"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some night creature—at once ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... was gentle, almost hypnotic—"of course you know who the woman is that Mr. Warren was planning ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... she spoke with a marked foreign accent, for how much I would sell Mephisto. The artist protested, but she turned on him and gave him a tongue lashing of which I could guess the meaning, although the words were unintelligible to me. I couldn't quite grasp the situation, but the strange hypnotic power which the bear apparently exercised over cats had excited my curiosity, and I wished to investigate it at my leisure, so I politely but positively refused to name a price, and told her the animal was not for sale. The artist seemed relieved and she was very much disappointed, ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... by with dizzy and uniform speed; the country below slowly unrolls, and the steady drone of the Engine is almost hypnotic in effect. "Sleep, sleep, sleep," it insidiously suggests. "Listen to me and watch the clouds; there's nothing else to do. Dream, dream, dream of speeding through space for ever, and ever, and ever; and rest, rest, rest to the sound of my rhythmical hum. Droning on and on, nothing ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... before which others seem to bow in glad obedience. But whence do they obtain such magic power? What is the secret of that almost hypnotic influence over people which we would give anything ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... broke in upon the orchestra and demanded the tutti. Gruening, violently tremoloing, swore, helplessly. The men stared. Wildly, once more, Ivan indicated full orchestra. So there came one, furious, discordant crash, as all the instruments, obeying, in their customary, hypnotic manner, the motion of their leader, came in, each with his first notes, no matter how far ahead of the present measure they might be. The noise was, truly, something hideous! The men themselves grew panic-stricken; and each group strove madly to bring their particular theme out of the general ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... spoke up from the opposite side of the room under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,—"did you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape from our wicked doctor here? What a reputation ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... fist into my hand, and looks up with wide baby eyes, mutely asking for a little petting, and I snatch him up and hug him. And then, as I look over his shoulder at the other forlorn little mites, I long to take all 113 into my arms and love them into happiness. There is something hypnotic about this working with children. Struggle as you may, it gets ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... largely, the dusky hue of her complexion had vanished, and she looked a different being. The only trouble complained of was sleeplessness, but it did not interfere with the satisfactory progress of the case, and no hypnotic was given. After the first few days we had no return of the nerve-crises which in the country had formed so characteristic a part of her illness. Her hands and feet also, at first of a remarkable deadly coldness, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... her mission to awaken Europe to war against greed and avarice, hypocrisy and theft, robbery and violence? Lands which have slept and dreamed for centuries, do not easily awake. And a part of Europe still dreams deeply under the hypnotic influence of English cant and altruism, or at least of her ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the present, and fall ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... nobody could understand it. The doctor treated him for water on the brain, hypnotic irresponsibility and hereditary lunacy. Meanwhile his business suffered, and his health grew worse. He seemed to be living upside down. His days seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but to be all middle. There was no time for exercise or recreation. When he began ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... trooper-like blaring was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with the exaggerated mildness of his spectacled eye. "What do you think it means?" he asked. "Has he gone mad? We have been conducting some experiments involving—considerable mental strain. He and I and a lady. Hypnotic—" ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... them. And the defile continued, continued without end during days and months as it had done for years; and it seemed as if the whole world, all the miseries and sufferings of humanity, came in turn and passed in the same hypnotic, contagious kind of round, through that rocky nook, ever in search ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... work. About all I could do was keep 'em reminded there was ladies present and it wasn't a barroom where anything could be rightly started. Doc Martingale's feelings was running high, too, account, I suppose, of certain full-hearted things his wife had blurted out to him about the hypnotic eyes of this here Nature lover. He was quiet enough, but vicious, acting like he'd love to do some dental work on the poet that might or might not be painless for all he cared a hoot. He was taking his own drinks all ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... wildly grotesque nature. Figures increasingly horrible and menacing crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... that we could have shortened materially the duration of her illness—two years,—by hypnotic suggestion, but unfortunately her friends objected to this mode of treatment. Suggestion in the waking state had been abundantly used, but with little apparent effect of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Strange to say, the hypnotic influence must have stolen up from her ladyship's room on the floor below, and along the corridor to mine, for I found myself thinking: "She rather likes me, and can be useful, if she dominates the two girls in this way. I must do my best to keep ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... for fear of frightening them off; he liked the warmth and friendliness of their little bodies pressed close to him; there was something pleasantly hypnotic in the feeling of small hands tugging at him. Suddenly he became conscious of a change in the children's faces; the gladness was fading out and in its place was ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... The incident which turned his thoughts into this new channel was a performance of Bellini's 'Capuletti e Montecchi,' in which Madame Schroeder-Devrient sang the part of Romeo. This remarkable woman exercised in those days an almost hypnotic influence upon Wagner, and the beauty and force of this particular impersonation impressed him so vividly that he relinquished his admiration of Weber and the Teutonic school and plunged headlong into the meretricious sensuousness of Italy. The libretto of 'Das Liebesverbot' is ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and who like to drive through them or look at them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite—they do not ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... climax to her suspense seemed at hand. The unknown thing, until now too busy with the clock to take heed of her, paused for a moment or so, as if undecided what to do next, and then slowly began to veer round. But the faint echo of a voice below, calling her by name, broke the hypnotic spell that bound Diana to the floor, and with a frantic spring she cleared the threshold of the room. She then tore madly downstairs, never halting till she reached the dining-room, where she sank on a sofa, and, more ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... entered a bare, brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to us—papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at the ends of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies swaying lithely in alternation as they threw their weight against the light ropes. Other blacks, in the long white robes and exquisitely worked white skull caps of the Swahili, glided ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... in the ground, with the addition of this salt of science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken, and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs—"up there before our eyes, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... your ship, was built. The Universe is ours, and in due course we shall take it—just as in due course I shall take this vessel. Do your worst; I shall not speak." The creature's eyes flamed, hurling a wave of hypnotic command through Seaton's eyes and deep into his brain. Seaton's very senses reeled for an instant under the impact of that awful mental force; but after a short, intensely bitter struggle he threw off ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... prosaic. I was sure that no trick had been played upon me. I was sure that I had actually seen in the crystal what I had described to Emmeline, and that she, too, had seen it. But then, I argued, such an experience might be the result of hypnotic suggestion, or of thought transference, or of some other imperfectly understood agency.... Rosetta Rosa ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having thus made the mice desire to lose ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... professional hypnotist for many years, I have seen astounding and apparently miraculous results by individuals using self-hypnosis. Many of these cases seem unbelievable to those not familiar with hypnotic phenomena. It should be remembered, though, that many individuals seek hypnosis only when all other forms of therapy have failed. This is so common that hypnosis has come to be known as a port of last call. Yet, despite the seeming hopelessness of such cases, medical literature ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... said in quiet, incisive tones the voice of Henry Scott (of the Psychical Research Society). "I hardly dared to hope for so complete a triumph! My good friends, it is one a.m. As the clock struck twelve you sank into hypnotic trance; on the point of its striking one, you emerged. The hour of interval was telescoped in your waking consciousness to a few seconds. As for the lights—at half-past twelve Doctor Pennock went to bed. She turned them out as she passed through the house. ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... he was absorbed, as only Dumas has power to absorb his readers. The man of action in that great romancer exercised a sort of hypnotic power over Flint. The robust virility passed into the sinew of his soul. The romance possessed him utterly, and left him without even the power to criticise. It was he himself who stood in Queen Catherine's ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Democrat, must be endowed with some strange and hidden power through the exercise of which he could direct the movements and control the actions of those who might be brought in contact with him or subjected to his hypnotic influence; hence the anxiety and curiosity to hear the maiden speech of this strange and remarkable man. The voice in the House of a Democrat from the county of Lowndes was of so strange, so sudden, so unexpected and so remarkable that it was difficult for many to bring ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... hard to maintain. Somehow the inherent and masterful depression of her hostess was weighing her down. Outside the sun had settled in clouds, and a somber twilight stole in through the window. The voice opposite droned on, engrossing, dominating, hypnotic. Annie realized that unless she roused herself she would relapse into permanent silence, and so, in a lucky pause, as her eyes fell upon a strange object hanging above the mantelpiece, she grew aggressive for the moment, and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... bleeding foot upon the boy's neck—laughed until the place pealed and echoed with the unseemly clamour, causing the crowds outside, held only in check by the mental force of the handful of priests, to strain against the invisible hypnotic barrier, and cry to ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... a number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... early mesmerists are filled with records of cases of this rapport, in which "community of sensation" was present, and various supernormal phenomena, such as clairvoyance, etc., were manifested. No such phenomena are recorded in hypnotic seances, as a rule, which makes me suspect most strongly that mesmerism and hypnotism are not identical, in spite of the general belief that they are fundamentally one—all mesmeric phenomena being due to "suggestion." Of this, however, later. For the moment, I wish only ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Godfrey bent upon him a gaze that was positively hypnotic. "You will do it because I want you to, and because I tell you that, sooner or later, if you keep this cabinet safe where no one can get at it, the man we want will walk into our hands. And I'll tell you more than that, Simmonds; if we do get him, I'll ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... to have a hypnotic effect on the freckled boy; his big pupils contracted each time Abner came to ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... I could fetch 'em. I have hypnotic power. This boy will raise the ship for us. Loosen his bonds, ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... Mr. Brink, so I wrote to Mr. R. B. Bunnell, Superintendent of Telegraph of the P. Q. & X. Railroad at Kansas City, Missouri, saying I was an expert operator and desired a position on his road. Mr. Bunnell must have been laboring under a hypnotic spell, for by return mail he wrote, enclosing me a pass to Alfreda, Kansas, and directing me to assume charge of the night office at that point at the magnificent salary of $37.50 per month. This was a slight decrease from ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... of Young's studies of light might perhaps have gained earlier recognition had it not chanced that, at the time when they were made, the attention of the philosophic world was turned with the fixity and fascination of a hypnotic stare upon another field, which for a time brooked no rival. How could the old, familiar phenomenon, light, interest any one when the new agent, galvanism, was in view? As well ask one to fix attention on a star while a meteorite blazes ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... piercing gaze of the unkempt scoundrel, and, to my surprise, I found myself held mystified. Never before had any man or woman exercised such an all-powerful influence over me by merely gazing at me. That it was hypnotic was without doubt. The fellow himself with his sallow cheeks, his black beard, his deep-set eyes, and his broad brow was the very counterpart of those portraits which the old cinquecento artists of Italy painted of ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... examination methods in education had been destroyed by these expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates had substituted a few weeks of trances, and during the trances expert coaches had simply to repeat all the points necessary for adequate answering, adding a suggestion of the post hypnotic recollection of these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, of a quasi-mechanical ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... off the toque. Her hair fell in a mass on her snow-blotched shoulders. Her captor advanced upon her. He reached out and satisfied himself by touch that something was not there which he dreaded. In hypnotic fear she suffered that ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... was still more terrible. Notwithstanding his zeal, and the fact that he had given evidence against his own wife, he was arrested, charged with a similar offense. Whether hypnotic influences were exerted, or whether the examining justices merely imagined things against the prisoner, cannot be known at this time. The court records, however, state that while the witnesses were on the stand, they were so badly afflicted with fits and hurts, that the prisoner's ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... point shining with the unmistakably steady ray of a planet. Huge bats fluttered about him, and the great cloud-masses swept across the sky, being part of Saturn's ceaseless whirl. He found he was in a hypnotic or spiritualistic state, for it was not necessary for him to have his eyes open to know where he was. In passing one of the pools they had noticed, he observed that the upper and previously invisible liquid had the bright colour of gold, and about ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... healing in the touch of his big hand. Healing light streamed from his brown eyes, and his iron-gray beard sparkled with it. His presence in a sick-room seemed to fill it with waves of life, and his influence over the patients to whom he ministered was little short of hypnotic. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . . There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . . The father's sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable depression, without his wrathful exasperation. And she would never ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... only by the turning of Miss Gallifer's pages. It might have been three o'clock. Once more Barbara was lost in the unaccustomed hush, her eyes fixed on the white face on the pillow, in almost hypnotic restfulness. The pushing open of the door behind was so soft that she didn't notice. Miss Gallifer turned ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the first to make a sound—a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from him ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Bernheim, a Professor of the Medical Faculty in Nancy who is a champion of hypnotism has written a book on 'Suggestion and its Application in Therapeutics,' in which a great many hypnotic cures ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in Petrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers, engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do to the mere mortals who ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... "I've changed my mind about Newport. I guess I'll spend the summer on my own Hotel de Roof!" And he grinned; but he grinned alone. Wilson, the dry goods man, who laughed so joyously at everybody's jokes, was now watching, as if under a hypnotic spell, the lips of the man who sat on the high stool beside the ticker and called out the prices to the quotation boy. Now and again Wilson's own lips made curious grimaces, as if speaking to himself. Brown, the slender, pale-faced man, was outside in the hall, ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... she sits for hours and hours, with not even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring pot. It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you'd be surprised how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it's even less distracting than sheer silence. You don't know, after all, what on earth sheer silence means—even at Widderstone. But one can just realize a water-nymph. They chatter; but, thank ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... a drug derived from the hyoscyamus plant, much like belladonna, though more distinctly sedative. It is a hypnotic used often in mania and mental excitement. The feeling which Mrs. Cranston described is one of its effects. You recall the brightness of her eyes? That is one of the effects of the mydriatic alkaloids, of which this is one. The ancients were familiar with several of its ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... Or that other delightful abstraction—he has a Balliol accent too—with literary tastes and artistic rooms, where gambling takes place. He is invariably a coward, but dreadfully fascinating all the same; though he scorns women he has an hypnotic influence over them; something in his polished Oxford manner is irresistible. Throughout a career of crime his wonderful execution on the piano, his knowledge of Italian painting, and his Oxford manner never seem to ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... both stood still, and again Browning felt that strange spell stealing upon him, as if hypnotic eyes were peering out from the shadows and looking down into his soul. He shook himself, he even looked around in search of those eyes; but he saw nothing save the dark, gloomy woods ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... religious experiences and treats them as the substance and occupation of the highest life. We are disposed to describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally mean something morbid or hypnotic. But in India their validity is unquestioned and they are not considered morbid. The sensual scheming life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is the true and healthy life of the soul. More than that it is the type and foretaste of ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the beat of the tom-tom over the hills, calling the Indians to the Medicine Lodge dance. There was something weirdly fascinating in the reiterated turn, turn, that carried almost a hypnotic power as hour after hour it ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... la Tour, in Montjoie, a quaint small town somewhere in that hilly region of the Ardennes along the border between Luxemburg and Belgium. Our memory is rather vague as to Montjoie, for we got there late one evening, after more than seventy up-and-down miles on a bicycle, hypnotic with weariness and the smell of pine trees and a great warm wind that had buffeted us all day. But we have a dim, comfortable remembrance of a large clean bedroom, unlighted, in which we duskily groped and found no less than three huge beds among which we had ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... on that infernal Family History which was now such a bitter toil. But the day-dream passed. He knew perfectly well that he had not the courage to dismiss Alice. In the hands of that calm-eyed girl he was as putty. She exercised over him the hypnotic spell a lion-tamer exercises ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... certain play, you considered it the greatest play that had ever made its bow to Broadway; and you actually persuaded yourself to believe it—at least those who made the real successes were men who possessed that hypnotic power. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... withdraw his gaze from the figure of Mary Braddock. Her back was toward him,—resolutely, it seemed to David,—and she must have been conscious of the carnal eyes bent upon her. Somehow David had the feeling that she was battling against the impulse to turn in response to the hypnotic command. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Call on him, attended by referees. Maintain a general temperature of not more than sixty-five when you meet him on the campus. Buy him one ten-cent cigar during the fall and introduce him to one girl—age, complexion and hypnotic power to be carefully regulated by the rushing committee. Then you send him a little engraved invitation to amalgamate with you; and when he answers, per the self-addressed envelope inclosed, you are to love him like a brother for the next three ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... in her chair. Her face was of an ivory pallor and she seemed to have fallen back into the characteristic hypnotic trance. As for Bellward, he had dropped on to a sofa, a loose mass, exhausted but missing nothing of what was going forward, though, for the moment, he seemed too spent to take any active part in the proceedings. In the meantime Strangwise, his white, ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... that I had become the victim of the hypnotic power of Tushegoun Lama; but I preferred this to seeing an innocent Mongolian die, for I had not believed that Tushegoun Lama, after slashing open the bodies of his victims, could repair them ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... to connect with a flatfoot's jaw while he was trying to make hypnotic passes at me. He's coming ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... distant. The services were then open to the public, but eventually permission to attend them was withdrawn, because of the careless and sometimes irreverent behavior of young people who regarded the Shaker costumes, the solemn dances or marches, the rhythmic movements of the hands, the almost hypnotic crescendo of the singing, as a sort of humorous spectacle. I learned to know the brethren and sisters, and the Elder, as years went by, and often went to the main house to spend a day or two as the guest of Eldress Harriet, ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... first applause; and Trimmer's people, seeing the crowd had taken Hector's point, sprang to their feet and began to cheer. At a tense moment, such as this, cheering is often hypnotic, and good managers know how to make use of it on the floor. The noise grew thunderous, and when it subsided Hector was master of the convention. Then, for the first time, I saw how far he would go—and why. I had laughed at him all my life, but now I believed there was "something in him," ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me under the hypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name of God and Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother—in the name of all good things—I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more." Whether or no it was the result ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... his face again to the westward. This man, by name Tlapane, was called a "senoga"—one who holds intercourse with the gods. He probably had a touch of insanity, for he was in the habit of retiring no one knew whither, but perhaps into some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... look at it too long or closely," said Phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "As I have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. You are, of course, aware that many Eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. This ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... privileged," Fannia said. He remembered from the hypnotic language lesson that "chief" on Cascella meant more than it usually did on Earth. The chief here was a combination of king, high priest, deity and ...
— Warrior Race • Robert Sheckley
... symbolism—Schwellensymbolik, Jahrb. ps. F. III, p. 621 ff., IV, p. 675 ff.] that in hypnagogic hallucinations (dreamy images before going to sleep), besides all kinds of thought material, the state of going to sleep also portrays itself in exactly the same way that in the close of a dream or hypnotic illusions on awakening, the act of awakening is pictorially presented. The symbolism of awakening brings indeed pictures of leave taking, departing, opening of a door, sinking, going free out of a dark surrounding, coming home, etc. The pictures for going to sleep are sinking, entering ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... like Mercury," thought Mr. Lavender; and taking advantage of her interest in his hat, which she had knocked off in her effusions, he placed his hand on her head and crumpled her ear. The dog passed into an hypnotic trance, broken by soft grumblings of pleasure. "The most beautiful eyes in the world!" thought Mr. Lavender, replacing his hat; "the innocence and goodness ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the events that had happened. The telegram that Susie had received pointed to a definite scheme on Haddo's part, and suggested that his sudden illness was but a device to get into the studio. Once there, he had used her natural sympathy as a means whereby to exercise his hypnotic power, and all she had seen was merely the creation of his own libidinous fancy. But though she sought to persuade herself that, in playing a vile trick on her, he had taken a shameful advantage of her pity, she could not look upon him with anger. Her contempt for him, her ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Heights, where by operating from the vantage ground of the social and political center of the republic, like some chief marshal on the broad field of human events, she could, by the unseen and irresistible power of hypnotic suggestion, inspire, guide and control the causative and law-making forces which so powerfully affect all social and industrial conditions. Was it possible that spiritual unfoldment alone, could confer such marvelous power? ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... an objection it may be stated that the Coue method of Induced Autosuggestion is in no sense inferior to hypnotic suggestion. Coue himself began his career as a hypnotist, but being dissatisfied with the results, set out in quest of a method more simple and universal. Conscious autosuggestion, apart from its convenience, ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually exist is a question we need not determine. The poet does not demand our absolute ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... Sioned Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out his foot against the fender, almost overturning it, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... critters!" commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged and ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... to full strength. Her cheeks were flushed again, but this time with the color of health. The firelight played on her hair, glowing in it prismatically. Her eyes, as she turned them on him, caught the lights and drew them into their depths. They were once more fathomless and hypnotic. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... In those hypnotic experiments in which the operator merely makes the subject do some external act, we get no further than the fact that the person's individual will has been temporarily put to sleep, and that of the hypnotist has taken its place; still even this shows a power of impressing upon the subliminal ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... the black sky above. Yet even in this seclusion the scene remained as light as it had been outside the woods in the open. Darkness indeed was impossible in this land; under all circumstances the light seemed the same—neither too bright nor too dim—a comfortable, steady glow, restful, almost hypnotic in ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wanted to know who it was had told me. I refused the information, because it was evident they would have been angry with him. Everett's theory was that one of them had dreamt it—probably Camelford—and by hypnotic suggestion had conveyed to the rest of them the impression that they had dreamt it also. He added that but for one slight incident he should have ridiculed from the very beginning the argument that it could have been anything else than a dream. But what that incident ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... portrait of St. Francis, Jeanne rose and started forward; she was a poor creature torn by passions, to whom the images of celestial peace, grown rigid on the sacred walls, called in vain. All before her was silence and void. She was following paths unknown to her, swiftly, securely, as one in an hypnotic trance. She passed through dark and narrow places, through light and broad places, never hesitating, never looking to right or left, all her senses sharpened and concentrated in her hearing, following little sounds of distant whisperings, the faint complaining of one door, ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... appeared the other arm was gone, and then the breasts, and then a part of the face—it was awful. The poor creatures on the islands awaiting their fate tried to cover their eyes with their hands to hide the fearful sight, but now I saw that they too were under the hypnotic spell of the reptiles, so that they could only crouch in terror with their eyes fixed upon the terrible thing that was ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... poetry or foreign languages are occasionally given. An experimental parallel to this reproduction of forgotten knowledge was devised by Edmund Gurney. He showed that information communicated to a subject in the hypnotic trance could be subsequently reproduced through the handwriting, whilst the attention of the subject was fully employed in conversing or reading aloud; or an arithmetical problem which had been set during the trance could be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... intervals around the wall were panels painted to resemble marble. Crouched upon a rug in one corner was a life-size figure of what seemed to be a tiger, perfectly colored and made of porcelain. It had tremendous glass eyes, larger even than the cousin's from Guatemala, and they shone with a hypnotic intensity that was disturbing. Kirk wanted to kick it and cry "Scat!" Hidden in other desolate quarters of the room were similar studies in animal life. These anomalous surroundings by turns depressed him and provoked an ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister's white form, that was clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Highness, as you call him, ever really went to the other world by any of the orthodox routes. If you could imagine an absolute suspension of all the vital functions induced by the influence of something—some drug or hypnotic process unknown to modern science, brought into action on a human being in the very prime of his vital strength—then, so far as I can see, the results of that influence would be exactly ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... rattle, then a strong perfume—something like opium or hasheesh—was forced into the room, then the fellow on the outside began to work his hypnotic spell." ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... remedial; restorative &c. 660; corrective, palliative, healing; sanatory[obs3], sanative; prophylactic, preventative, immunizing; salutiferous &c. (salutary) 656[obs3]; medical, medicinal; therapeutic, chirurgical[Med], epulotic|, paregoric, tonic, corroborant, analeptic[obs3], balsamic, anodyne, hypnotic, neurotic, narcotic, sedative, lenitive, demulcent|, emollient; depuratory[obs3]; detersive[obs3], detergent; abstersive[obs3], disinfectant, febrifugal[obs3], alterative; traumatic, vulnerary. allopathic[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... transaction of borrowing an elephant from an Indian prince, hence we preferred to hire one from Mr. Zoroaster, who keeps a big shop full of beautiful brass and enamel work, makes Indian rugs and all sorts of things and exerts a hypnotic influence over American millionaires. One American millionaire, who was over there a few days ahead of us, evidently came very near buying out Mr. Zoroaster, who shows his order book with great pride, and a certain estimable American lady, who owns a university on the Pacific slope, recently ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... him, with a very pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was he that did it. And it's he who was really ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and spontaneous thing in it, a young ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... followed by exhortations for sinners to advance to the mourners' benches to receive the more intimate and individual suasion of the clergy and their corps of assisting brethren and sisters. The condition was highly hypnotic, and the professions of conversion were often quite as ecstatic as the most fervid ministrant could wish. The negroes were particularly welcome to the preachers, for they were likely to give the promptest response to the pulpit's challenge and set the frenzy going. A Georgia preacher, for instance, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Stephanie," he said, simply, a strange, uncertain feeling of real affection creeping over him. The man's greatest love was for art. It was hypnotic to him. "Did you ever study art?" ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... floor. That gentleman will rise, train his compelling orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhaust his alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorable member of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power and hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of the method are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" will no longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech," to the irritating abridgment ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... work of a genius and a lifetime; and the appealing humanity he infused into his touch, gave his listeners a delight that bordered on the supernatural. So the accounts, critical, professional and personal read. There must have been a hypnotic quality in his performances that transported his audience wherever the poet willed. Indeed the stories told wear an air of enthusiasm that borders on the exaggerated, on the fantastic. Crystalline pearls falling on red hot velvet-or did ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... rather terrified private, just that sort of man whose name one would never know or want to know. (It was something rather like Postlethwaite, I believe). "Two paces forward, Private Johnson," ordered my skipper emphatically, fixing an hypnotic eye on the youth, and adding, to prove his accuracy, "Now, my lad, your name's Joh——?" "——nson, Sir," concluded the victim. That night, at dinner, the Brigadier told the C.O. that, among many disappointments, he had found one officer who seemed to know the names of his men "almost better than ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... Dunning was in a nervous state, the story was a grim one, and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase 'hypnotic suggestion'. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, adding a few details about the man and his published work. ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... a febrile pulse within Birnier's brain, dominating him with hypnotic suggestion to action. An urge to scream and to yell, to dance and to leap, plucked at his limbs. Resurgent desires from he knew not what subconscious catacombs, wriggled and struggled furiously within him. The great moon scattered ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... and it reads, a dam, or obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man has changed since Adam produced ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the drowsy swash of saddle leather and the padded chug of dragging feet and the hum, the hypnotic hum, of the heat that drowsed ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... unexpectedness of these happenings had numbed my brain. To precede Buck meekly upstairs and to wait with equal meekness while he interviewed Mr Abney had seemed the only course open to me. To one whose life has lain apart from such things, the hypnotic influence of a ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... powder is prepared, sometimes called cohoba. This powder, says Mr. Safford, is a narcotic snuff "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations of hidden ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Navii" Sologoub happily blends fantasy and reality. Revolutionary meetings alternate with improbable hypnotic seances, and terrible corteges of corpses contrast violently with scenes of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the cable train came to a halt, and the hypnotic sleep of the pilgrimage through Cottage Grove Avenue ended. Sommers started up—alert, anxious, eager to see her once more, the glow of enchantment, of love renewed in his soul. Yet at the very end of his journey he was fearful for the first time. How could they ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... he had a personal force that was almost hypnotic. There must have been something else to him, too, for they say that Hal's mother died, as desperately in love as she had been when she ran away with him, and that he was almost crushed by her loss and never wholly got over it. He transferred his devotion to the child, who was only three years ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... extract from shop and safe, and sell in Amsterdam, distributing the proceeds to various deserving charitable agencies. In this particular crowded hour of life the leader of the group, a fanatical prig with hypnotic eyes, abducts the beautiful Lady Fenton, with ten thousand pounds' worth of stuff upon her, from one of the least ambitious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... dealt with hypnotism—and the success of the dramatic version of Trilby presented a few days ago by Mr. Tree, invite one to apply the test. Clearly there are large numbers of people who enjoy hypnotic fiction, or whose prejudices have been effectively subdued by Mr. du Maurier's tact and talent. Must we then confess that our instinct has been unjust and unreasonable, and give it up? Or—since we must like Trilby, and there is no help for it—shall we enjoy the tale under ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... out of his half-hypnotic daze—a daze which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the hideous peril in ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the tips of his fingers, he discovered ... but no more than that. The shock of Barter's calm statement had cast off that much of his semi-hypnotic lethargy. A minute before he hadn't been able even ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... made to him by Margrave, a wanderer in many countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some occult fashion, knit together, and that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Chantelle, across her knitting, discoursed of their afternoon's excursion, with occasional pauses induced by the hypnotic effect of the fresh air; and Effie, kneeling, on the hearth, softly but insistently sought to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the relation between a ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... The remark betrayed the hypnotic influence: for she really could not sail very well. No athlete this lady; she had even let her saddle-horse go after the purchase of the second car; the sail now stood as her sole sporting activity, and that but lately taken up. However, she handled ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... seeing her pleased, had revolutionized his methods with women and paid her tribute by the most scrupulous behavior and, finally, instead of setting out to turn her head with pearls and diamonds and carry her by storm while she was under the hypnotic influence of priceless glittering things for bodily adornment, which render so many women easy to take, he had recognized her as intelligent and paid her the compliment of treating her as such, had stated his case and waited for the time when the blaze of love ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... climbed those stairs, for she was borne along by that hypnotic power which drags one to behold a catastrophe in spite of his will. Reaching the room, she stood appalled; for the group she had joined watched two raging things that rushed at each other with inhuman cries, ragged, bleeding, fighting on a carpet of debris. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Raal," Irving said sourly. "There are extremely severe penalties against any complicity in the unsupervised use of hypnotism or hypnotic drugs, and their use against the will of the ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... not get as far as that. With him the process did not take more than a minute, but it was startling in its results, and reduced me to an extraordinary state of hypnotic receptibility. When it was over my instructor tapped with a finger on my lips, uttering aloud as he ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... lives of women, and to the wider consideration of the religious impulse in general, and its close connection with the sexual instinct. I had intended to treat this subject in some detail, especially in relation to religious hypnotic phenomena, a matter of very deep significance in estimating woman's character. I should have liked, too, to have traced the influence of the early and late Christian teaching upon woman's mind, to have examined her position in the social and domestic relationship, and ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... wrangle which ended in a discourse by the "father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit. By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the Voice that was coming from ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... that is, as the poet has put it, to seeing life "steadily and seeing it whole." The sane view is to see things in their relation to other things; the non-sane view is to see them isolated, in such a way that they exercise a kind of hypnotic spell over us. And it makes no difference what a man's habitual interests may be, whether they be sordid or lofty, he needs ever and anon to get away from them. In reality, nothing wherewith a man occupies ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... real. My love for Gertrude Forrest was real; my walk and talk with her that day were real. Ay, and the hateful glitter of Voltaire's eyes was real too; his talk with Kaffar behind the shrubs the night before was real. The biological or hypnotic power that I had felt that very night was real, and, above all, a feeling of dread that had gripped my being was real. I could not explain it, and I could not throw it off, but ever since I had awoke out of my mesmeric sleep, or whatever the reader may be pleased to call it, I felt numbed; weights ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking |
