"Assimilating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beasts to the view of the populace. Facts like this mark the standard of public feeling, and may teach us that there was little real consideration for women in those times;—and where that is not found, there can be little refinement. Scantiness of information, and the necessity of assimilating to modern tastes a picture which, if it could have been obtained, would probably have been disagreeable, has obliged the Author of Waverley to draw much from the resources of his poetical mind in the depicting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... a matter of course, this King Arthur, the ideal hero of later ages, was a less commanding personage in the early forms of the legend than when it had acquired its splendid distinction by borrowing and assimilating other mythical tales. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... course of its life-history two very distinct phases: the vegetative, or growing, assimilating phase, and the reproductive. The former is in many cases inconspicuous and therefore unobserved; the latter generally receives more or less attention at the hands of the collector of fungi. The vegetative phase ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... renounced all property and were sworn to celibacy, while they submitted themselves to penances of such rigour that their lives were often endangered, if not shortened. Below them were the mass of believers who were allowed to marry and to live in the world, assimilating themselves so far as possible to the ideal set before them by the higher caste. From the Perfected were chosen officers with the names of bishop and deacon, the latter acting as assistants to the chief officers. The ritual was simple but definite, and the most ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... interrupted and delayed the literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and {65} glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared Tottel's Miscellany, containing songs ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature and assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don Marquis and Mencken write—at their best—as lightly and as trippingly as any past master of the feuilleton. There is nobody writing in the daily press in Paris to-day who does the feuilleton as well as they do it. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, and though in 1846 the three provinces joined to pay the expenses of such a survey, which was completed in 1848, British {93} North America was for the ten years which followed Lord Durham's Report too busy assimilating his remedy of Responsible Government to have much energy left for practical affairs. But in 1848, along with the triumph of the Reformers alike in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, railways succeeded Responsible Government as the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... The confusion between b and v was evidently a great source of error, and their nice discrimination, to which Cassiodorus devotes four chapters, a very crux of accurate scholarship. We see also from a passage in the 'De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum[94]' that the practice of assimilating the last letter of the prefix in compound words, like illuminatio, irrisio, improbus, though it had been introduced, was as yet hardly universal; and similarly that the monks required to be instructed to write quicquam for euphony, instead ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... the year 1893 it had been a limited monarchy, but at that date it was felt, by the progressive party in the state, that monarchy had had its day, and that the friends of such a form of government should give way to more liberal institutions, assimilating to the institutions of the United States, and to become a part of which Great Republic is the earnest desire of all those who have the interests of the Islands at heart. The monarchy, in a bloodless revolution, disappeared and the Republic took ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... of the means requisite for assimilating Finland we can not help reckoning, first and foremost, with this fact, that by the will of Russian emperors that country has lived its own particular life for nearly a century and governed itself in quite a special manner. Another consideration that should be taken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Federal Union was a combination of strength and freedom such as the world had never seen. With this for its organic form, with its spiritual lineage drawn from the Puritan, the Quaker and the Cavalier, with Anglo-Saxon stock for its core, yet with open doors and assimilating power for all races, and with a continent for its field of expansion,—the American people became the leader and the hope of humanity. This was the nation which the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... playgrounds, our library centers are essential to American democracy. All three are to be classed together as our most democratic and efficient agencies for training our people into their citizenship and assimilating them into the American body politic. Nowhere are we on a more common footing of an equality of opportunity than in the public schools, the public playground ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... powers alike for the control and supervision of old congregations, as for the supporting of new ones—for proposing and carrying out laws and regulations in furtherance of the philanthropic and educational portions of this scheme, and for assimilating all Jewish arrangements, either provincial ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... period was one of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading upward to dazzling ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so far as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of thinking instead of assimilating mine. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... organised animals is doubtful, though it may perhaps have affected the higher mollusca. But in marine animals it seems probable that the colours, however beautiful, varied, and brilliant they may often be, are in most cases protective, assimilating them to the various bright-coloured seaweeds, or to some other animals which it is advantageous for them ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Brahma never placed their women in charge of eunuchs. In Italy it was customary to emasculate boys that they might grow up with the faculty of taking the female parts in comedies, their voices thereby assimilating to that of the other sex, this being on the same principle that the basso-profundos were infibulated that they might retain ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes indisposed to ill-exercised power, even by the ordinary operation of human passions, must join with that society, and cannot long be joined without in some degree assimilating to it. Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest, manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough (and for a worthy man perhaps too ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Columbus came over the sea. All the world had changed since then, except the steadfast North. The Boy sat up suddenly, and rubbed his eyes. With that faculty on the part of the unlearned that one is tempted to call "American," a faculty for assimilating the grave conclusions of the doctors, and importing them light-heartedly into personal experience, he realised that what met his eyes here in Nicholas' house was one of the oldest pictures humanity has presented. This was what was going on by the Yukon, when ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... they undertake. Of their powers of absorption of any subject there can be no question. It has been urged, as against this, that the Japanese possess the defect not uncommon among people of any race, viz., that the capacity for rapidly assimilating knowledge is to some extent counteracted or rendered abortive by an incapacity to practically apply that knowledge. I may say for myself that though I have often heard this objection urged I have not seen any indications of this lack of ability ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... complete organization of the higher education. It is within quite recent years that the conception of endowing research for its own sake, leaving the Research Professor free altogether from direct teaching or with only a few good pupils whose work consisted chiefly in assimilating his ideas and helping with his researches, has become at all widely acceptable. Indirectly, of course, the Research Professor is just as much a teacher as the Teaching Professor, because his results become accessible ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... coincident. Philosophy is the love of Perfect Wisdom; Perfect Wisdom and Perfect Goodness are identical; the Perfect Good is God; philosophy is the "Love of God."[665] Ethically viewed, it is this one motive of love for the Supreme Wisdom and Goodness, predominating over and purifying and assimilating every desire of the soul, and governing every movement of the man, raising man to a participation of and communion with Divinity, and restoring him to "the likeness of God." "This flight," says Plato, "consists in resembling God (omoiosis Theo), and this resemblance ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... marvellous power of growth, we are prepared to believe them capable of producing changes wherever they get a foothold and begin to grow. Their power of feeding upon complex organic food and producing chemical changes therein, together with their marvellous power of assimilating this material as food, make them agents ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... while close adjoining is the vicarage, made picturesque by peaks and gables. At first glimpse, none of the houses appear to be less than two or three centuries old, and they are of the ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with thatched roofs, which give them the air of birds' nests, thereby assimilating them closely ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spiritual growth, but they can do no more. And often how bitterly are they disappointed when they see that, in spite of admonition and instruction and entreaty and example, and every external help and incentive, the inner nature, the heart, the soul of child or pupil is not assimilating spiritual truth, is not growing "in grace and in the nurture and ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... at him. "That makes more sense than you're capable of assimilating, Mr. Walking Status Symbol. My likes and dislikes aren't dictated by someone else. If I like corny music, I'll listen to it and the devil with Brahms or Dixieland or anything else that somebody else tells me is ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... at least, that the medium is merely an extraordinary dreamer. Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it done for him? Does a man do his own digesting, circulating, assimilating, or is it done for him? If he does not do these things himself, who does? About the physical functions through the sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly: the cosmic force. How, then, about the psychic functions? Are they done ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past. But I would raise no false hopes of myself. I am no thaumaturgist. Do you awake with a sinking sensation in the stomach? Have you lost the power of assimilating food? Are you oppressed with an indescribable lassitude? Can you no longer follow the simplest train of thought? Are you troubled throughout the night with a hacking cough? Are you—in fine, are you but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... his hotel very soon. To people of discernment and judgment it was not difficult to submit to the will of this full-bearded, broad-chested man, who knew so much better than they did what they ought to do if they wanted to get all the good out of Sadler's which they were capable of assimilating. ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... those of Edom, Moab, and Ammon. Their acceptance of civilisation was undoubtedly a step in the forward direction; but as certainly did it also involve a peril. It involved an overloading, as it were, of the system with materials which it was incapable of assimilating at once. The material tasks imposed threatened to destroy the religious basis of the old national life. The offensive and defensive alliances among the tribes gradually dissolved under the continuance of peace; the subsequent occupation of the country dispersed those whom the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... philosophy the same results which it produced in politics: it emancipated the reason from all previous prejudice and prescriptive shackles. Xenophanes was the first thinker who openly assailed the popular faith (B. C. 538). He divested the Great Deity of the human attributes which human vanity, assimilating God to man, had bestowed upon him. The divinity of Xenophanes is that of modern philosophy—eternal, unalterable, and alone: graven images cannot represent his form. His attributes are— ALL HEARING, ALL SIGHT, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... haranguing her audience, and at last regarded her friends as the chorus in a tragedy, there only to give her her cues. In fact, she had a very fine collection of phrases and ideas, derived either from books or by assimilating the opinions of her companions, and thus became a sort of mechanical instrument, going off on a round of phrases as soon as some chance remark released the spring. To do her justice, Dinah was choke full of knowledge, and read everything, even medical books, statistics, science, and jurisprudence; ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... formation of the League for securing peace, the constitution and regulation of tribunals for settling disputes, the resuscitation of International Law and reconsideration of its rules. An attempt should be made towards assimilating, by arrangement, the laws of the mother country and the colonies and also of different nations, affecting commerce, and also as regards personal status—nationality, naturalisation, and ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... future with the culture which I should acquire by actual contact with the hoary traditions of Great Britain. He advised me earnestly to disembark at Liverpool in a receptive and appreciative, rather than a critical and antagonistic, state of mind, to endeavour to assimilate all that was worth assimilating over there, remembering that this might give me as much as I wanted to do in the time. I remember he expressed himself rather finely about the only proper attitude for Americans visiting England being that of magnanimity, and about the claims of kinship, only once removed, ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... wandering rivers that interlace the vast forests of the Canadas, coasting the most remote lakes, and creating new wants and habitudes among the natives. Sometimes they sojourned for months among them, assimilating to their tastes and habits with the happy facility of Frenchmen, adopting in some degree the Indian dress, and not unfrequently taking to themselves ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... "translated," for though the historian usually compiled his material from more than one source, his method was to put together long, consecutive passages from various authors, with little attempt at assimilating them into a whole. The distinction between history and romance was slow in arising. The Morte Arthure offers within a few lines both "romances" and "chronicles" as authorities for its statements.[109] In Caxton's preface to Godfrey of Bullogne the enumeration ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... education in the case of university men joining the commercial side. Specialised education at school is of no practical value. There is ample time after a boy has started business to acquire all the technical knowledge that his brain is capable of assimilating. What we want when we take a boy is to assure ourselves that he has ability and moral strength of character, and I submit that the true function of education is to teach him how to learn and how to live—not how to make a living. We are interested naturally ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... flowering bean and lucerne fields, filled and fed us, body and soul, with delicious perfumes. In like manner we can recollect the good things we consumed long years ago—the things we cannot eat now because we are no longer capable of digesting and assimilating them; it is like recalling past perilous adventures by land and water in the brave young days when we loved danger for its own sake. There was, for example, the salad of cold sliced potatoes and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... lead to grave error in the judgment of men, and therefore in the management of affairs. There is no art in which either the barrister, the politician, or, for that matter, the journalist excels so much as in the rapid grasp of a logical position, the power of assimilating great masses of material against it or for it, and of putting out the results of this research again in a lucid and convincing form. Anyone listening to such an exposition would be tempted to believe that here was a man of such high general ability that he would be perfectly ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... strata deposited at the bottom of the sea, are not the products of river-sediment solely, but are in part due to the actions of waves and tidal currents on the coasts. In the second place, we find that Hutton's conception of upheaval by subterranean forces, has not only been modified by assimilating these subterranean forces to ordinary earthquake-forces; but modern inquiries have shown that, besides elevations of surface, subsidences are thus produced; that local upheavals, as well as the general upheavals which raise continents, come within the same category; and that all these changes ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... dealt with clothes, men, and the show business, in that order of importance. Presently one of the young men sauntered diffidently across the room and added himself to the group with the remark that it was a fine day. He was received a little grudgingly, Jill thought, but by degrees succeeded in assimilating himself. A second young man drifted up; reminded the willowy girl that they had worked together in the western company of "You're the One"; was recognized and introduced; and justified his admission to the circle by a creditable ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... In the latter he is 'vita vivificans, principium spiritualis, id est, verae reproductionis in vitam veram'. Now this principle, or 'vis vitae vitam vivificans', considered in 'forma passiva, assimilationem patiens', at the same time that it excites the soul to the vital act of assimilating—this is the Blood of Christ, really present through faith to, and actually partaken by, the faithful. Of this the body is the continual product, that is, a good life-the merits of Christ acting ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 1897 it even opposed the national Czech demands. Later, seeing the duplicity of their German comrades who recognised the state right of Finland and Hungary, but not that of Bohemia, and who openly preached the necessity of assimilating the Slavs, the Czech Socialists began to identify themselves more and more with the national struggle for independence. They organised their own trade unions, which brought them into open conflict with the Austrian Socialists. This question was discussed at the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... all marriage ceremonies are essentially religious, as involving the conception of something strange and dangerous in the contact of men and women; they are intended, he thinks, to neutralize dangers by reversing taboos and by assimilating the two persons each to the other, the dangers in question being not merely distinctly sexual but those of contact in general. Though he carries his application of the principle of taboo too far, he has collected a large number of examples which illustrate the separation between the sexes ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... prevails in the United States, we are not long in discovering that it rests in great part on a misunderstanding: men mistake coexistence for amalgamation. I do not fear to affirm that the second would be as undesirable as the first would be desirable. Why dream of blending or of assimilating the two races? Why pursue as an ideal frequent marriages between them, and the formation of a third race: that of mulattoes? America does right to resist such ideas, and to inscribe her testimony against such a ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... auxiliary to the Chinese. Within a very recent period, since the acquisition of knowledge has become a necessity in Japan, a society has been formed by the most prominent men of the empire, for the purpose of assimilating the spoken and written language, taking the forty-seven native ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... with the work of the Greeks, we shall state briefly the contributions to the stream of civilization which have come down to us from each of the important historic peoples or groups or forces, and shall trace the blending and assimilating processes of the centuries. While describing briefly the educational institutions and ideas of the different peoples, we shall be far less concerned, as we progress down the centuries, with the educational ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Europe, takes possession of whole regions of the globe to meet the needs of their commerce and to get rid of their paupers and malcontents. Instead of fighting capacities, as we do, thwarting them, nullifying them, the English aristocratic class seeks out young talent, rewards it, and is constantly assimilating it. Everything which concerns the action of the government, in the choice of men and things, is prompt in England, whereas with us all is slow; and yet the English are slow by nature, while we are impatient. With ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... sometimes formally and of set purpose. Old institutions get new names; new institutions are set up alongside of them. But the old ones are never swept away; they sometimes die out; they are never abolished. This comes largely of the absorbing and assimilating power of the island world. But it comes no less of personal character and personal circumstances, and pre-eminently of the personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances in which ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... admit that primitive or first nouns are representations of things, is there any better way of framing representations than by assimilating them to the objects as much as you can; or do you prefer the notion of Hermogenes and of many others, who say that names are conventional, and have a meaning to those who have agreed about them, and who have previous ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Western wisdom. He takes anything that Europe can give him—art, literature, science, metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters—neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. There's an ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... contagious, and his earnest desire to learn was flattering to his teachers. When it came to assimilating Spanish, however, he did not appear to be so apt a pupil. He managed, after many trials, to acquire "buenos dias" and "buenos tardes," and "senorita" and "gracias," and a few other short terms. Dick was indeed eager to get ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from much reading, and limited to monotonous to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside village which is not a—not a great village; she is quite marvellously delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and observe, not merely of transmuting it into something personal and racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... will find excellent studies among the pilgrims of Kief. The upper and educated classes, who in Russia are assimilating with their equals in other nations, and are therefore not tempting to the pencil or the brush, do not, as we have already seen, come in any numbers to these sacred shrines. It is the lower orders, who still preserve the manners and customs of their ancestors, that make these church festivals ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... stated. We must not forget Neefe, Beethoven's former teacher, who was pianist, or Simrock, all of whom formed a galaxy of virtuosi and composers unequalled by any similar organization. Beethoven greatly profited by his association with these chosen spirits, assimilating their experiences and ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... I am induced to draw from these premises is very different. The decline, and, finally, the total extinction nearly, of these pustules, in my opinion, are more fairly attributable to the cow-pox virus, assimilating the variolous, [Footnote: In my first publication on this subject I expressed an opinion that the smallpox and the cow-pox were the same diseases under different modifications. In this opinion Dr. Woodville has concurred The axiom of the immortal Hauter, that two diseased ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... the highest. Hence she had not merely got used to the horror, but in a measure satisfied with it; never suspecting, because never caring enough, that she had at the same time, and that not very gradually, been assimilating to the horror; had lost much of what purity she had once had, and become herself unclean, body and mind, in the contact with uncleanness. One thing she did know, and that swallowed up all the rest—that her husband's affairs ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... principal characteristic of a portico, (namely, the pediment), and destroying at once the august appearance which it gives to the building; we find in all the churches of Sir Christopher Wren the campanile to form a distinct projection from the ground upwards; thus assimilating nearer to the ancient form of building them entirely apart from the main body of the church. I should conceive, that if this idea was followed by introducing the beautiful detail of Grecian architecture, according to Wren's models it would raise our church ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... intellectual culture, and all together do not realize the idea of life. The tame lion may be taught many arts, assimilating him to the intelligence of man; but these remove him so much further from his appropriate life. Thus there may be a cultivated intelligence, which constitutes no part of the creature's life; and this without considering the ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... civilization, of commercial intercourse, and of literary and scientific research with all their enterprises of military aggrandizement, and with all their systems of civil administration. Such was the ascendancy of the Greek genius, so wonderfully comprehensive and assimilating was the cultivation which it introduced, that, within thirty years after Alexander crossed the Hellespont, the language, the literature, and the arts of Hellas, enforced and promoted by the arms of semi-Hellenic Macedon, predominated in every country ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... Soil Improvers.—All things considered, no class of plants grown upon the farm are so beneficent in the influence which they exert upon the land as clovers. They improve it by enriching it; they improve it mechanically; and they aid plant growth by gathering and assimilating, as it were, food ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... in that region, the care of the children is from the first in the hands of half-barbarized negroes, whose power of moulding and assimilating childish minds is peculiar, so that the teacher has to contend constantly with a savage element in the children which seems to have been drawn in with the mother's milk. It is, in a modified way, something the same result as if the child had formed its manners in Dahomey ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tenacious of their traditional independence as these Tyrolean mountaineers—descendants of those peasants, remember, who, led by Andreas Hofer, successfully defied the dictates of Napoleon. Though I think that she is going about the business of assimilating these unwilling subjects with tact and common sense, I do not envy Italy her task. Generally speaking, the sympathy of the world is always with a weak people as opposed to a strong one, as England discovered when she ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... events, by the omission of intermediate stages. But it must be taken into consideration that long before, in the Judeo-Hellenic and in the Arabic-Spanish period, the Jews had passed through their "century of reason." In spite of the intervening ages of suffering and gloom, the faculty of assimilating new principles had survived. For the descendants of Philo and Maimonides the rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century was in part a repetition of a well-known historical process. They had had the benefit of a similar course of studies before, and, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... eruption of Skaptur Jokull in that year. It lasted for several months as a pale blue haze, and occasioned so much obscurity that the sun was only visible when twelve degrees above the horizon, and then it had a blood-red appearance. Violent thunderstorms were associated with it, thus assimilating it with that of 1883. Alike in 1783 and 1831 there was a pearly, phosphorescent gleam in the atmosphere, by which small print could be read at midnight. We know nothing regarding the meteorological ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... striking diversity in their natural productions does not in any way correspond to the main physical or climatal divisions of the surface. The great volcanic chain runs through both parts, and appears to produce no effect in assimilating their productions. Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation that clothes its surface. The ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... is n't it better to buy little by little, enjoying every new object as you get it, and assimilating each article to your household life, and making the home a harmonious expression of your own taste, rather than to order things in sets, and turn your house, for the time being, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... same consequences follow, which followed last June," said Ezra Jennings—"if you suffer once more as you suffered then, from sleepless nights, we shall have gained our first step. We shall have put you back again into something assimilating to your nervous condition on the birthday night. If we can next revive, or nearly revive, the domestic circumstances which surrounded you; and if we can occupy your mind again with the various questions concerning the Diamond which formerly agitated it, we shall have replaced ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... assimilation, and that starch, which had been assumed to be a species of universal matiere premiere, is probably rather a general reserve for the elaborating work of the plant. If now the aldose groups tend to pass over into the starch form, representing a temporary overflow product of the assimilating energy, it would appear that the ketose or levulose groups are preferentially used up in the elaboration of the permanent tissue. We must also take into consideration the researches of Lobry de Bruyn showing the labile functions of the typical CO group in both aldoses and hexoses, whence ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... therefore, in which happiness might be attained is by merging one's nature in great Mother Nature, and following the direction in which she herself is moving: this again can only be accomplished by assimilating men's individual conduct with the triumphant force of Nature, the other force being always overcome with terrific catastrophes. The effort to assimilate the individual with the universal law is popularly known as the practice of morality. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Notwithstanding which, the body still continues to perform its proper functions, often for a considerable length of time; some contrivance, therefore, was necessary to guard against these accelerators of its destruction. There are two ways in which the living body may be preserved; the one by assimilating nutritious substances, to repair the loss of different parts; the other to collect, in secretory organs, the humours ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... of the American Revolution has long been confused with that of the French Revolution. As matter of fact, they stand at opposite poles. Our philosophy was religious, the French non-religious. America had been peacefully assimilating, for a century and a half, the doctrines of the Reformation. France had been held for two centuries and a half in a condition of mediaevalism, and the principles of the Reformation had little hold among the people. When the Americans spoke, it was with ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... disappear, and they go back to their play unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when this now UnDead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free. To this I am willing, but is there ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... believe in the existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a quantitative calculation as to the possibility of assimilating other Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground that while the Prussian type was strong enough to assimilate the Saxons and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to assimilate Austrians ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... faith—with calm submission, concealing her hate and contempt for all that new life. She learned the language very easily, yet understood but little of the new faith the good sisters taught her, assimilating quickly only the superstitious elements of the religion. She called Lingard father, gently and caressingly, at each of his short and noisy visits, under the clear impression that he was a great and dangerous power it was good to propitiate. Was he not now her ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... example, the priests, clothed in red and smeared with blood, offered a red-haired, red-cheeked man to "the red planet Mars" in a temple which was painted red and draped with red hangings. These and the like cases of assimilating the victim to the god, or to the natural phenomenon which he represents, are based ultimately on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, the notion being that the object aimed at will be most readily attained by means of a sacrifice which resembles the effect that ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... which the French gained the good will and friendly alliance of the Natives in Canada, by intermarrying with, and assimilating themselves to the habits and inclinations of, these children of the forest, an intimacy arose which induced the Indians to impart freely to the French their knowledge of the interior country. Among other ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... thing Forgotten fact is news when it comes again Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities Give thanks that Christmas comes but once a year Good protections against temptations; but the surest is cowardice Goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities Habit of assimilating incredibilities Human pride is not worth while Hunger is the handmaid of genius If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank Inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances It is easier to stay out than ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... process that continually gives us new material to digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating, rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own, but most of them are common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that was not in the first ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... insists that we must not forget that mental phenomena do not belong to the same order as physical phenomena. He points out that, when we make the word "interaction" cover the relations of mental phenomena to physical phenomena as well as the relations of the latter to each other, we are assimilating heedlessly facts of two different kinds and are obliterating an important distinction. He makes the same objection to calling the relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena causal. If the relation of a volition to the movement of the arm is not the same ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... Wordsworth, to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and speak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the language of the next generation. But he did it with the tact of a scholar also. English, for a quarter of a century past, has been assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but pedants will regret a great consequent increase of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... such minds; it had the wealth of much learning incorporated with it, yet had not been cast into rigidity nor dressed into primness by a technical and bookish legislation; it had gone on for centuries gathering in and assimilating stores from Nature and from Religion; it was rich with the life of a nation of brave, free, honest, full-souled, and frank-hearted men; it was at once copious, limber, and sinewy, capable alike of expressing the largest and the subtlest thought, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Greek sense—which is commonly called "original creation." And as with individuals, so with nations. By accepting in a lump a foreign culture a nation inevitably condemns itself for a time to intellectual sterility. So long as it is occupied in receiving and assimilating a flood of new ideas, unfamiliar conceptions, and foreign modes of thought, it will produce nothing original, and the result of its highest efforts will be merely successful imitation. We need not be surprised ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... things seen must be after the fashion of the unseen whence they come, as the very genius of embodiment is likeness, therefore the soul of man must of course have natural relations with matter; but, on the other hand, as the spirit must be the home and origin of all this moulding, assimilating, modelling energy, and the spirit only that is in harmonious oneness with its origin can fully exercise the deputed creative power, it can be only in proportion to the eternal life in them, that spirits are able to draw to themselves ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... secular and official writers, we may refrain from quoting from Mission authorities more than the statement of the Decennial Conference of representative missionaries from all India in 1902. The statement refers to South India. "Christianity," we are told, "is in the air. The higher classes are assimilating its ideas."[48] Thus from East and North and South, from officials and non-officials, from Europeans and natives, comes concurrent testimony. There is no declared Reformation, but Christian and Western ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... of the night in a singular light. Like many men of great intelligence, his perspicuity was not spontaneous, as it did not at once penetrate to the heart of things. As with all natures endowed with the faculty of living greatly in the present, of extracting, so to speak, the essence of it and assimilating it, his second-sight had need of a sort of slumber before it could identify itself with causes. Cardinal de Richelieu was so constituted, and it did not debar in him the gift of foresight necessary to the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sense of hunger will go away sooner. If you are very thin and have difficulty gaining weight you may find that the pounds go on easier because chewing well makes your body more capable of actually assimilating the ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Science, which the great Voltaire asked permission to join, while conferring with Ivan Shuvalof over the History of Peter the Great which he was then engaged in writing. There were no more ugly German costumes; French dress, manners and speech were the fashion. Russia was assimilating Europe: it had tried Holland under Peter, then Germany under Empress Anna; but found its true affinity with France under Elizabeth, when to write and speak French like a Parisian became the badge of high ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... amid far other scenes, by men whose creed and condition he despised. While Seneca was being guarded by his attendant slave through the crowded and dangerous streets of Rome on his way to school, St. Peter and St. John were fisher-lads by the shores of Gennesareth; while Seneca was ardently assimilating the doctrine of the stoic Attalus, St. Paul, with no less fervancy of soul, sat learning at the feet of Gamaliel; and long before Seneca had made his way, through paths dizzy and dubious, to the zenith of his fame, unknown to him that Saviour had been crucified through whose only merits he ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... once said, peace and rest were inconceivable while there existed strife and suffering in nature. Nowhere could there be found refuge; drawing near unto the divine, this pain only became wider, more intense, almost insufferable, feeling and assimilating the vastness of divine sorrow brooding over the unreclaimed deep. This pity, this consciousness of pain, not her own, filling her own, filling her life, marked her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... out on a short walk the next morning, assimilating my new knowledge to the rhythm of swinging footsteps. As I took a short cut through the weeds of a corner lot, my eye fell on a few loose printed sheets. A triumphant pounce proved them to be Sanskrit verse. I sought out a pundit ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the adventures at all. If it had not been for the quiet and persistent guardianship of her cowboys she might almost have forgotten Don Carlos and the raiders. Madeline was assured of the splendid physical fitness to which this ranch life had developed her, and that she was assimilating something of the Western disregard of danger. A hard ride, an accident, a day in the sun and dust, an adventure with outlaws—these might once have been matters of large import, but now for Madeline they were in order with all the rest ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... embodied it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took them from ancient, mediaeval, Renaissance, or modern life. He felt, and truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs, the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... assimilating what pleased me and giving it out again as my own appears in much of my early correspondence and my first attempts at writing. In a composition which I wrote about the old cities of Greece and Italy, I borrowed my glowing descriptions, with variations, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... aspect of the Incarnation depends upon our realizing intensely the true humanity of our Lord. The awful separating and purifying process that is ever being carried on in the fiery furnace of the Divine Holiness, ever consuming and ever assimilating, we expect to see in Him in the struggles of a truly human will. Holiness, to be truly human, must not only be a gift, but an acquirement. Coming from God, it must be accepted and personally appropriated, in the voluntary surrender of all that is not in accordance with it. In Jesus, as ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... the Timaeus, represent in images the idioms of the gods who preside over the parts of the universe. And the divisions of the essence of the soul in that dialogue shadow forth the total orders of the gods. To this we may also add that Plato composes politics, assimilating them to divine natures, and adorning them from the whole world and the powers which it contains. All these, therefore, through the similitude of mortal to divine concerns, exhibit to us in images the progressions, orders, and fabrications of the latter. ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... may be found by supposing all the nerves of involuntary motion which supply that tract with vitality, suddenly to be gifted with the exquisite sensitiveness to their own processes which is produced by its correlative object in some organ of special sense—the whole organism assimilating itself to a retina or a finger-tip. Sleep now disappeared. This initiated an entire month during which the patient had not one moment of even ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... greatest interest to her replies, till he could have written a Life of the celebrated man himself. His powers of acute observation, interest, and sympathy—in short, his intense faculty for human fellowship, as well as his capacity for assimilating information from books—were already at work; and the future novelist was consciously or unconsciously collecting material ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... seed is capable of assimilating, by well-determined and thoroughly specialized processes, the nutrient matter contained in its environment, precisely as the "primordial germ" develops under its environing conditions. From the moment they strike their rootlets ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... methods of colonies in other countries, such as the Barbadoes, Honduras, etc., where extraordinary privileges were offered settlers, free and large grants of land, absolvment from past debts, etc., that it makes an early example of the curious absorbing and assimilating power of American nationality, which ever grew and grew even against such ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his very dreams new and strange powers ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... three committees, sitting at St. Petersburg, to bring the coinage, the customs system, and the postal service of Finland into harmony with those of Russia. In June there appeared an imperial ukase assimilating the postal service of Finland to that of Russia—an illegal act which led to the resignation of the Finnish Ministers. In May 1891 the "Committee for Finnish Affairs," sitting at St. Petersburg, was abolished; and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... followed out the course of a literary development, beginning in grey antiquity with biblical narratives, assimilating Persian doctrines, Greek wisdom, and Roman law; later, Arabic poetry and philosophy, and, finally, the whole of European science in all its ramifications. The literature we have described has contributed its share to every spiritual result ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... are giving him his personal "copy"—to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree their dispositions are; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... having ceased her chatter, took the telegram and began feverishly to count the words. Then her tapping pencil slowed down and her brows contracted; she was assimilating their meaning. Then, with a blush, and a very becoming one, she looked at me with an expression of distress and said, "Do you really ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... affairs, and to execute his memorable settlement of that country: whilst eminent writers appear to be able, in scampering from Durban via Kimberley to Cape Town in a post-cart, to form decided opinions upon every important question in South Africa. The power of thus rapidly assimilating intricate knowledge, and of seeing straight through a wall whilst ordinary individuals are still criticising the bricks, is no doubt one of the peculiar privileges of genius—which is, perhaps fortunately for South Africa—rare. To the common run of mind, however, the difficulty of forming ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... impossibility of a beardless boy of sixteen or seventeen years, at all assimilating to the character of a warrior and mighty slayer of men, is of itself an insuperable obstacle to the complete personification of certain characters by a young gentleman of the age and stature of Master Payne. He might speak ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... of timidity as spring loosens the streams from the grasp of winter, and sends them forth in a rejoicing rush. The mind of youth, when impelled by this original strength and enthusiasm of Nature, is keen, eager, inquisitive, intense, audacious, rapidly assimilating facts into faculties and knowledge into power, and above all teeming with that joyous fullness of creative life which radiates thoughts as inspirations, and magnetizes as ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... time it brought to light as the opening portion of the History of Tacitus what are now known as "The Last Six Books of the Annals." These I shall now endeavour to point out were the handiwork of Bracciolini, to whose wondrous power of assimilating his literary abilities to those of another I must pay this just tribute;—that in those six books of the Annals he mastered the simplicity, though he came far short of ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Falstaff's page, and are about as near the standard as the original. Sir Fret. Ha! Sneer. In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; so that they lie on the surface like lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize! Sir Fret. [After great agitation.] Now, another person would be vexed ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... They keenly enjoyed English society and sights, and learned something of English life and character, which to one of them, at least, proved afterwards useful. Indeed this admirable young Prince, Albert, seemed always learning and assimilating new facts and ideas. He had a soul athirst ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... and internal rebellion, played a preponderant part in the defence of the French colonies in North Africa during the long struggle of the war. Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caid's little black ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... no need to coax his appetite now with luxuries, for his father used to banter him laughingly about its wolfishness, and compare his food-assimilating powers to those of Coffee and Chicory—boys who could literally graze upon meat by the hour together, and then grin, and show ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... both cases equally inexorable. It was useless to argue that she was his inferior in culture and social accomplishments; she was still young and flexible, and displayed an aptness for seizing upon his ideas and assimilating them which was fairly bewildering. And if purity of soul and loving singleness of purpose be a proof of noble blood, she was surely one ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to Nekhludoff to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. At first his capacity for assimilating the thoughts of others, and of expressing them correctly, had given him a position of supremacy among pupils and teachers in the gymnasium and the university, where qualities such as his are highly prized, and he was satisfied. When he had finished his studies and received his diploma ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... assimilating the spirit of the school of Squarcione, which in the next few years was to be rendered famous by Mantegna, another influence was asserting itself, which was sufficient to counteract the hard formalism ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Gravity was generalised, by assimilating the terrestrial attraction seen in falling bodies with the celestial attraction of the sun and planets; and when, by fair presumption, the same power was extended to the remote stars; when, also, the law was ascertained, so that the movements of the various bodies could be computed ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense, in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination I knew that the weary search was over and ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... right to all the good we can do them, he at once, by that thesis, includes generosity and beneficence within the category of justice. He is obliged to say, that our utmost exertions are due to our fellow creatures, thus assimilating them to a debt; or that nothing less can be a sufficient return for what society does for us, thus classing the case as one of gratitude; both of which are acknowledged cases of justice. Wherever there is a right, the case is one ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... constitution permitted such gifts to be first made, and not merely increased, after the celebration of the marriage, and have directed that they shall be called gifts 'on account of' (and not 'before') marriage, thereby assimilating them to dowries; for as dowries are not only increased, but actually constituted, during marriage, so now gifts on account of marriage may be not only made before the union of the parties, but may be first made as well as increased during the continuance ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... reader that Professor Hering is not responsible for this suggestion, though it seems to follow so naturally from what he has said that I imagine he intended the inference to be drawn,—if this is so, assimilation is nothing else than the communication of its own rhythms from the assimilating to the assimilated substance, to the effacement of the vibrations or rhythms heretofore existing in this last; and suitability for food will depend upon whether the rhythms of the substance eaten are such as to flow harmoniously into ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects. By enlightening the opinions, by expanding the patriotism, and by assimilating the principles, the sentiments, and the manners of those who might resort to this temple of science, to be redistributed in due time through every part of the community, sources of jealousy and prejudice would be diminished, the features ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... differences of race, and above the claims of political power. At once the most firm and the most flexible institution in the world, she is all things to all nations—educating each in her own spirit, without violence to its nature, and assimilating it to herself without prejudice to the originality of its native character. Whilst she thus transforms them, not by reducing them to a uniform type, but by raising them towards a common elevation, she receives from them ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... mean incentive to goodness. He was, in fact, the god of the Gaelic people, worshipped with no outward altar, but enshrined in the hearts of his admirers. How far the more admirable traits of Highland character may be attributed to the assimilating influence of the idea of Fingal we cannot decide. That our character as a people has been largely influenced for good by the power of his example we have no doubt. The bards, an order of the old Druidic hierarchy, became the priests ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... war, with all its horrors, was finally forced upon us and we needed statesmen and scientists and military leaders to guide and direct, they were at hand in the graduates of our colleges and universities—broadly trained men capable of assimilating, or learning, or in other ways gaining quickly, the specific form of efficiency needed in the particular activity assigned. And when we needed soldiers they were at hand in the person of our boys of the schools, both common and high, from every nook and corner of the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... coffee made from browned wheat or corn the best drink. Depend for a time upon liquid food that can be taken up by absorbents. The juice of lemons and other acid fruits is usually grateful, and {280} assists in assimilating any excess in nutriment. These may be diluted according to taste. With many, an egg ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot, where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the cauldron that they could never reassume their former unqualified and ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Mrs. Haldene, opening her prayer-book. Her tone implied that things would not go very smoothly for the interloper. "All this comes from assimilating English ideas," ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... much more serious was the aspect which it presented to us in Japan! We were more than mere participators in this civilization. We had grafted upon our own life, old, balanced, remote, isolated, the creator of great traditions, the newer and different ideas of Europe, assimilating the best of them without losing these that were strong and potent among our own. They had been fused into our life and, in the process, had enabled us to make an enlarged contribution to human progress. We had become so much a part of the world that nothing in it was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... some fifty aboriginal tribes in various stages of semi-civilisation or savagery, distributed all over the country from Sonora to Yucatan, and these are described elsewhere. It is not to be supposed that they are savages as a whole; for, on the contrary, they are remarkably gifted in some cases, assimilating the civilisation and intellect of the white man and furnishing excellent material for the country's citizens. The upper-class Mexicans, like the Peruvians or other Spanish-Americans when they are of unmixed white descent, naturally ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... of his European opportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know that there must be fallow periods—that the impact of new impressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowed for all that. But her past experience of Nat's moods had taught her to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions were fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it as well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too much excitement and sterile flattery... Mrs. Melrose? Well, yes, for a while... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey, no ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... it is in fact merely comfortable in a crude unimaginative way. Susan was one of those who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for assimilating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through windows or open doors as she passed by. She saw ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... I know are always cramming themselves with knowledge. But they never think. When they get a few minutes' leisure they grab a book and go to reading. In other words, they are always eating intellectually, but never digesting their knowledge or assimilating it. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... colon is not a cesspool but a digestive and assimilating organ. Its content is not poison but food. Active elimination is important not so much because delay causes autointoxication or poisoning as because too large a mass is hard to manage and irritates the intestinal wall. The problem is not so much one of toxicology as of simple mechanics. ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... adapting himself with fluidity to diverse circumstances and conditions; meeting with equal cheerfulness of confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him the passions are elemental, the dramas epic, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... maintained, there would be another revolution. Some writers vehemently objected to the proposition that the public should bear the expense of restoring the currency; some urged the government to take this opportunity of assimilating the money of England to the money of neighbouring nations; one projector was for coining guilders; another for ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unexpected strain of hardness in the Korean character. They found, underneath the surface apathy, a spirit as determined as their own. They succeeded, not in assimilating the people, but in ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... of age, and became at once prominent as a scholar among the two or three hundred other lads from all parts of the country. He was also a leader in athletic sports. He was not a bookworm, but he was a close student and possessed the happy faculty of assimilating knowledge from books and tutors far more easily and quickly than most of his fellows. In debating-societies he held his own well, and was conspicuous by his ability to ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... powers it manifests, if brought to bear systematically upon studies within the same range, would readily master them without help? This need for perpetual telling results from our stupidity, not from the child's. We drag it away from the facts in which it is interested, and which it is actively assimilating of itself. We put before it facts far too complex for it to understand; and therefore distasteful to it. Finding that it will not voluntarily acquire these facts, we thrust them into its mind by force of threats and punishment. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... to that end from the moment of her birth. Her father's fiery powers of expression; her mother's nature absorbed in one still dream of love and duty; her own solitary childhood in spite of the enormous household in which she was brought up; above all her brooding nature quietly absorbing and assimilating the knowledge and thought which were finding expression around her; the first years of married life in Cincinnati, where the slaves were continually harbored and assisted, notwithstanding the risks to life and property;—everything, in short, within and around her was nourishing the child of her ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... upon intellectual matters. It is out of the question to keep direct moral considerations constantly uppermost. But it is not out of the question to aim at making the methods of learning, of acquiring intellectual power, and of assimilating subject-matter, such that they will render behavior more enlightened, more consistent, more vigorous ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... be at home with one's contemporaries and to record one's intimacy means to see with the eye as well as the mind. The slow inductive method of personal contact is indispensable; and no reasoning from first principles, no assimilating of secondhand experience, with whatever touches of genius, can ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... most of them; some are fanciful and far-fetched; some are apt and felicitous; but all foreshadow the independent thinker and observer, and show that this "Intellectual Epicure" was feeding on strong meat and assimilating it. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... ho de Petros heistekei pros te thyra exo] (St. John xviii. 16). Has not this place, by the way, exerted an assimilating influence over St. John ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the slave; not only is he deprived of the artificial safeguards of the law, but has none of those natural safeguards enumerated above, which are a protection to others. But not only is the slave destitute of those peculiarities, habits, tastes, and acquisitions, which by assimilating the possessor to the rest of the community, excite their interest in him, and thus, in a measure, secure for him their protection; but he possesses those peculiarities of bodily organization which are looked upon with ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... identical in all its parts with that of the Sea-Anemone, it nevertheless presents one important difference. The body of the Sea-Anemone is soft, while that of the Coral is hard. It is well known that all animals and plants have the power of appropriating to themselves and assimilating the materials they need, each selecting from the surrounding elements whatever contributes to its well-being. The plant takes carbon, the animal takes oxygen, each rejecting what the other requires. We ourselves build our bones with the lime that we find unconsciously in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare, and always precious. I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... camp-stools and trout-scales, receive the same designation. And now comes the crowning triumph of this versatile term, as well as a happy illustration of what might be called its agglutinative and assimilating powers; for when horses and wagon have received their load of tent and equipments, and father, mother and the babies have filled up every available space, this whole establishment, this omnium gatherum of outfits, becomes neither more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... at the gates of Milan (I. ii. 129-44), renders it almost impossible that he could have gathered his knowledge of Northern Italy from personal observation. {43a} He doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled friends or to books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... him to understand that any effort of his own would probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required, nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such opportunities as sections of the social ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by one and reading aloud to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch |
