"Acquisitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type. He seemed indeed to be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other. His wandering eyes, his long acquisitive fingers, his rapid movements showed him still the hunter on the trail, to whom everything else was in truth indifferent but the satisfaction of an instinct which had grown and flourished on the ruins ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... did not stop to reason even after he had vented the first edge of his rage upon the innocent bill poster. He let himself intuitively guess at the whole damning chain of the Fat Baritone and his eternal gossiping and the pretty actress and the acquisitive manager. The intensity of his manner when he pulled open the manager's door frightened the manager's stenographer into an unwilling admission that Mr. Graemer had just left for Brooklyn. And a dazed taxi starter, who decided that somebody's life ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Queen's Gate, turning to Lady Davenant in her distress in order to turn somewhere. Her old friend was at home and by extreme good fortune alone; looking up from her book, in her place by the window, she gave the girl as she came in a sharp glance over her glasses. This glance was acquisitive; she said nothing, but laying down her book stretched out her two gloved hands. Laura took them and she drew her down toward her, so that the girl sunk on her knees and in a moment hid her face, sobbing, in the old woman's lap. There was nothing said for some time: Lady ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... to the conclusion that the exhaustively economic interpretation of contemporary history is inadequate to meet the present situation. In his suggestive book, "The Acquisitive Society," R. H. Tawney, arrives at the conclusion that "obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... when our minds are merely acquisitive, storing up impressions and information; and it prolongs that period of acquisition to maturity by always throwing facts in our way. Its purpose is not to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for its ideal mere intelligence and not social usefulness. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Public Benefits, 1714. The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices. Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, and rivalry are the roots of the acquisitive impulse, and contribute more to the public good than benevolence and the control of desire. Virtue is good for the individual, it is true, since it makes him contented with himself and acceptable to God and man, but great states require stronger motives to labor and industry in order to be prosperous. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... are strangely fair! Fair—for the jewels that sparkle there,— Fair—for the witchery of the spell That ivory keys alone can tell; But when their delicate touches rest Here in my own do I love them best As I clasp with eager, acquisitive spans My glorious treasure ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... instinct; thus, crouching, stalking, springing and teasing the mouse when caught, have been proved to be instinctive in young cats. Some animals have definite food-storing instincts also, and possibly food-storing shows the acquisitive or collecting tendency in its lowest terms. Possibly, that is to say, hunting and collecting, as well as disgust (primarily of bad-tasting or bad-smelling food), are originally parts of the food-getting behavior, having ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... households. "There were several hundreds of them." It is not surprising that under a ruler addicted to such practices the British sailors who frequented the Burmese ports should have been subjected to maltreatment. Their complaints reached the ears of the iron-fisted and acquisitive Lord Dalhousie, who himself went to Rangoon in 1852, and forthwith "decided on the immediate attack of Prome and Pegu." M. Dautremer speaks in flattering terms of "the tenacity and persistence of purpose which make the strength and glory of British policy." He might ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... forth torrents of feeling, and produce rhapsodies of sentiment. The propensities naturally restrict their expression to a specific object of sense; the emotions respond to immaterial being. The tendencies of the former are acquisitive, selfish, gratifying; of the latter, bestowing, expanding, diffusing. The one class is restricted to the orbits of time and matter, the other flows on through the limitless cycles of infinity and immortality. The former is satiated in animal gratification, the latter ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... were slightly astonished. During the youth of the twins, the wives of several gentlemen present had called at intervals to inspect the growth of Anthony Seagrave's grandchildren, particularly those worthy and acquisitive ladies who had children themselves. The far-sighted reap rewards. Some day these baby twins would be old enough to marry. It was prudent to remember such details. A position as an old family friend might one day prove ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... action of the cerebral temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained—these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted the kind of acquisitive power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all operations. A dim explanation of phenomena once vivid must at all events for the moment suffice us; it being obviously no account of the matter ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... life, my girl. He has no imagination. His feeling runs straight in the direction of sensuality. He's as ignorant and as clever as they're made. He's never done a stroke of honest work in his life, and despises all those who are fools enough to toil, me among them. He is as acquisitive as a monkey and a magpie rolled into one. His constitution is made of iron, and I dare say his nerves are made of steel. He's a rare one, I tell you, and I'll make a ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean—not yet—and whose head is very high up—in Pomerania, the breeding place of such precious Grenadiers that Prince ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of the Bight of Tyee, a quarter of a century passed. A man may prosper much in twenty-five years, and Hector McKaye, albeit American born, was bred of an acquisitive race. When his Gethsemane came upon him, he was rated the richest lumberman in the state of Washington; his twenty-thousand board-feet capacity per day sawmill had grown to five hundred thousand, his ten thousand acres to a ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... all myself, Mickey," explained Douglas. "I happened to select a father who was of an acquisitive turn of mind. He left me enough that I can have a comfortable living in a ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... thing likely to ensure for Bubbles a reasonably happy and normal life. Blanche Farrow knew enough of human nature to realize that the kind of love Bill Donnington felt for her strange little niece was of a high and rare quality. It was very unlike the usual selfish, acquisitive love of a man for a maid. It was more like the tender, watching, tireless devotion certain mothers have for their children—it was infinitely protecting, infinitely forgiving, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... vice have reduced them to a few scattered communities and some stragglers, and a legend, the admiration of boyhood. Boys they were, pugnacious, hunters, loyal, and cruel, older than the merrier children of the South Seas, younger and simpler than the weedy, furtive, acquisitive youth who may figure our age and type. "We must be a Morally Higher race than the Indians," said an earnest American businessman to me in Saskatoon, "because we have Survived them. The Great Darwin has proved it." I visited, later, a community of our Moral Inferiors, an Indian ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... and acquisitive propensities, we of the metropolis have found time to wish one another a happy new-year, and to send friendly greetings to our country cousins also. We don't like to take the step from one year into another without a coup d'amitie. Besides all which, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... so insatiate that it not only combines with itself but seizes upon other substances, particularly those having an acquisitive nature like its own. Such a substance is carbolic acid (phenol) which, as we all know, is used as a disinfectant like formaldehyde because it, too, has the power of attacking decomposable organic matter. Now Prof. Adolf von Baeyer discovered ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... learnt to row and swim, and acquired a certain precocious knowledge of the world, and proficiency in tying a white neckcloth. The labours of the classics and science were alike distasteful to him; study of any kind he abhorred; yet so acquisitive was his intellect, retentive his memory, and powerful his ability, that when he left Eton at eighteen, few youths presented a more showy surface of information. He had had one or two narrow escapes from expulsion for offences, in which the vices of maturer years were mixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... rather of Chinese, who are also a cold-blooded race: slow, watchful, inquisitive, acquisitive, and full of the sense of humour. There are fishes in the Great Aquarium whose faces ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... his mind whether he should not go down and post up the daily record of his impressions which he kept for his home-staying sister. But the cigars of Colonel Cochrane and of Cecil Brown were still twinkling in the far corner of the deck, and the student was acquisitive in the search of information. He did not quite know how to lead up to the matter, but the Colonel very soon did ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... years the sensitive, injured and pathetic little orphan had become a plump, rosy beauty of the Russian type, a woman of bold and determined character, proud and insolent. She had a good head for business, was acquisitive, saving and careful, and by fair means or foul had succeeded, it was said, in amassing a little fortune. There was only one point on which all were agreed. Grushenka was not easily to be approached and except her aged protector there had not been one man who could boast of her favors during those ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... were strengthened with the addition of 14 officers and 283 other ranks. Of these, 8 officers and 170 other ranks had been casualties in the recent operations, and the remainder were fresh from the United Kingdom. About this time the native village of Jelil yielded to our acquisitive pioneers an upholstered sofa and arm-chair. These became very precious in the eyes of headquarters mess and wherever we went they went also, excepting when they were lent to a relieving unit, the terms as to return being carefully arranged. Later on, when the ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... general preparedness for public speech. But preparation consists in something more definite than the cultivation of thought-power, whether from original or from borrowed sources—it involves a specifically acquisitive attitude of the whole life. If you would become a full soul you must constantly take in and assimilate, for in that way only may you hope to give out that which is worth the hearing; but do not confuse the acquisition of general ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question, but not to answer—forever to raise difficulties, and never to solve them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,' rallied ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith |
