus prone ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... liberal, comprehensive view of historical relations (such for instance, as we find in Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois) that can give truth and interest to reflections of this order. One Reflective history, therefore, supersedes another. The materials are patent to every writer; each is prone to believe himself capable of arranging and manipulating them, and we may expect that each will insist upon his own spirit as that of the age in question. Disgusted by such reflective histories, readers have often returned with pleasure to narratives adopting no particular point of view—which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the source of ten thousand acts of injustice, by making bargains with him at a risk to yourself, or by having him as a companion at the festival of Dionysus? Or would you, if you wanted to apply a touchstone to a man who is prone to love, entrust your wife, or your sons, or daughters to him, perilling your dearest interests in order to have a view of the condition of his soul? I might mention numberless cases, in which the advantage would be manifest of getting to know a character in sport, and without ...
— Laws • Plato
... dodging from side to side, generally contrived to escape it; fatal duels, therefore, seldom if ever occurred; and the parties, having thus given and received satisfaction, retired from the field reconciled.[1] They appear more prone to sudden bursts of passion than most Indians I have seen, and quarrel often and abuse each other in the most scurrilous terms. With the Sauteux, Crees, and other tribes on the east side of the mountains, few words are ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... his hand. Womble stirred uneasily, feeling for the other the hatred one is prone to feel for one ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... was the prevailing tone in tapestry, carpet, and furniture, so that the whole room seemed to shine with the sweet tints of the inner side of a shell, and when lit up, as it was then, formed such a chamber as some fairy hero might have built up for his princess. At the further side, prone upon an ottoman, her face buried in the cushion, her beautiful white arms thrown over it, the rich coils of her brown hair hanging in disorder across the long curve of her ivory neck, lay, like a drooping flower, the woman whom he had come ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... befriended her. She hid herself in the old orchard, lay prone upon the warm grass, her cheek upon her folded forearms, and let herself go. She did not cry even now. Grief was not what she felt, still ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to sleep, and when they waked the rain had ceased altogether. The lawn in front of the house was a muddy lake and many trees lay prone on the ground. It was a scene of devastation that greeted Mr. Campbell as he hurried home at daylight in a 'riksha. He had dispatched a messenger in the night, paying a large fee, to see if the girls were safe at home and had spent the night in ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... storms remote but murmur on thine ear, Nor waves in ruinous uproar round thee roll, Yet, yet a moment check thy prone career, And curb the keen ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... his estimates of other men, but in this case the tragedy of Burns's "life of fragments" attracts and softens him. He grows enthusiastic and—a rare thing for Carlyle—apologizes for his enthusiasm in the striking sentence, "We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify." So he gives us the most tender and appreciative of his essays, and one of the most illuminating criticisms of Burns that has appeared in ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... uphold the general who was doing England's work in Spain. There was need of all the support his genius could contribute to this task, for parliament was slow to grasp the deep purpose of the campaign, was impatient for results, and prone to grumble at the bill of expense. Yet in the end Canning enjoyed the satisfaction of pointing to the complete verification of his hopes. He might have been Foreign Minister in the Liverpool ministry at its outset (1812) had he been willing ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... him, yet he faces judge, jury, counsel, witnesses and audience with a calm dignity worthy of an emperor. He listens imperturbably to facts which may hang him, to lies which may lend color to the facts, to well-meaning guesses which are wide of the mark. Truthful and false evidence is equally prone to err when guilt or innocence must be ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... one pang of fear, one quicker beat of the heart before. But the image presented to his irritable fancy (always prone to brood over terrors),—the image of that companion chained to him night and day,—suddenly quelled his courage; the image stood before him palpably like the Oulos Oneiros,—the Evil Dream ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Old man, these many years side by side Our parallel paths have lain; Now, in life's long journey, diverging wide, They can scarcely unite again; And tho', from all that I've seen and heard, You're prone to chafe and to fret At the least restraint, not one angry word Have we two exchanged as yet. We've shared our peril, we've shared our sport, Our sunshine and gloomy weather, Feasted and flirted, and fenced and fought, Struggled and toiled together; In happier ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... he called a halt, bidding us rest. We all lay flat on the grass by the roadside. The moon was still battling with clouds. The darkness of the fields on either side was total. I crawled on hands and knees to the sound of silver-trickling water and found a little spring-fed stream. Prone, weight on elbows, I drank heavily of its perfect blackness. It was icy, talkative, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... and all rat-eaten and broken ones carefully excluded. Canes may, however, be kept some days without fermenting, provided they be not broken or damaged, it being, as we said before, the mixture of the sap and the cane juice that makes the liquid so prone to fermentation; and the mill, gutters, and everything with which the juice is likely to come in contact, should be kept carefully clean, and whitewashed immediately after, and the whitewash removed before use, as acetate of lime being an exceedingly ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the mind is weak. I came back into the bedroom where my husband was asleep, closing my eyes as I passed through, and went off to the open terrace beyond, on which I lay prone, clasping to my breast the end of the sari tied over the gold. And each one of the rolls gave me a shock ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... One at least of them paid the price of inexactitude then and there; he still shudders to think how, put to the test, he unintentionally left the Park for a no less fashionable but much more crowded thoroughfare, to arrive eventually, in the prone position, in a byway of Piccadilly, where small fragments of the machine may still be collected by industrious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... traveled wide and far, as ones of his predatory stamp are prone to do, and with a Russian facility for tongues spoke English, German, French, and half the languages of Europe. The instinctive purpose of Storri's existence was to make money. To him, money was a prey, and stood as do deer to wolves; and yet, making a fine distinction, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; limited access to potable water; water-borne diseases prevalent; water pollution especially of fishing areas results from the use of commercial pesticides; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern and central parts of the country; soil degradation; ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... crime—which he will not mention for humanity's sake—may be atoned for by it, is sublime of its kind and a worthy representative of this whole mode of thinking. You might perhaps make Sperate's story a little shorter still, as it comes in at the end where one is prone to hurry impatiently to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... companions, but with a face burning with extraordinary fires, Fergus Carrick sprang for the clean edge of the trap-door, caught it first with one hand and then with both, drew himself up like the gymnast he had been at his Scottish school, and found himself prone upon the floor and trap-door as the latter closed under him on the release of the lever which Stingaree understood so well. A yell of execration followed him into the upper air. And Stingaree was across the counter before his new ally had picked ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... bina sesquipedalia paulum ab imo praeacuta, dimensa ad altitudinem fluminis, intervallo pedum duorum inter se iungebat. Haec cum machinationibus immissa in flumen defixerat fistucisque adegerat—non sublicae {5} modo derecte ad perpendiculum, sed prone ac fastigate, ut secundum naturam fluminis procumberent—eis item contraria duo ad eundem modum iuncta intervallo pedum quadragenum ab inferiore parte contra vim atque impetum fluminis conversa statuebat. {10} Haec utraque insuper bipedalibus trabibus immissis, quantum eorum ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... fail to set the house of his mind in order; he can sweep the dust of unfinished investigation into obscure nooks and corners; he can make fair the outside of the cup and the platter for cursory inspection. Herein lies his peculiar temptation. The public is prone to take his scientific spirit for granted, and is a long time in opening its eyes. Meanwhile he lives a life of delightful leisure, teaching as many hours a week as a business man labours in a day. Not one man in a hundred is proof against the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... here name the fact that I was in boyhood extremely prone to castle-building—a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature life: finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or less practicable. In early days the habit was such that on going to bed it was a source of satisfaction to me to think I should be able to lie for a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... About twenty-five years ago it occurred to me that one of the above objections to the extensive dietetic use of nuts might be overcome by mechanical preparation of the nut before serving so as to reduce it to a smooth paste and thus insure the preparation for digestion which the average eater is prone to neglect. The result was a product which I called peanut butter. I was much surprised at the readiness with which the product sprang into public favor. Several years ago I was informed by a wholesale grocer of Chicago that the firm's sales of peanut butter amounted on an average to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... Stephen, fist outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... destined to be left behind in the onward march of the human intellect. It belongs to an infantile stage of intellectual development, when experience, dependent on testimony, becomes the slave of credulity. Children and childish nations are prone to superstition. Religion belongs properly to such. Hence the endless controversies of religious sects. But as man advances into the knowledge of the physical sciences, and becomes familiarized with ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... they do not fraternize. The convention is sure to be of one feather or the other. They do not flock together. That is no doubt just as well, for I have great respect for the flicker. He is a whimsical old codger, very prone to talk to himself and go through strange gymnastics in a rather ridiculous way, but the flicker is honest. He brings up a large family in the strictest probity and I have never known a flicker to do a wrong thing. On the other hand, the blue ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed by the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, hardly can I express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... of the glories of Egypt and be glad to turn our backs upon her. He will cure us of idols by showing forth their helplessness when they are cried unto; and when Israel is in its most grievous strait and therefore most prone to attach itself to whosoever helpeth it. He will prove Himself at last by His power. Aye, thou hast said. Israel can suffer little more without perishing. Therefore is redemption ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... did not convince the son, but the words which he had spoken helped to create a doubt which already had almost an existence of its own. Anton Trendellsohn was prone to suspicions, and now was beginning to suspect Nina, although he strove hard to keep his mind free from such taint. His better nature told him that it was impossible that she should deceive him. He had ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... the dull sounds of the falling dirt, they had completed their task when the nearer approach of voices and of stumbling footfalls within the tunnel warned them to desist. Bob and Frank on one side of the slight opening, Captain Folsom and Tom Barnum on the other, they threw themselves prone on the ground. The bricks had been divided into two piles, one by ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... while the Texan searched the trail with keen eyes that missed nothing. Suddenly he drew up his horse. Blizzard had shied at something lying prone ahead of them, and The Kid's eyes had seen it at the ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... the minor princes and princesses of his dynasty is insisted upon to such an extent by the aged Emperor of Austria, the kindliest, most warm-hearted and sympathetic of old men, always prone to patient forbearance and indulgence, it will be readily understood that it is exercised to its fullest extent by Emperor William, in whose character the tendency to autocracy, and the spirit of command, is far more developed ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... religion themselves concern and make it their business all; Sitting,[FN53] they weep for the pains of hell and still for mercy bawl! If they could hearken to Azzeh's speech, as I, I hearken to it, They straight would humble themselves to her and prone before her fall. ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... building of the world, a long, high ridge of stones had been reared up by the sea, dividing the swampy grassland from the sand. Some of these stones—"pebbles," so they called them round about—were as big as a man, and many as big as a fair-sized house; and when the sea was angry—and very prone he was to anger by that lonely shore, and very quick to wrath; often have I known him sink to sleep with a peaceful smile on his rippling waves, to wake in fierce fury before the night was spent—he would snatch up giant handfuls of these pebbles and fling and toss them here ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... own name, the marriage would take place. This propensity on the part of parents to live their children's lives is very common. Few be the parents and very great are they who can give liberty and realize that their children are only loaned to them. I fear we parents are prone to be perverse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... intensity of her then locked arms with anguish and torment and a cheated, unsatisfied love. Strength of mind and body involuntarily resisted the ravages of this catastrophe. Will power seemed nothing, but the flesh of her, that medium of exquisite sensation, so full of life, so prone to joy, refused to surrender. The part of her that felt ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... are much more satisfactory as park trees than Chinese chestnuts. People are so prone to break off branches ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... stood twirling the letter between his fingers. Joanna bade him open it. It might be something important Paragot drew from the envelope half a sheet of note-paper. He looked at it, made a staggering step to the door and fell sprawling prone upon the carpet. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... simply a financial system, to which the doctrines of Judaism happen to be tacked on. How many of the councillors believe in their Established Religion? Why, the very beadles of their synagogues are prone to surreptitious shrimps and unobtrusive oysters! Then take that institution for supplying kosher meat. I am sure there are lots of its Committee who never inquire into the necrologies of their own chops and steaks, and who regard kitchen Judaism ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Harris stretched prone on the floor and rested the muzzle of his rifle on a crack between the logs. It was hard shooting. He was forced to shift the butt end of the gun, moving with it himself to line the sights instead of swinging the ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... from his gorgeous throne, which awed the world, The mighty Monarch of the east was hurl'd, To dwell with brutes beneath the midnight storm, By Heaven's just vengeance changed in mind and form. 215 —Prone to the earth He bends his brow superb, Crops the young floret and the bladed herb; Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide. Long eagle-plumes his arching neck invest, 220 Steal round his arms, and clasp his sharpen'd breast; Dark ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... "pleasure-thinking" for the more purposeful thinking of the actual world, but the child who loiters too long in the realm of fancy may ever after find it hard to keep away from its borders. His natural interest in sex, if artificially repressed, is especially prone to satisfy itself by ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation. The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought up to substantiate ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... feet six. Madison was naturally timid and retiring in the presence of other men, but he was at his best in the company of his friend Jefferson, who valued his attainments. Indeed, the two men supplemented each other. If Jefferson was prone to theorize, Madison was disposed to find historical evidence to support a political doctrine. While Jefferson generalized boldly, even rashly, Madison hesitated, temporized, weighed the pros and cons, and came with difficulty to a conclusion. Unhappily ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the conventionality and artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the wrongness ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my staircase and dropped asleep there,—and my nameless visitor might have brought some one with him to show him the way,—still, joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a few ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... whether any modern woman would cherish a mid-Victorian sentiment like "Always Faithful." On the other hand, many men might. His experience as a detective had led him to the belief that men were more prone to such sentiments than the other sex, though their conduct rarely accorded with their protestations ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... know what he meant, and so very probably would they who defied him. It may be that the son of a butcher of the village shall become as well fitted for employments requiring gentle culture as the son of the parson. Such is often the case. When such is the case, no one has been more prone to give the butcher's son all the welcome he has merited than I myself; but the chances are greatly in favour of the parson's son. The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to the one class nor to ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... did their truth-telling do them. At nine o'clock the guards, paid bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state, full of meat and sleep, were upon us. Not only had we had no breakfast, but we had had no water. And beaten men are prone to feverishness. I wonder, my reader, if you can glimpse or guess the faintest connotation of a man beaten—"beat up," we prisoners call it. But no, I shall not tell you. Let it suffice to know that these beaten, feverish men lay seven hours ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... heart of mine To earthly idols prone, Should'st all those clinging cords untwine, And take again Thy own,— Help me to lay my hands in thine, And say ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... Bahadur, "O my lord, I was busy washing my clothes and knew not of thy being here; for our appointed time was nightfall and not day-tide." But Amjad cried out at him, saying, "Thou liest, O vilest of slaves! By Allah, I must needs beat thee." So he rose and, throwing Bahadur prone on the ground, took a stick and beat him gently; but the damsel sprang up and, snatching the stick from his hand, came down upon Bahadur so lustily, that in extreme pain the tears ran from his eyes and he ground his teeth together and called out for succour; whilst Amjad cried ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... to the sacred books, and not quote poets or profane authors; they closed the churches to profane assemblies and burlesques (fetes des fous); they ordered the parish priests, in their addresses (au prone), to explain the gospel of the day; they ruled that a stop should be put to the abuses of excommunication; they interdicted the publication of any book on religious subjects without the permission of the bishop of the diocese. . . . Troyes at that time contained some enlightened ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... wood, we found a wounded trooper prone on the ground and gasping for breath; while beside him grazed his horse. He was bleeding from his side, and too faint to turn his head as ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... prone on the floor of the library in various positions of juvenile comfort, watching the firewood in the big wide grate sparkle and crackle, or the broad snowflakes "spat" against the window-panes, where ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... problems, and may be turned by the operator himself into various shapes by heating small probe-pointed steel rods in a spirit lamp, the proximal end being turned over at a right angle for a controlling handle. Hooks with a greater curve than a right angle are prone to engage in small orifices from which they are with difficulty removed. A right angle curve of the distal end is usually sufficient, and a corkscrew spiral is often advantageous, rendering removal easy by a reversal of the twisting motion ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... and distresses, make him prone enough to any desperate resolution, yet says he in the language ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... children, commingled with the hoarse shouts of excited men.... On every side were hurrying forms of men and women, bareheaded, partially dressed, some almost nude, and all nearly crazed with fear and excitement.... A few steps away, under the gas-lamp, a woman lies prone and motionless on the pavement, with upturned face and outstretched limbs, and the crowd which has now gathered in the street passes her by, none pausing to see whether she is alive or dead ... no one knows which way to turn, ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... of his puppy, dropped it incontinently, and made an onslaught on Tyr, the old wolf-hound, who basked dozing, whimpering and twitching in his hunting dreams. Prone went Rol beside Tyr, his young arms round the shaggy neck, his curls against the black jowl. Tyr gave a perfunctory lick, and stretched with a sleepy sigh. Rol growled and rolled and shoved invitingly, but could only gain from the ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... giant, prone in an endless ease, who stretched from the waterfall at the topmost point of the valley to the shore of the sea, and about me ran in many futile excitements the natives of Atuona, small creatures whose ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... people had rather a tendency to the useful, than to the beautiful. Unable to assimilate the elements of beauty and grace furnished by more genial races, this mystic and vanished nation was rather prone to the stupendously and minutely practical, than devoted to the beautiful for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... She was ever prone thus to answer questions before they were fully asked, or could be properly understood by her, and from such premature decisions as she hastened to give she could never afterwards be persuaded to retreat. Knowing this the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... ascend into communion with a being that seems to him so vast, remote, and incomprehensible; and when danger threatens, when his hopes are broken, when the black wing of sorrow overshadows him, he is prone to turn for relief to some inferior agency, less removed from the ordinary scope of his faculties. He has a guardian spirit, on whom he relies for succor and guidance. To him all nature is instinct with mystic influence. Among those mountains ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... seeking satisfaction from another—human love does conquer it, but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn round upon all other would-be exorcists, and say, 'Jesus we know ... but who are ye?' It is only when the Ark is carried into the Temple that Dagon falls prone before it. If you would drive self out of your hearts—and if you do not it will slay you—if you would drive self out, let Christ's love and sacrifice come in. And then, what no brooms and brushes, no spades ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs just such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on the fourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... guard that I could see nothing in the street except the figures that immediately surrounded me, I wished that I had given him the money. At such times, when all hangs in the balance and the sky is overcast, the mind runs on luck and old superstitions, and is prone to think a crown given here may avail there—though THERE be a ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... Justice Harlan, stressed the abundance of medical testimony tending to show that the life expectancy of bakers was below average, that their capacity to resist diseases was low, and that they were peculiarly prone to suffer irritations of the eyes, lungs, and bronchial passages; and concluded that the very existence of such evidence left the reasonableness of the measure under review open to discussion and that the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... PRUE, and brother TIM, (I scarcely recollected them), Magnificent in gala trim: Dear me, how I respected them! I deemed them quite grown up, so bold Seemed they, glared so defiantly: Yet they, too, cowered to behold Prone before JACK the ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... have been sound in the circumstances then existing. Until the banking system was reformed, there was real danger of contracting the currency by a withdrawal of treasury notes. President Cleveland was making a mistake to which reformers are prone; he was taking the second step before he had taken the first. The realization on the part of others that his efforts were misdirected not only made it impossible for him to obtain any financial legislation but actually fortified the position of the ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... worthy man, was killed. Ere this, he had exercised the peaceful profession of a schoolmaster; but finding there was no employment for him in these perilous times, he had boldly shouldered the musket, and died a soldier. But so prone are mankind to pass over the merits of this most useful class of men, that had he not fallen by the side of a Marion, perhaps his memory would have been forgotten. About the same time, Mr. Bentley, another schoolmaster, was killed in action. The suspension ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... Storrs, he is prone to take the other side of the Square when he sees me on my accustomed bench. In repose his face is as grim as ever, but I have seen him smile at a child. Probably the weight of our collective sins ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Particularizing as to the members of his staff, Washington described their several characteristics: Stuart was intelligent and apparently honest and attentive, but vain and talkative, and usually backward in his schedule; Crow would be efficient if kept strictly at his duty, but seemed prone to visiting and receiving visits. "This of course leaves his people too much to themselves, which produces idleness or slight work on the one side and flogging on the other, the last of which, besides the dissatisfaction ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... distance to one side, the young son and heir had thrown himself prone upon the grass in the shade of a magnificent oak, story-book in hand. Much interested he seemed in his book, yet occasionally his eye would wander from its fascinating pages to watch, with pride and delight, the tiny Rosebud ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... self-condemnation, a conviction of outlawry and a desolation passing speech. He looked for comfort, for promise of restoration, and found none, in things material or things intellectual, in others or in himself. For his mind, always prone to apprehend by images rather than by words, and to advance by analogy rather than by argument, discovered, in surrounding aspects and surrounding circumstance, a rather hideously apt parable and illustration of its present state. Just as this seemingly fair city was proven, on intimate ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... assistance in his perplexity. It is singular that in times of difficulty and danger, when a clear head is particularly necessary, men who have charge of property, and the lives of their fellow-men, are prone to consult the rum bottle, which always produces an effect precisely the reverse of what ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... the modern men, whose privations in early life in no wise approached those of our hero look back with gratitude upon their early days? Are we not prone to excuse and condone our shortcomings, either of character or of achievement, by murmuring at the hard fate which deprived us of those advantages which more fortunate brothers and sisters enjoyed in infancy and youth? Do we not to-day swing too far in the direction of sickly sentimentality ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... chronic from the onset, and is a slow creeping degeneration of the kidney substance, and in many respects an anticipation of the gradual changes which take place in the organ in extreme old age. Families in which the arteries tend to degenerate early are more prone to this disease. Doctor Osler says: "Among the better classes in this country Bright's disease is very common and is caused more frequently by over-eating than by excesses ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Marcia. Any one who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel; and any one who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor so white, nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s. But it still serves as a convenient short cut on a day when Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a hazard, and thus Hannah Winter was using it. She was to have met Marcia at the Michigan Boulevard entrance at two, sharp. And here ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... did not bother Joel very much. He knew how prone baseball players are to boast when things are turning their way; and at the same time find all sorts of plausible excuses when the reverse tide begins to ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... of a moment—the shout, the vision of the boy, and the rescue—so sudden, indeed, that Mrs Cruden had barely time to clutch Horace by the arm before Reginald lay prone in the middle of the road. In another moment Horace was beside his brother, helping him up out of ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... first assault the teams found themselves thus: The Kingstonians were stretched prone upon the board with their legs straight against the cleats; Sawed-Off was braced against his cleat and seated, facing Troy. The rival team was seated, but with knees bent; and their captain glared amazed at Sawed-Off, who was busily taking in over a ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... disposed as not to care about riches, and sometimes on account of something else. More frequently, however, he inclines to intemperance, both because through spending too much on other things he becomes fearless of spending on objects of pleasure, to which the concupiscence of the flesh is more prone; and because through taking no pleasure in virtuous goods, he seeks for himself pleasures of the body. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 1) "that many a prodigal ends in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of the class who upon trial have been found to have light, clear voices and who are not prone to shout. Let ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... only flow down. The tendency of human nature is towards what is good, as that of water is to flow downwards. One may, indeed, by splashing water, make it spurt upwards, but that is forcing it against its true character. Even so, when a man becomes prone to what is evil it is because his Heaven-implanted nature has been diverted ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... likes, and dislikes of all creatures. This is unfair. I tell them so. But they cannot get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me. They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... fired the load into the face of the thing with its voice of the dead, had not something burst on his head with a staggering, overpowering blow, and despite his efforts to stand, his knees gave way beneath him and it seemed pleasant for him to lie prone upon ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... beliefs, that in which man has, at all times of his history, been most prone to set faith, is that of a golden age of peace and plenty, which had passed away, but which might be expected to return. Such a period was looked for when Augustus closed the temple of Janus, and ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... and may be seen in myriads in the dust of the streets or skipping in the sunbeams which fall on the clay floors of the cottages. The dogs, to escape them, select for their sleeping places spots where a wood fire has been previously kindled; and here prone on the white ashes, their stomachs close to the earth, and their hind legs extended behind, they repose in comparative coolness, and bid ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to be doubted if Mr. Croker realizes how prone and dead he is. One knows when one is wounded, but one knows not when one is killed. Some near day, or some far day, Mr. Croker will seek to return. Then, and not until that time, will he comprehend the palsy that has stricken his supremacy. Mr. ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... the bilberry hummocks, till he caught sight of a bit of print cotton in a hollow just below the quaint stone shooting-hut, built some sixty years ago on the side of the Scout for the convenience of sportsmen. David stalked the cotton, and found her lying prone and with her hat, as usual, firmly held down over her ears. At sight of her something told him very plainly he had been a brute to tell her his news so. There was a strong moral shock which for ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to multiply, to intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... himself along Dowst's prone form, and then along Rip's. When Dominico had reached the shelter of the crystals, Dowst crawled along with Rip's body for his guide, passed over him, ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... rationale than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A] With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most prone,—an originality mainly in details. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... the 25th of January, 1605, the first white man in over sixty years. A large harbour which struck his fancy was named in honour of the saint's day, Puerto de la Conversion de San Pablo, for the sun seldom went down without a Spaniard of those days thus propitiating a saint. We are more prone to honour the devil in these matters. The Gila they called Rio del Nombre de Jesus, a name never used again. So it often happens with names bestowed by explorers. The ones they regard most highly vanish, while some they ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... scientists are prone to ascribe to man as a whole the faculties which only the best trained and most talented possess. They fail to consider our cannibal brethren, such as are found among the Dyaks on the Island of Borneo, whose chief articles of adornment in the house are heads of murdered men, and whose savage and ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... seeing that Claude was less pliant than he had looked to find him, shunned occasion of collision with him, or the Paduan being in better spirits was less prone to fall foul of his companions, certain it is that life for a time after the outbreak at supper ran more quietly in the house in the Corraterie. Claude's gloomy face—he had not forgiven—bade beware of him; and little save on the subject of Louis' ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... boy seemed entirely comfortable, and the lady not at all disturbed, the colonel did not interrupt them for a while. But when the lady at length rose, holding Phil by the hand, the colonel, fearing that the boy, who was a child of strong impulses, prone to sudden friendships, might be proving troublesome, left his seat on the flat-topped tomb of his Revolutionary ancestor and hastened ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... other subject are people so prone to become panegyrists of the past as in this matter of the weather. "Ah," they say, "we never now have the lovely summers we used to have." Reading the other day Walpole's Letters, I discovered that ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... of an army in the field. On the north, Russia is almost wholly invulnerable. The Czar might retreat until his pursuers perished of fatigue and hunger. The unquestionable result of the whole is, that Russia is the real terror of Europe. France is dangerous, and madly prone to hostilities; but France is open on every side, and experience shows that she never can resist the combined power of England and Germany. It is strong evidence of our position, that she has never ultimately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Why the prone bucks were so comparatively shy I do not know, for right on the ground with them we came upon deer, and, in the immediate neighborhood, mountain sheep, which were absurdly tame. The mountain sheep were nineteen in number, for the most ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... defects of style in the speech are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears 'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... act without control; I ne'er have cherished hate for such as thee. Of all the spirits who deny, The scoffer is least wearisome to me. Ever too prone is man activity to shirk, In unconditioned rest he fain would live; Hence this companion purposely I give, Who stirs, excites, and must, as devil, work. But ye, the genuine sons of heaven, rejoice! In the full living beauty still rejoice! May that which works and lives, the ever-growing, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to sea—slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A] With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most prone,—an ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... fraction of an intolerable second, the ship, in the fiercer burst of a terrible uproar, remained on her side, vibrating and still, with a stillness more appalling than the wildest motion. Then upon all those prone bodies a stir would pass, a shiver of suspense. A man would protrude his anxious head and a pair of eyes glistened in the sway of light glaring wildly. Some moved their legs a little as if making ready to jump ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Him in the garden, prone, While He poured His soul to God; Then He bore affliction ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... weak in discipline and prone to straggling, they none the less bore themselves with conspicuous gallantry. Their native characteristics came prominently to the front. Patient under hardships, vigorous in attack, and stubborn in defence, they showed themselves worthy of their commander. Their enthusiastic patriotism was not ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in her efforts to give no trouble, and yet she never had the air of a dependent or a beneficiary; but held her head high, and when called upon gave an opinion as though she had a right to it. The very first morning Susan, who was prone to be late to breakfast, came down in a great state of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers—looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain— are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Spain would not listen to any negotiations for the hand of his sister, unless the persecution of his co-religionists in England was stopped; and James, in order to carry out his foreign policy, blinded by his admiration for the Spaniard, and always prone to follow the line of least resistance, promised what he certainly could not perform, the parliamentary repeal ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... imperfect creatures, wayward and foolish as little children, horribly unreasonable, selfish and willful. We are not capable of enduring the shock of finding at every turn that our idol is made of clay, and that it is prone to tumble off its pedestal and lie in the dust, till we pick it up and set it in its place again. I was struck with Ernest's asking in the very first prayer he offered in my presence, after our marriage, that God would help ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... "So prone is man to society, and so happy in it, that, to relish perpetual solitude, one must be an angel or a brute. In a solitary state, no creature is more timid than man; in society, none more bold. The number of offenders lessens the disgrace of the crime; for a common reproach is no reproach. A man ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... struck my ear, and the body under my foot seemed to heave. I started back, and simultaneously the apparent corpse rose up, a tall, blood-besmeared figure, which stared horribly upon me for a moment and then, with another loud and horrid groan, fell prone on his back, his arms widely extended. I lost no time in scrambling past him after my companions, who had run away, and small blame to them, for it was like the rising of a corpse suddenly endowed with volition. Both were by this time in what has been forcibly and ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... as in men, a taste for gaming arises from the want of better occupation, or of proper emotion to relieve them from the pains and penalties of idleness; both the vain and indolent are prone to this taste from different causes. The idea of personal merit is insensibly connected with what is called good luck, and before avarice absorbs every other feeling, vanity forms no inconsiderable part ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... saw a girl or boy So prone as Sophie to destroy Whate'er she laid her hands upon, Though tough as wood, or hard as stone; With Sophie it was all the same, No matter who the thing might claim, No matter were it choice or rare, For naught did the destroyer care. Her playthings shared ...
— Slovenly Betsy • Heinrich Hoffman
... if Lary had not been disguised in liquor," said Josiah, "he never would have committed so base an action. Daniel Simpson, at times we are all prone to do ill; and as for the few shillings thou just now proposed, to give up the culprit, since my loss cannot affect thee, there is a crown to keep the affair a secret; as the disgrace of this thoughtless man might deprive his innocent wife ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... and nights together, refusing all intercourse with his friends. It seemed as if he had lost Buelna for good and all. At times, as the certainty of this defined itself more clearly, Felipe would fling his hat upon the ground, beat his breast, and then, prone upon his face, his head buried in his folded arms, would lie for hours motionless, while his pony nibbled the sparse alfalfa, and the jack-rabbits limping from the sage peered at him, their ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... unable to contribute in any degree or manner toward his own justification and conversion; moreover, that, being an enemy of God, man, of his own natural powers, is active only in resisting the saving efforts of God, as well as able and prone only to do so; that God alone and in every respect is the Author of man's conversion, perseverance, and final salvation; and that, since the grace of God is universal and earnestly proffered, man alone is responsible for, and the cause of, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... seen her; she keeps her chamber with the migraine. As she comes from her kinsman, General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Governor of Canada, she may be useful, being lately untethered from the convent and no more than seventeen or eighteen, and vain, no doubt, of her beauty, and so, I conclude, prone to babble if flattered. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... it. Lawler saw the weapon belch smoke and fire as it cleared Antrim's hip; he felt a shock as the bullet struck him; felt still another sear his flesh near the arm as he let his own pistol off. He saw the outlaw plunge forward and fall prone, his arms outstretched. He ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and to this love he fell a martyr; dying of a decayed and ruined constitution before he was forty. The town's people thought him a shrewd and sensible man, and regretted his death. As for me, I never greatly loved him; I had not grown up with him; and he was too prone to repulse my little advances to familiarity, with coldness, or anger. He had certainly some reason to be displeased with me, for I learned little at school, and nothing at home, though he would now and then attempt to give me some insight into the business. As impressions of any kind ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... to suck this singing weed; And while the morning gathers up its strength, And while the noonday runneth on in might, Until the shadows and the evening light Come and awake me with a fear at length, Prone in some hankering covert hid away, Fain am I still my piping to prolong, And for the largess of a bounteous day Dare pay my maker with a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... to a species of envy, we think may be more justly regarded as having its foundation in the love of sensationalism to which human nature is prone—sensationalism which appears to become all the racier when it finds its food in high quarters. The particular direction the tendency took was influenced by the blindness of George III. and of his grandson, the Crown Prince of Hanover, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... and now stood, breathing loudly, one hand clenched upon his breast, and turning swiftly, took a stumbling pace toward the open window, tripped, and fell prone upon ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... foliage-masses and aromatic odor. It seems a sacrilege to destroy them so ruthlessly. When stripped of their bark and stained with the dark-red sap, they look like fallen giants spoiled of their armor, lying there prone and white-naked, as if there had been a battle of the giants and the gods. These giants were perfumed, it seems. Their huge green plumes are now withered and torn, and their red blood oozes slowly from their bodies in thin and trickling streams. You think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... parties, it would be impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not prone to use that ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... stamped with austere simplicity. The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was almost certainly a Calvinist. He habited himself in black and was served by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery. If a woman was not flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil masquerading for the downfall of man—and no doubt with some justice, too. Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good time ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... deadly white at the horrifying spectacle I presented as I lay prone at her feet, but her evident alarm quickly vanished upon my assurance that ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... water during heavy rains, drainage must be provided. Notice whether any cellar windows have been closed. Countrymen are prone to do this as a cheap and easy method when the framework gets beyond repair. Replacing stoned-up windows is not expensive or difficult but just one more thing which must be done. Notice the extent of the cellar. Old builders sometimes did only a partial job of excavation because of economy. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... advance of their age. They, like all their contemporaries, were besieged by errors, ancient, inveterate, traditional; and accidentally, from one cause special to themselves, they were not merely liable to error, but usually prone to error. This cause lay in the polemic form which so often they found a necessity, or a convenience, or a temptation for assuming, as teachers or defenders ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... way. Gibbs had risen to his knees unaware that the Italian, with yet another knife, was close behind him. At a bound Hilary arrested the lifted blade and hurled its wielder aside, who in the next breath seemed to spring past him head first, fell prone across the prostrate Gibbs, turned face upward, and slid on and away—lassoed. Both bull-drivers clattered ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... out; level, flatten; prostrate, knock down, floor, fell. Adj. horizontal, level, even, plane; flat &c. 251; flat as a billiard table, flat as a bowling green; alluvial; calm, calm as a mill pond; smooth, smooth as glass. recumbent, decumbent, procumbent, accumbent[obs3]; lying &c. v.; prone, supine, couchant, jacent[obs3], prostrate, recubant[obs3]. Adv. horizontally &c. adj.; on one's back, on all ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stuffy hall, A frantic shouter, greater duffer, A mob more prone to stamp and bawl, Noise, suffocation still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... took the loaded gun, and, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the spot, stretched myself prone on the deck, with the barrel of the weapon resting upon the rail of the schooner's very low bulwark. Sighting the piece carefully, I brought it to bear immediately on the spot where I thought I ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... new attachment. Thus did I reason, and thus I believed; and though I was a kind of consultation opinion among my friends in "suits of love," I was really then unaware that at no time is a man so prone to fall in love as immediately after his being jilted. If common sense will teach us not to dance a bolero upon a sprained ancle, so might it also convey the equally important lesson, not to expose our more vital and inflammatory organ to the fire the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... how lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to explain their injurious influence. The lees deposited from vinous fermentation consist of mineral salts, tartaric acid, and organic matters. Of these the 'organic substances are the most to be dreaded, and for this reason, that they are very prone to rapid decomposition. They consist of yeast-cells, cells of other micro-organisms, of DEBRIS and minute particles of grape stalks and skins, and of other bodies, all readily liable to decompose. All these various materials, therefore, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... enemy outside the shop, he had another within, who was ready to improve every opportunity to trouble him. This was a small, thinfaced man who worked with him, and whose name was Mires. Besides being physically unable to carry an even end with him, this workman was prone to shirk every part of his work that he could, this portion falling largely on Jack to do in ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... than saw the body lying prone, with her head on the ground; and the paler shadow of her hair reminded me of the dear beauty of her. I grew calmer. The comfort of having said all that I had to say relieved my heart and sent rippling ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... who was my friend— It's pretty clear you got on badly; Your ribs, somehow, seem prone to bend, Your silken dress seems wearing sadly. It's very hard, I know, to part, And sentimental feelings smother, But even though it break my heart, I'm going, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... full circle comes the wheel, And, prone across the knees of Fate, You are to hear, without appeal, The final terms that we dictate; And, when you whine (the German way) On presentation of the bill: "Ach, Himmel! we can never pay," "Can't you?" we'll cry; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... the house and came upon the prone figure of a cow-puncher, rolled close against the house. The man's head was bloody, his hands were tied behind him, and his neckerchief had been stuffed into his mouth and held there by another. He was half-dead when Stelton, with ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... appeared near the surface, and with a quick slice Clee made his first incision. With the cut, the prone slave bucked and snarled. Clee murmured soothing words to it in English, and, as the creature quieted down, made another cut. Again came the bucking and throaty protest; and this time, to Jim's dismay, he saw in the bestial faces of the animal-men ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... would bring her books, and read to her The poems of Dr. Donne, and the blue river Would murmur through the reading, and a stir Of birds and bees make the white petals shiver, And one or two would flutter prone and lie Spotting the smooth-clipped grass. The days went by Threaded with talk and verses. Green leaves pushed Through blossoms stubbornly. Gervase, unconscious of dishonesty, Fell into strong and watchful loving, free He thought, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... banks of the murmuring stream on her road to a wealthy weaver's. The young fellows saluted the fair one as they greeted no other. No one ventured, however, to accost her with unseemly speeches—a kind of thing, by the way, that young men at all times are very prone to. Maud was treated by every one like a saint. Maidens even, her equals in years, prized her highly; and in no way envied her the general admiration. This might be founded in the behaviour itself of Maud. More forward to oblige, to do good offices, more sweetly behaved, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Next arrives the Prone to Err Very ancient Chronicler, All that mythologic lore Swallowing whole and wanting more, Crediting what wholly lacked All similitude of Fact, Building on this wondrous basis All we know of early races; So the Past as seen by him Furnished from its chambers dim Hypothetical foundations Whence ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion, watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... charge their followers, / did crash of shafts resound. Risen eke was Hagen, / who erst unto the ground Was borne by mighty lance-thrust, / prone upon the grass. I ween that unto Gelfrat / nowise of ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... motive had placed her in this extraordinary situation, nor had I long to conjecture. Puss was skulking in a corner, and though the mutton was untouched, yet her conscious fears clearly evinced that she had been driven from the table in the act of attempting a robbery on the meat, to which she was too prone, and that her situation had been occupied by this faithful spaniel to prevent a repetition of the attempt. Here was fidelity united with great intellect, and wholly free from the aid of instinct. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... strong a man's health is, so much the more prone is he to sin. The more fat the sow is, the more she loves the mire. It is not so hard to sit up a night or two, as to watch for a whole year; just as it is not so hard to start well as it is to hold out to the end. One leak will sink a ship, and one sin will kill a man's soul. If a man ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... to preserve Dare from the consequences of folly, and a gentlemanly wish to keep as close to the truth as was compatible with that condition, his answers had not appeared to Paula to be particularly evasive, the conjuncture being one in which a handsome heiress's shrewdness was prone to overleap itself by setting down embarrassment on the part of the man she questioned to a mere lover's difficulty in ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... strode on—Kunti's strong son— And Bhima, and Arjuna followed him, And Nakula, and the hound; leaving behind Sahadev in the sands. But Nakula, Weakened and grieved to see Sahadev fall— His loved twin-brother—lagged and stayed; and next Prone on his face he fell, that noble face Which had no match for beauty in the land,— Glorious and godlike Nakula! Then sighed Bhima anew: 'Brother and Lord! the man Who never erred from virtue, never broke Our fellowship, and never in the world ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Yet in such hideous subter-human form, Vulgar as venomous! Dragon indeed, And dangerous, but with no soul save greed, No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind, The common enemy of humankind; Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns to blast, To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast Prone—as itself is prone—in common dust. The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the Just, All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought, All that co-operant Man hath won or wrought, All that the heart has loved, the mind has taught Through the long generations, hoarded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... onward, while the Texan searched the trail with keen eyes that missed nothing. Suddenly he drew up his horse. Blizzard had shied at something lying prone ahead of them, and The Kid's eyes had seen ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's book and the butcher's bill through the little ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... will tell you: yet, if you were not dunces, you would never ask me such a question; for is not he corpus naturale? and is not that mobile? then wherefore should you ask me such a question? But that I am by nature phlegmatic, slow to wrath, and prone to lechery (to love, I would say), it were not for you to come within forty foot of the place of execution, although I do not doubt to see you both hanged the next sessions. Thus having triumphed over you, I will set my countenance ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... words these for our black brother; but see how prone men are to invert truth, justice, and mercy in dealing with women. During the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... so prone to believe the marvellous, had faith in Mesmer, and reverenced him as a saint. Why should he not perform miracles with his hand, as did Moses with a rod, when he struck the rock? Why should not the power of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in the process of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that he could not close eyes ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... not soured Harry's temper, but he certainly appears more prone to take offence than in former days," was my inward comment, as I pondered over his last words. "I am afraid Fanny has annoyed him; I must speak to her, and give her a hint to be more careful for ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... been reading over this letter, dear Aunt Janet, and I am afraid the record is rather an alarming one. But don't you go building up superstitious horrors or fears on it. Honestly, I am only joking about death—a thing to which I have been rather prone for a good many years back. Not in very good taste, I suppose, but certainly very useful when the old man with the black wings goes flying about you day and night in strange places, sometimes visible and at others invisible. But you can always hear wings, especially in the ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... hath passed word to help His people in their need; but He saith not any where that He will alway help them right as they would have it. We be prone to think there is but one fashion of help, and that if we be not holpen after our own manner, we be not holpen at all. Yet, if thou take a penny from a poor beggar, and give him in the stead thereof an angel [half-sovereign], thou hast given him alms, though he ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... library work. Consequently we have this feminization to reckon with, and to me it is an active factor in the diversity of library practice to which I have referred, for women far more than men are prone ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... large harbour which struck his fancy was named in honour of the saint's day, Puerto de la Conversion de San Pablo, for the sun seldom went down without a Spaniard of those days thus propitiating a saint. We are more prone to honour the devil in these matters. The Gila they called Rio del Nombre de Jesus, a name never used again. So it often happens with names bestowed by explorers. The ones they regard most highly vanish, while some they ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... him along the garden-path, with the endless messages and warnings girls are so prone to give; and the young man, with a great softness at his heart, went away, as many another John has gone, feeling better for the companionship of innocent maidenhood, and stronger to wrestle with temptation, to wait and hope ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... could not fill his father's shoes; they were too big for him. He did become member for East Barsetshire, but he was such a member—so lukewarm, so indifferent, so prone to associate with the enemies of the good cause, so little willing to fight the good fight, that he soon disgusted those who most dearly loved the memory of the ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle he suddenly succumbed; his head dropped, and he lay prone in the grass, apparently as lifeless, as the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... transparent hot waves swam up and danced themselves into nothing; while from the river bank, a half-mile away, came a sound hotter than even the locust's midsummer rasp: the drone of a planing-mill. A chance boy, lying prone in the grass of the Court-house yard, was annoyed by the relentless chant and lifted his head to mock it: "AWR-EER-AWR-EER! SHUT UP, CAN'T YOU?" The effort was exhausting: he relapsed and suffered with increasing malice but ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... of mind. He heard a sound of voices at the front of the house, and sprang to his balconied window to listen. Captain Stewart and O'Hara were walking upon the brick-paved terrace and chatting calmly over their cigars. The man above, prone upon the floor, his head pressed against the ivy-masked grille of the balcony, listened, and though he could hear their words only at intervals when they passed beneath him he knew that they spoke of trivial matters in voices free of strain ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... half-breech'd legions swarm'd like moths around; But, ah! the half-breech'd legions, call'd in vain, Dismay'd and useless, fill'd the cumber'd plain; And while for servile aid the Doctor calls, [41]By P——t subverted, prone to earth he sprawls. [42]E'en then were heard, so Brazenose students sing, The grass-plot chains in boding notes to ring; E'en then we mark'd, where, gleaming through the night, Aerial crosses shed a lurid light. Those wrestlers, too, whom naked we behold Through many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... as the nature of the soul and immortality are prone to concentrate their attention on death and neglect the phenomena of birth, which surely are equally important. For if a soul survives the death of this complex of cells which is called the body, its ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Norridgewock on the Kennebec River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims to lands about ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... naturally prone to seek the company of those they love; and as their impulses are often at such times impatient of control, etiquette prescribes cautionary rules for the purpose of averting the mischief that unchecked intercourse and incautious familiarity might give rise to. For instance, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... might escape, and then she saw Ellerey with the sweat and grime of the conflict upon him. For an instant their eyes met, her lips whispered his name, and then she threw up her arms, and with a low cry fell prone upon ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... lain in wait With tender greetings, and the lights within Gleamed on the grave of Bliss that once had been. Fair Hope who daily poured into his ear Her rainbow promises gave way to Fear Who smote him blindly, leaving him to moan With bitter tears before the gateway prone. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... did I say?" shouted Shaddy excitedly, as all at once there was the sound of splashing and agitation in the water down beneath the submerged trees; and directly after the serpent's tail rose above the trunk of one of those lying prone, and gleamed and glistened in the blaze as it undulated and bent and twined about. Then it fell with a splash, and beat the water, rose again quivering seven or eight feet in the air, while the water all around seemed terribly agitated. There ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... foul-spoken, repulsive wretches inside and out. In all the party there obtains a certain twitching character of mouth and furtiveness of eye, that hint how the coward is lurking under the bully. The hint is quite correct, for they are a slinking sneaking set, far more prone to lie down on their backs and kick out, when in difficulty, than to make a stand for it. (This may account for the street mud on the backs of Numbers five, six, and seven, being much fresher than the stale splashes ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... back. We kept on. There was hardly one who lost in step. The commanders whispered in the darkness, "Close up the ranks." The men behind those who had fallen jumped across the bodies of their comrades lying prone, and joined in immediately behind those in the ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... frosty or begins to rub off in spots, we are so prone to say, "I am aging rapidly." It pays to advertise. We always get results. See the one shrivel who goes around front-paging his age. Age is not years; age ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... progress and decline of conservatism. For better or for worse the modern man is intellectually more self-reliant than his ancestors, more prone to try new inventions and to profit by new discoveries, more conscious and therefore more critical of conditions about him, more convinced that he lives in a better world than did his fathers, and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... appellation of Roughhead; and Herbert Roughhead being assailed, at his entrance into the room, by a variety of petty reproaches and maternal witticisms upon his uncouth appearance, became bashful and awkward, averse from polite society, and prone to the less fastidious company of servants in the stable and the kitchen. Mrs. Harcourt absolutely forbade his intercourse with the postilions, though she did not think it necessary to be so strict in her injunctions as to the butler and footman; because, argued she, "children will get to the ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... score which, by the after-judgment of five nations, remains unsurpassed in the history of opera save by the music-dramas of one Richard of Bayreuth. Already, in his heart, Ivan knew the value of his work. But his nature, ever prone to self-depreciation, never wholly believing in his own power till another had assured him of it, cried out for confirmation of his secret hope. With the stamp of Zaremba's approval, Petersburg, first ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... which he felt it his duty to interpret to men, hinderances and trammels to the development of his genius. The laurel tree of Petrarch's garden is a fair type of one phase of the poet's own speech, prone to derive its significance from extraneous sources and overloaded with borrowed metaphor. But the laurel receives a new meaning if we picture to ourselves Madonna Laura reclining in its shadow on the banks of the little river, with flowers scattered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... indignation, the boys, freely ringing the changes of rebellion, had avowed to one another that they would acquaint the dean with the head-master's favouritism, and request his interference—as too many of us do when things happen that annoy us. We are only too prone to speak out our mind, and to proclaim what our remedy or revenge shall be. But when our anger has subsided, and we see things in their true light, we find that those boasts were only loud talking, and cannot be acted upon. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the moment for the intervention of that tiny glimmer of reason which Darwin so generously grants to animals. Do not, if you please, confound reason with intelligence, as people are too prone to do. I deny the one; and the other is incontestable, within very modest limits. It was, I said, the moment to reason a little, to discover the cause of the hitch and to attack the difficulty at its source. For the Tachytes the matter was of the simplest. She had but to grab the body by the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... by the name of Cape Cod, no one can positively tell, not even themselves. The last opinion seems to be that of the most sensible people of the island. So prevailing is the disposition of man to quarrel, and shed blood; so prone is he to divisions and parties; that even the ancient natives of this little spot were separated into two communities, inveterately waging war against each other, like the more powerful tribes of the continent. What do you imagine was the cause ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... black sea, the thrust of the vessel threw up a great welt which bordered the wedge of disturbed waters: phosphorescence gleamed like great wet stars. The tips of cigarettes glowed on the forward deck where members of the crew lay prone, exchanging occasional words in the hushed voices races not far from nature use in the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... and Fred had reached the sill, when there was a bright flame, which illumined the smoke-filled room, and he uttered a cry for help, and hesitated, for he had caught a glimpse of those who had preceded him lying prone ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... doubted if Mr. Croker realizes how prone and dead he is. One knows when one is wounded, but one knows not when one is killed. Some near day, or some far day, Mr. Croker will seek to return. Then, and not until that time, will he comprehend the palsy that has stricken his supremacy. Mr. Croker ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; waterborne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... jealous disposition of the Turk, has a mortality of three out of every four, according to Chardin, and of two out of every three, according to Clot Bey, the chief physician of the Pasha,[36] and of nine out of ten, according to Bisson. So prone to reach high offices were intelligent eunuchs that it is related that parents were at times induced to treat their boys in the manner above stated, that they might be on the highway to royal favor, honor, and rank; such is the ennobling tendency ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the teapot and eyed her parent with a puzzled frown. That frown had sat too often on her cheerful face during the past three months. In truth, Mr. Benny as a regrater fell disastrously short of success, being prone to sell at monstrous overweights, which ate up the profits. When Nuncey at length forbade him to touch the scales, he gave away apples to every child that chose to edge around the ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Creator—for we were like-minded friends, and no subject was tabooed. We conversed freely about whatever chanced to enter our minds—of things past, present, and to come. We spoke of God the Saviour, of redemption and of sin. Then, with that discursive tendency to which most minds are prone, we diverged to home and civilised lands, contrasting these with life in the wild-woods of the Great Nor'-west. After that we became sleepy, and our converse was more discursive—at times even incoherent—in the midst of which Lumley reverted to his unfinished exposition of grossness, and, ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... that it might be because Socialists as a class, speaking roughly, are generalizers. They do not see vividly and deeply the universal in the particular, the universal in the individual, the national in the local. They are convinced by counting, and are moved by masses, and are prone to overlook the Spirit of the Little, the immensity of the seed and of the individual. They are prone to look past the next single thing to be done. They look past the next single man to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... flung his right hand toward his pistol butt. There was a silent struggle; a shot, one of the young man's arms swung out—flail like—the clenched hand landing with a crash. The big man went down like a falling tree—prone to the ground, his revolver flying ten feet distant, a little blue-white smoke curling lazily upward out of its muzzle. The big man was raised again—bodily—and hurled down again. He lay face upward in the white sunlight—a mass of bruised and ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... beyond the sunset's golden choir, Instead of one august enduring sleep, There waits a life where memory shall keep Her ancient force and hope her old desire, Now, even now, on altars cleft and prone Rekindle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... the prone position is resumed, make a uniform and efficient pressure along the spine, removing the pressure immediately, before rotation on the side. (The pressure augments the expiration, the rotation ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... moralising, was not prone to indulge in sentiment when circumstances called him to action. He had come suddenly in sight of the wreck on turning the point of the frowning cliff where the gallant ship had met her doom, and stood only for a few seconds to gaze sadly ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... his horse rared up on his hind legs till he fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise. Vainly the neighbours averred ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of Dickens whilst at school," Mr. Thomas continues, "is that of a healthy-looking boy, small but well built, with a more than usual flow of spirits, inducing to harmless fun, seldom or never I think to mischief, to which so many lads at that age are prone. I cannot recall anything that then indicated he would hereafter become a literary celebrity; but perhaps he was too young then. He usually held his head more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Ayala, in his recent novel, La Pata de la Raposa, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... sage, while, slyly stealing, The nymphs their fetters around him cast, And,—their laughing eyes, the while, concealing,— Led Freedom's Bard their slave at last. For the Poet's heart, still prone to loving, Was like that rack of the Druid race,[1] Which the gentlest touch at once set moving, But all earth's power couldn't cast ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... as one might suppose. It was surrounded by swamps everywhere. And it had been raining, of course. It always seems to have been raining in France during this war. There were duck boards over the swampy ground, and a single mis- step might send one prone in the ooze up to ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... we are all prone to stare backward. Who lives in the present? Do you? When we are young we pant for the future, that pitches painted tents before us. When we are older, we live in the past, that wraps itself in a sacred gilding glamour, and is vocal with ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
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