"Passive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... safe, from a moral point of view, so far as concerns the knowledge of life that the adolescent gets. The only real danger from the "movies" and the theatres is likely to be the cultivation of the habit of passive entertainment. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave's grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the profession of grandmother—for example by sitting up to unchristian hours with ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... no time to throw a gun on Cherokee where he's consoomin' flapjacks at the O. K. House, an' tell him the committee needs him at the New York Store. Cherokee don't buck none, but comes along, passive as ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact, the natural man's attitude to these things does not differ much from the attitude of the great artists. It is only that a certain lust for creation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on to something beyond passive resignation. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... in itself a quite undoubted one, is the possession by man of a certain special and important feeling, which, viewed from its passive side, we call sympathy, and from its active side, benevolence. It exists in various degrees in different people, but to some degree or other it probably exists in all. Most people, for instance, if they hear an amusing story, at once itch to tell it to ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... or two more and the recumbent position had become unendurable as too passive to correspond with the inward energy. She clambered back, and, standing upon level ground, turned, facing the width of the bare clearing and the rough buildings on it, and looked toward the downward slope and the wild lake, whose cold breath of water was agitated by the wind. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... ROSE. Contrast this active exuberant pleasure not unmixed with pain with the passive meditative joy that ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... settled footing, and make a roadway to move forward upon. Often these obstacles are viewless to others, and the combat is unsuspected; the site of many a Penuel remains untraced; but none the less these are the pivots on which entire personal histories turn. Hawthorne's comparatively passive endurance was of infinitely greater worth than any active irruption into the outer world would have been. It is obvious that we owe to the innumerable devious wanderings and obscure sufferings of his mind, under the influences ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... palpably for the sole and most amiable purpose of amusement, and succeeding in this purpose, how should we deal? How but receive it with a passive acquiescence equally amiable, content solely to be amused, and giving all severer criticism—to him who to his other merits may add, if he pleases, that of being the first critic. Most especially let us not be carping and questioning as to the how far, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... a sort of scene began to ensue: The ladies,—who by no means had been bred To be disposed of in a way so new, Although their haram education led Doubtless to that of doctrines the most true, Passive obedience,—now raised up the head, With flashing eyes and starting tears, and flung Their arms, as hens ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... convened for his trial, and it was unanimously resolved to chain him to a tree, where he was to be left exposed to the elements until he starved to death. The passive and silent fit had again come over Gallego. I implored that the sentence might be softened, but I was laughed at for my childish pity, and ordered home to the rancho. The command to chain him having been executed, the Spanish outcast was left to his terrible fate. One of the men, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... vehemently. "Why cannot I feel even decently angry with you? You torment and charm in the same breath. At times I say to myself, 'She is cold, heartless, unfeeling,' and then a word, a look—Molly," seizing her cool, slim little hand as it lies passive in her lap, "tell me, do you think you will ever—I do not mean to-morrow, or in a week, or a month, but in all the long years to come, do you think you will ever love me?" As he finishes speaking, he presses his lips with passionate tenderness to ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... night. Those blue eyes never met his. No step responsive to his came from that door. It seemed to have been so long unopened that it had grown as fixed and hard as the stones that held its bolts in their passive clasp. He dared not watch in the daytime, and with all his watching at night, he never saw father or daughter or domestic cross the threshold. Little he thought that, from a shot-window near the door, a pair of blue eyes, like Lilith's, but paler ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... is a dream; In all things heads of houses are supreme {9} Proctors are perfect whosoe'er they be; Logic is reason in epitome: Examiners, like kings, can do no wrong; All modern learning is not worth a song: Passive obedience is the rule of right; To argue or oppose is treason quite:{10} Mere common sense would make the system fall: Things are worth nothing; words are ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... passive on the keys; she bowed her fair head, feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though she had passed through some exhausting crisis. Old Nelson (or Nielsen), looking aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Mrs Desmond credit for being more passive than active in the whole affair," he concluded, since Paul seemed disinclined to volunteer a remark. "But the deuce of it is, that I feel sure Desmond knows less about the thing than any one else. Can you see him putting up ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... confusion of the storm to steal from the acorn stores of the woodpeckers. One of the golden eagles made an impressive picture as he stood bolt upright on the top of a tall pine-stump, braving the storm, with his back to the wind and a tuft of snow piled on his broad shoulders, a monument of passive endurance. Thus every storm-bound bird seemed more or less uncomfortable, if not in distress. The storm was reflected in every gesture, and not one cheerful note, not to say song, came from a single bill. Their cowering, joyless endurance offered striking contrasts to the spontaneous, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... is 'Erastianism,' it is of an unusual kind. The idea of Knox is that in a Catholic State the ruler is not to be obeyed in religious matters by the true believers; sometimes Knox wrote that the Catholic ruler ought to be met by 'passive resistance;' sometimes that he ought to be shot at sight. He stated these diverse doctrines in the course of eighteen months. In a Protestant country, the Catholics must obey the Protestant ruler, or take their chances of prison, exile, fire and death. The Protestant ruler, in a Protestant ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... indignities to which he subjected his unfortunate wife, for the avowed purpose of forcing her to make a will entirely in his favor, and of course disinheriting her daughter. These persecutions failed of their object. An unexpected, quiet, passive, but unconquerable resistance, was opposed by the, in all other things, cowed and submissive woman, to this demand of her domineering husband. Her failing health—for gently nurtured and tenderly cherished as she had ever been, the callous brutality of her husband soon told upon ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... "Oh Selene, I pulled you out of the water, and since that night I have never ceased to think of you and I must die for love of you. Have your thoughts never, never met mine on the way to you? Are you still and always as cold, as passive as you were then when you belonged half to life and half to death? For months have I prowled round this house as the shade of a dead man haunts the spot where he had left all that was dear to him on earth, and I have never been able to tell you what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe's collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... primary seat of these affections, but in the latter stages of their course, the right side also is liable to become involved, and, as a consequence, there then exists great disturbance of the venous circulation, with a damming back of the blood in the veins, and passive congestion of the liver, kidneys and brain, followed by dropsy, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... smasher hat from the grass, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... states of mind in which I formed—and indeed executed—the sudden project of breaking something. These were, I believe, simply the result of an excessive sense of responsibility. I am not one of those who conceive that the duty of deity is to sit passive beside the cup of nectar. Here on this island, in the permanent absence of that refreshment, I reflect (I perceive that I shall have very frequent opportunities for reflection) that I was perhaps only too anxious to preserve ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus unconsciously by our passive enthusiast? ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... thought, viz., the duty of all free countries to resist the spread of absolutism. Pre-eminently this duty was upon America. "Republican America," said he, "and all-overwhelming Russian absolutism cannot much longer subsist together on earth. Russia active,—America passive,—there is an immense danger in the fact; it is like the avalanche in the Alps, which the noise of a bird's wing may move and thrust down with irresistible force, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... our political existence; and as they have a common interest in being our carriers, and still more in preventing our becoming theirs, they would in all probability combine to embarrass our navigation in such a manner as would in effect destroy it, and confine us to a PASSIVE COMMERCE. We should then be compelled to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequaled spirit of enterprise, which signalizes the genius of the American merchants and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... this is provoking. It is a mortifying indication of the little importance that is attached to what we are saying; and there is something of the irritation that is produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye that is looking beyond you,—the grin that is not at anything funny in what you say,—the occasional inarticulate sounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... his time, notably his own brother John, who himself was probably not entirely free from blame in the matter. Hunter is said to have excused his own irritability on the grounds that being an anatomist, and accustomed to "the passive submission of dead bodies," contradictions became the more unbearable. Many of the physiological researches begun by him were carried on and perfected by his more famous brother, particularly his investigations of the capillaries, but he added much to the anatomical ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened to Rene's insidious whispers—Rene, who could not endure the captivity to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... to the brotherly protestations of his admirer, and exchanged only such words with him as their occupations required. Old Angus, however, was not so passive an observer of his new and unlooked-for housemate. "He's a good for nought sort of a fellow, slenken frae place to place wi' nowt but a sark to his back," Angus would say to his wife. Mr. Wilson's physical imperfections were an offence in the dalesman's ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... His argument did not lead him to a Creator of the world, for the universe, no less than the prime mover, was eternal, and the latter is nothing more than a principle of reason immanent in the world—pervading it, not distinguished from it—and the author of motion only in a passive way, after all, as a sort of magnetic object of desire.[20] In other places Aristotle makes passing references to different forms of the argument to prove the existence of the gods,[21] but it is evident that his own interest centered around this unmoved final cause, and it is in his proof of its ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... helplessness that one lies so remote from all but surface sensation, day after day gazing at the address of letters that come, with a passive wonder of how soon she is to vacate her name? Also a friend calls to say that to-morrow he travels afar. It seems then that he will be too much missed, and the parting has its share of unutterable longing. But by the morrow it is not the one left who is sorry. The new sun shines on an earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the man sat staring stonily before him, rigid as a statue, while the woman lay passive ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... it, we get no benefit whatever from it, and may as well throw it aside. (2) Read actively, not passively, putting the book under cross-examination as we go along—asking questions regarding it, weighing arguments. Mere passive reading may do no more good than the stream does to the iron pipe through which it flows. Novel-readers are often mere passive recipients of the stories, and thus get no real benefit from them. (3) Read ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... of the objects that had taken his brother's attention, and for a few moments the boys seemed passive spectators of ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... You have called a meeting in the Coliseum to protest against the bread-tax. What if the Government prohibits it? Your principle of passive resistance will not permit you to rebel, and without the right of public meeting your association is powerless. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... cabin locked," he told her in a perfectly passive voice, but in a manner that halted her suddenly, angry as she was. "I don't want no woman messin' with my berth nor with my duds. That door's no more locked against you than it is against my niece. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his good circulation, and in the morning it seemed quite natural. But at night, why should there be this difference between him and the acres of land that cooled all round him until the sun returned? What lucky chance had heated him up, and sent him, warm and lovable, into a passive world? He had other instincts, but these gave him no trouble. He simply gratified each as it occurred, provided he could do so without grave injury to his fellows. But the instinct to wonder at the night was not ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... the teaching may make an adequate impression, it is necessary, if not to discard all these passive methods, at least to supplement them by exercises which call out the activity of the pupil. Some such exercises have already been experimented with, and others might be devised.[243] The pupil may be ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... for her sister-in-law. Used to be wheedled by an idolizing mother, and to reign over her court of parasites, he had no notion of obeying, and a direct command or opposition roused his sullen temper of passive resistance. When he found 'that little nobody of a Mrs. John Dusautoy' so far from being a flatterer, or an adorer of his perfections, inclined to laugh at him, and bent on keeping him in order, all the enmity of which he was capable arose in his mind, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and silent ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the association is the general meeting, in which every member possesses an equal active and passive vote. The general meeting carries its motions by a simple majority of votes; a majority of three-fourths is required for the alteration ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... favour of the female by the fascination of their odour, or brilliant colour, or song, or grace, or strength, as revealed in what are usually mock-combats. The female is, in these respects, comparatively unaccomplished and comparatively passive. With her rests the final decision, and only after long hesitation, influenced, it seems, by a vaguely felt ideal resulting from her contemplation of the rivals, she calls the male of her choice.[48] A dim instinct seems ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... wide-spread. Nothing so fresh, or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The spell employed was novelty—or, at most, wonder—and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... man to claim for himself, but there is nothing that I should like better than to be able to think when I boasted that my friends, like the friends of Hermogenes, were many and cared for me, that I had helped to make them so because in a world so full of passive friends I had at any rate tried ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... tio Mariano was one of the big men about town. He had been a smuggler in the happy days when revenue agents, from Captain of the Port to ordinary patrolman, had hands but never eyes. And even now, when things were not so lax, he would take a passive share in some enterprise of the sort. But his principal activity was doing charity—lending the fishermen, or their wives, advances on their pay at fifty per cent a month; and this had given him a grip on the throats of the poorest elements along shore, so that he could deliver their vote bodily ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... should be reconciled to this. No! It is hard enough to be reconciled to the blows God has dealt me, without accepting what my husband and son see fit to give me in this." Her hand was cold and passive, and her voice ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... first produced always evoked the word "ingenuous," those to whom his face was familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man of experience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance this freshness was all un-brushed. His foot had begun to stumble, but he was full of big intentions and of sweet Maud Stannace. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... of existence for some days, until something happened which roused him from his state of passive misery into ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... twofold meaning, one active, 'one who does no harm' (noxa), and a passive, 'one who is not injured,' 'one to whom no harm is done,' qui non afficitur noxa, and in this latter sense it is used in this passage. [200] 'In order that, when in office, they themselves might guide the populace more gently,' ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... Rattlin is very singular. All clever boys are. He knows already his five declensions, and the four conjugations, active and passive. Come, Master Rattlin, decline for the lady the adjective felix—come, begin, nominative hic ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it. Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium—unless German—with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance, persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... for women was mingled indeed often with profound pity; pity for the sorrows and burdens that nature had laid upon them, for their physical weakness, for their passive role in life. That beings so hampered could yet play such tender and heroic parts was to him perennially wonderful, and his sense of it expressed itself in an unconscious homage that seemed to embrace the sex. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from her husband. He has contracted the infection in licentious relations before or since marriage. 'The cruelest link in the chain of consequences,' says Dr. Prince Morrow, 'is the mother's innocent agency. She is made a passive, unconscious medium of instilling into the eyes of her new-born babe a virulent ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... wherein if they condemne me, they utterly cancell both the gratifying of the action, and the gratitude, which thereby would be due to me. Whereas the active well doing should be of more consequence, proceeding from my hand, in regard I have no passive at all. Wherefore I may so much the more freely dispose of my fortune, by how much more it is mine, and of my selfe that am most mine owne. Notwithstanding, if I were a great blazoner of mine owne actions, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... victor; but, as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might be asking himself whether after all it had been worth while. For the active beauty of the Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have here, then, the passive beauty of the victor. But the later incident, the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and work of Polycleitus. He is already something ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... communication with Cromwell, and had done some diplomatic business for him in Paris. On his return in 1654, and for the next few years, he was in the closest relations with the Protector, thereby carrying out the principle he had probably adopted from White, of a "universal passive obedience to any species of government that had obtained an establishment." His Royalist friends made an outcry, and so did the Puritans; but Digby was confident of obtaining from Cromwell great advantages for the English Catholics, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... duty to lay clearly before you, that if you wish to introduce any alteration in our Danish system of farming, that it would not be successful. There would be a passive antagonism with the people, who, if you let them be steered by a good bailiff, would give you no trouble. In the direction of any improvement, however, new agricultural implements from England of the simpler ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... the Cape to Pietermaritzburg, but they might have conspired to assemble on the Cambuscan as a protest against high hopes and dreams of a promised land. The protest, let me add, was an entirely passive one. They stood aloof, watching the flashy gaieties of the hurricane-deck from their own sad penumbra—a dejected, wistful, whispering throng. "They simply don't occur," one of the be-diamonded ladies remarked ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it's useless. If ever patience is counselled to us, it is when accidents befall us, for then, as we are not responsible, we know we are in other hands, and it is our duty to be comparatively passive. Perhaps I may say that in every difficulty, patience is a life-belt. I beg of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... little sort of market-place where the roads met in the village, under the castle, and where the men stood in groups and talked, talked, talked. This was where Ciccio belonged: his active, mindful self. His active, mindful self was none of hers. She only had his passive self, and his family passion. His masculine mind and intelligence had its home in the little public square of his village. She knew this as she watched him now, with all his body talking politics. He could not break off till he ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... gave a wriggle or two, but, like most of his countrymen, he had a good deal of common sense and self-command, which made him remain passive after a bit; when, throwing myself on my back, I floated, dragging his head across my body, so that he might rest awhile and recover himself before trying ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... have their backs up now, and grumble at the fate that chains them to a passive defence, when they would wish for nothing better than to try conclusions with their foes at close quarters. Sir George White knows best the part that he is expected to play in the general strategy of this campaign, and there may be reasons for ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... mandate issued, see the tour begun, And all the flock set out for Islington. Now the broad sun, refulgent lamp of day, To rest with Thetis, slopes his western way; O'er every tree embrowning dust is spread, And tipt with gold is Hampstead's lofty head. The passive husband, in his nature mild, To wife consigns his hat, and takes the child; But she a day like this hath never felt, "Oh! that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew." Such monstrous heat! dear me! she never knew. Adown her innocent and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... morning, and the bright sun was looking down upon an ocean as calm and peaceful as if its passive bosom had never been disturbed by the ensanguined tumults of warring men, or the commotions ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination; and it was so to-night with Adam. While his muscles were working lustily, his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama: scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future, floating before him and giving place one to the other in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... a state of mind in which a kind of passive expectation—a sort of blind submission to fate—was the chief feature. She had shed tears when her husband spoke of his approaching end, because her gentle heart was grateful to him, and by its own sacrifices had grown used to his presence, and because she suddenly felt that she had comprehended ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... question a man who does just one thing over and over becomes expert at his particular job; but does he not in time, because of his very expertness, lapse into a machine whose hands move automatically and whose mind is idle? Such a result is fatal both to his intellect and his will. He becomes passive until at length all initiative is destroyed. For many years the colored people of the South reaped precisely this harvest of mental inertia. Now, thank heaven, they are rousing out of the lethargy that has been their inheritance and their brains are getting to work. It will, however, take years, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... the manager's glance in kind; Barnes' candor and simplicity were apparent antidotes to the other's taciturnity and constraint. During the country dance the soldier had remained a passive spectator, displaying little interest in the rustic merry-making or the open glances cast upon him by bonny lasses, burned in the sunlit fields, buxom serving maids, as clean as the pans in the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... sorry I said it,' returned Greif penitently. He took her passive hand in his, hoping to make the peace as quickly as he had broken it, but she did not return the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... are the beginnings also of faith and love; when the new character receives, as it is forming, the Christian seed, and the man is also the Christian. And, then, this second beginning of life, resting on faith and conscious principle, and not on mere passive innocence, stands sure for the middle and the end: those who so watch and pray as to escape out of this critical period, not merely unharmed, but, as it were, set clearly on their way to heaven, will, with God's grace, escape out of the things which shall befal ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... I was not to possess her after all, what then? Should I be consolable? An angry denial leapt to my lips. There was no question of first or second. These two passions for this woman and for my own success were coordinate forces, and their very equality it was that kept me passive, without decisive ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... daughters, despite her sister's passive obedience, had been the mother's favourite. Her obedience was by no means passive. She inherited all her mother's self-will, and more than her mother's impulsiveness. Much the handsomer of the two, she was dressed up, flattered, indulged, and petted in ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... Commandment. Thus faith goes out into the works and through the works comes to itself again; just as the sun goes forth unto its setting and comes again unto its rising. For this reason the Scriptures associate the day with peaceful living in works, the night with passive living in adversity, and faith lives and works, goes out and comes in, in both, as Christ says, ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... unction and hospitality when he met Lily in the hall. At dinner he was brilliant, witty, the gracious host. Akers played up to him. At the foot of the table Elinor sat, outwardly passive, inwardly puzzled, and watched Lily. She knew the contrast the girl must be drawing, between the bright little meal, with its simple service and clever talk, and those dreary formal dinners at home when old Anthony sometimes never spoke at all, or again used his caustic tongue ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... an actual state rather than a passive, it is preceded by the sign of past tense, the ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... and pressed the passive hand that lay upon the coverlet. The two old friends and companions—for such they were, though they were man and child—held each other in a long embrace, and then the little scholar turned his face towards the wall, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... leave the Persians in undisturbed possession of Cyprus and Egypt. During the progress of these events, the states which formed the Confederacy of Delos, with the exception of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos, had gradually become, instead of the active allies of Athens, her disarmed and passive tributaries. Even the custody of the fund had been transferred from Delos to Athens. The purpose for which the confederacy had been originally organised disappeared with the Persian peace; yet what may now be ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood—the culture of ennui for its own sake—is certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... the screaming baby to a bedpost and reduced him to subjection by dipping his fingers in sorghum, then giving him a feather. The absorbing occupation of plucking the feather from one sticky hand to the other rendered him passive for an hour. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... perhaps in that of the human mind, the institution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and even to convert this newly-discovered instrument of human freedom into one which might serve to perpetuate that system of passive obedience which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the universe. It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian astuzia and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well as on the persons of authors; and in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... at this terrible passive game of fixed tension she would beat him. Her fixed female soul, her wound-up female will would solidify into stone—whereas his must break. In him something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... himself, as soon as he is sure that he cannot make it good. But no man is strong from reason, but from passion. Love and passion are like distant relations: they rarely go together. Olivier loved: he was only strong against himself. In the passive state into which he had fallen he was an easy prey to every kind of illness. Influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, pounced on him. He was ill for part of the summer. With Madame Arnaud's assistance, Christophe nursed him devotedly: and they succeeded in checking his illness. But against ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... were neglected. What did it matter where a shell hit me now, a weak useless thing at the bottom of a trench? Let it come, blow me to atoms, tear me to pieces, what did I care? I felt like one in a horrible nightmare; unable to help myself. I lay passive and waited. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... that touches his country's prosperity, in which he has an individual lot, and interested in all that affects the advantages of business of which he is a factor, to be relegated to the level of a mere appurtenance to a great machine, with little free will, with no duty but that of passive obedience, and with little hope or opportunity of rising in the scale of responsible and ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... out his watch as if to look at the time, "it is just upon midnight; you know the governor's orders, so you must go." The men, habituated like all Russians to passive obedience, went without a murmur, and Gregory found himself alone with Ivan and the two ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... held, nowadays, that he misjudged the German temperament, that remembering the vigorous attempts of the Allies on Sebastopol—he was, as we know, in the Crimea, at the time—he imagined that the Germans would make similarly vigorous attempts on Paris. He did not expect a long and so to say passive siege, a mere blockade during which the investing army would simply content itself with repulsing the efforts of the besieged to break through its lines. He knew that the Germans had behaved differently ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... destiny, and nothing which I have decided since alters that in any way. If you still want me after the war—if we find that neither of us has made a mistake—I can still help you, Derek, I hope. But, my dear, it won't be quite a passive help, if you understand what I mean. I've got to be up and doing myself—actively; to be merely any man's echo—his complement—however much I loved him, would not be enough. I've come to ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... were the only members of the Committee who actively endeavoured to ascertain whether Yoga Rama's experiments depended for their success on trickery or on other causes. The other members of the Committee remained passive spectators. As regards the lady members with whom Yoga Rama tried a few experiments, they declared themselves, at the conclusion of the performance, to be believers in his ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... engage our attention; those which result from the intricate and often from the imperceptible mechanism of political society—a subject of observation which seems at first view so little commensurate to our faculties, that it has been generally regarded with the same passive emotions of wonder and submission with which, in the material world, we survey the effects produced by the mysterious and uncontroulable operation of phisical sic causes. It is fortunate that upon this, as on many other occasions, the difficulties ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Dubravnik. I am of the opinion—and I did not think of it until since the commencement of this interview—that you are not what you seem to be, and that your mission in Russia is in some way connected with the Government police; that you are more than a passive enemy of nihilism—that you are, in short, an active one. If I am right there exists all the more reason why I must appeal to your manhood, your honor, your sense of justice, to your bravery and chivalry. ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... she spread the cloth and produced from various cupboards cold meats and pastries, bread and cakes, and many kinds of delicate preserves and sweetmeats. Her large, shapely hands among the gold-and-white china fascinated him, while her calm, noiseless, unhurried movements induced a feeling of passive repose that it required an effort to dispel, when she said ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... there cannot be more than one Infinite: Nor to ascribe to him (unlesse Metaphorically, meaning not the Passion, but the Effect) Passions that partake of Griefe; as Repentance, Anger, Mercy: or of Want; as Appetite, Hope, Desire; or of any Passive faculty: For Passion, is Power ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... the other Catholic courts. Austria gives her consent, as do Sardinia and all the other Italian states; only the court of Spain has declared itself the friend and defender of the Jesuits, and for your sake has France hitherto remained passive on this most important question, and has affected not to hear the demands of her subjects; for your sake has France stifled her own convictions and joined in your support. Therefore, think well of what you are about to do! To break off your friendly relations with ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... can be discovered only in the recesses of his own spirit,—not by that man, therefore, whose imaginative powers have been ossified by the continual reaction and assimilating influences of mere objects on his mind, and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex, the passive fancy!—not by him in whom an unbroken familiarity with the organic world, as if it were mechanical, with the sensitive, but as if it were insensate, has engendered the coarse and hard spirit of a sorcerer. The former ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... has darted from my hold, And, with the intemperate energy of love, Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel; But, ere it reach them, the keen sanctity, Which, with its effluence, like a glory, clothes And circles round the Crucified, has seized, And scorch'd, and shrivell'd it; and now it lies Passive and still before the awful Throne. O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe, Consumed, yet quicken'd, by ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... pledged to the passive part, could not long sustain it without rebellion. To "hang round" the shut door of his hopes seemed, after two long days, more than even his passion required of him; and on the third he despatched a note of goodbye to his friend. He was going off for a few ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... men. By May the expedition was ready. Monckton, with two thousand troops, embarked at Annapolis Royal, and by June 1 the expedition was at Chignecto. In the meantime Vergor, the French commandant at Beausejour, had not been passive. He had strengthened his defences, had summoned the inhabitants of the surrounding districts to his help, had mounted cannon in a blockhouse defending the passage of the river, and had thrown up a strong breastwork of timber along the shore. On June 3 the British landed. They had little difficulty ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... does not deny the capacity of fallen man for salvation, it is careful in defining that this is not an active, but a passive capacity. That is to say: Man is utterly incapable of qualifying himself for, or of contributing in the least toward, his own spiritual restoration; but what is impossible for man is not impossible with ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... king declared, To ease the nation's grievance, With his new wind about I steer'd, And swore to him allegiance: Old principles I did revoke, Set conscience at a distance; Passive obedience was a joke, And pish for non-resistance. And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... two words 'He was . . . He became,' imply another thing, and that is, that Jesus Christ who died because He chose, was not passive in His being born, but as at the end of His earthly life, so at its beginning exercised His volition, and was born because He willed, and willed because of 'the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... making further conquests. In England his main object was the same as that of his predecessors, to establish the king's authority over the great barons. What especially distinguished him was his clear perception of the truth that he could only succeed by securing, not merely the passive goodwill, but the active co-operation of those who, whether they were of Norman or of English descent, were inferior in wealth and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... love, but cannot return it; he feels, he admires, but he shrinks from any step demanding resolution or self-devotion. Hence, instead of conferring happiness, he makes victims,—victims not of an active, but of a merely passive and negative egotism. A conjunction of circumstances brings him to a sudden and vivid realization of his condition and its results. Instead of escaping by suicide, as might be expected,—and as would probably have been the case if Werther had not forestalled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... which is pretty fast when you take into consideration that a spermatozooen is only 1/300 of an inch long. Many of the spermatozoa, weaker than the others, perish on the way, and only a few continue the journey up through the uterus to the tube. When near the little ovum, which remains passive, their movements become more and more rapid, they seem to be attracted to it as if by a magnet, and finally one spermatozooen—just one—the one that happens to be the strongest or the nearest, makes a mad rush at it with its head, perforates it, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... another reason, too. For generations now, you men have had a monopoly of physical courage. You have faced storms at sea, and charged up hills, and pulled out drowning children, and footed it up fire-ladders, till you think that bravery is a male characteristic. You've always handed out the passive suffering act to us. We had any amount of compliments as long as we stuck to silent suffering. But now we want to see what shells look like. As long as sons and brothers have to stand up to them, why, we're ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... household on the Knap became again serene under the composing influences of daily routine. A desultory, very desultory correspondence, dragged on between Sally Hall and Darton, who, not quite knowing how to take her petulant words on the night of her brother's death, had continued passive thus long. Helena and her children remained at the dairy-house, almost of necessity, and Darton therefore deemed it ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... definite direction. This is a true process of self-education; but you see it is no mechanical process of mere aggregation. It requires activity of thought—but without that what is any reading but mere passive amusement? And it requires method. I have myself a sort of literary bookkeeping. I keep a day-book, and, at my leisure, I post my literary accounts, bringing together in proper groups the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... was passive in her hands, and submitted to have a big handkerchief put over his head for a cap, to hold on his arm the baby she improvised from a sofa-cushion of costly plush, around which she arranged as a dress an expensive ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... influences, developed its full independence during his struggles as a Reformer. For this communion with God he never thought it necessary, as the mystics maintained, to renounce one's personality and retire altogether from the world and things temporal: a purely passive attitude towards God, and a blessedness consisting in such an attitude, was not his highest or ultimate ideal. A man's personality, he held, should only be destroyed so far as it resists the will of God, and dares to assert ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... alliance between these two figures. The lady looks upon her empire as founded upon the divine right of beauty (and full as good a divine right it is as any king, emperor, or pope, can pretend to); she requires, and commonly meets with, unlimited passive obedience. And why should she not meet with it? Her demands go no higher than to have her unquestioned preeminence in beauty, wit, and fashion, firmly established. Few sovereigns (by the way) are so reasonable. The ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... however did not prevent the Chevalier de Lorenzy from proposing to me to write something in praise of that lady, insinuating that I might acquire some advantage by it. The proposition excited my indignation, the more as I perceived it did not come from himself, knowing that, passive as he was, he thought and acted according to the impulsion he received. I am so little accustomed to constraint that it was impossible for me to conceal from him my disdain, nor from anybody the moderate opinion I had of the favorite; this I am sure ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... himself on not having been in Paris on the 18th Brumaire, and I believe that had he been there he might well have opposed the actions of General Bonaparte, but in the army, at the head of a division facing the enemy, he was content to adopt the passive obedience of the soldier. He even rejected proposals, which were made to him by a number of generals and colonels, to march on Paris at the head of their troops. "Who," he said to them, "will defend our frontiers if we abandon them? And what will become of France ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... upon the timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander about the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... result of more active exertions than the other's passive self-denial. She sat up one night till two o'clock to dress a doll. Every fall a few hundred dolls were distributed to be dressed by the girls for the Christmas tree at the Settlement House in the city. Some of the students took dolls and paid other girls to make the clothes. Berta earned ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... child will take the bitterest draught from a father's hand. "This cup which Thou, O God, givest me to drink, shall I not drink it?" Be it mine to lie passive in the arms of Thy chastening love, exulting in the assurance that all Thy appointments, though sovereign, are never arbitrary, but that there is a gracious "need be" in them all. "My Father!" my Covenant God! the God who ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... class a relationship which only one or two of the children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the mass were left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she was placing herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed authority of Mr. Harby, so that the scholars could more safely harry her. She did not know, but her instinct gradually warned her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr. Brunt. On it went, jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it nearly drove her mad: ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother's hands. Her mother seemed actually passive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life, and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive resignation to the domination of ignorant ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... activities—to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... are first of all to be distinguished from those of the physical sense-world by being active organs. Whereas the eye and ear are passive, allowing light and sound to work upon them, it may be said of these perceptive organs of the soul and spirit that, while functioning they are in a perpetual state of activity, and that they seize hold of their objects and facts, as it were, in ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... value, and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods qua citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised in the ius divinum; and by passive obedience to these authorities he gradually began to deaden the sense of religio that was in him. And this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as time went on became more and more the rule; ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of passive endurance was past; action had begun. The Cullerne Water Company threatened to cut off the water, the Cullerne Gas Company threatened to cut off the gas. Eaves, the milkman, threatened a summons unless that long, long bill of his (all built up of pitiful little pints) ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... silent at this, gazing at her hands, the beautifully made pointed fingers bare of rings. On their backs the veins, blue-violet, were visible; and there was a delicate tracery inside the bend of her arms. But her face, Lee reflected, was too passive, too inanimate; her lack of color was unvaried by any visible trace of emotion, life. She was, in fact, plain if not actually ugly; her mouth was too large; on the street, without the saving distinction of her dress, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political—to aid some ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... matter how good the curriculum or how renowned the faculty, you cannot be educated without the most vigorous efforts on your part. Banish the thought that you are here to have knowledge "pumped into" you. To acquire an education you must establish and maintain not a passive attitude but an active attitude. When you go to the gymnasium to build up a good physique, the physical director does not tell you to hold yourself limp and passive while he pumps your arms and legs up and down. Rather he urges you to put ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... nature to suit his changing environment that at last he found that he could be content in almost any circumstances. He had no pleasures, no cares, no ambitions, no regrets, no hopes. It was mere passive existence, an inert, plantlike vegetation, the moment's pause before the final decay, the last ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... the majority by which a Liberal Government is supported, it is unable to pass any legislation unless it can procure the agreement of its political opponents. Observe the position in which the present Executive Government is consequently placed. Take only the question of passive resistance. The action of the House of Lords at the present time forces the Executive Government to lock up in prison men with whose action they entirely sympathise and whose grievance they have faithfully promised to redress. Such a position ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... was now to be employed in creating some of the new posts of defence, by which all such dreams of attack were to be dispelled. The strategy was passive, but it paved the way for the offensive undertaken ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... chief merit was their family connections or borough interest, he retired into the country; and, not knowing what to do with himself—married. In his family, to regain his lost consequence, he determined to keep up the same passive obedience, as in the vessels in which he had commanded. His orders were not to be disputed; and the whole house was expected to fly, at the word of command, as if to man the shrouds, or mount aloft in an elemental ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... of the eternal oneness of all being. For it compelled him to retain belief in a Creator distinct in essence from Creation. Such a belief Spinoza entirely rejected. For though his "Natura Naturans," or Nature Active, may in a manner be called the Creator of his "Natura Naturata," or Nature Passive, these are consubstantial and co-eternal, neither being before or after the other. Thus for him there was no beginning of the Universe and there could be no end. There was no creation out of nothing, ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... lasted but a short time, but it had seemed to me hours. Manuel bandaged my head and arm. The two soldiers remained perfectly passive, suffering from severe blows. The one felled by ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... gravity was fairly overcome, and he got a heavy fit of coughing in his pocket-handkerchief. Captain Armytage gazed keenly at Andy for a moment, during which he might as well have stared at a plaster bust, for all the discoveries he made in the passive simple countenance. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... sentence through the baseness of one of his accomplices. This awakening of a sentiment of honour in the soul of a murderer is a psychologic phenomenon worthy of reflection. The man who had so often shed the blood of travellers in the plains recoiled at the idea of becoming the passive instrument of justice in inflicting upon others a punishment which he felt that ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... her arms passionately round his neck. He was embarrassed sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection. He would have preferred her to be more passive. It shocked him a little that she should give him so marked a lead: it did not tally altogether with his prepossessions about the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... repetition of itself but a snatch of varied melody which showed it to be no echo, although evidently an answer. There have been few moments in my life more crowded with happiness than that one. And it was not a passive feeling of enjoyment, but one that spurred me to action. The swift pace which we had all by this time reached was now too slow for me. Seized again by the same fierce passion which took possession of me at my first acquaintance with Mona's voice, I started in her direction ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... as plans of campaign and combine the science of the tactician with that of the administrator, are bound to live in a state of ignorance; the most boorish peasant in the most backward district in France is scarcely in a worse case. Such men as these bear the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells timber in the forest. Violent physical exertion is succeeded by times of inertia, when they repair the waste. They fight and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... male organism is said to be more katabolic. In the female the rapidity of organic change is less; hence the female is said to be more anabolic. Put in more familiar terms, the male tends to expend energy, is more active, hence also stronger; the female tends more to store up energy, is more passive, conservative, and weaker. These fundamental differences between the sexes express themselves in many ways in the social life. The differences between man and woman, therefore, are not to be thought of as due simply to social customs ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... before and passive; now of a sudden he grew violent again, but in a different way. He flung himself upon his knees before Sir Crispin, and passionately he pleaded for the sparing of his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... the Archduke without beating hearts. He was capable of flying out at people and terrifying them to such a degree that they lost their heads completely. He often took their fright to be obstinacy and passive resistance, and it irritated him ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... had not counted on his clinging. It was as if, in their undivided substance, he had had knowledge of her purpose and had prepared himself to fight it. He hung on desperately; he refused to yield an inch of the ground he had taken from her. He was no longer a passive thing in that world where she had brought him. And he had certain advantages. He had possessed her for three nights and for three days. She had made herself porous to him; and her sleep ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... gods and goddesses are created together. All the forces divined by human intelligence are doubled into two persons, closely united, the one the complement of the other. The one has the active, the other the passive role. Egypt, Chaldaea, Greece, all had these divine couples; Apsou, or, as Damascius calls him, Apason and Tauthe; Anou and Antou, the Anaitis of the Greek writers; Bel and Belit, or Beltu, perhaps the Greek Mylitta; Samas, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... wanted to help poor Fyne; and as I could see that, manlike, he suffered from the present inability to act, the passive waiting, I said: "Nothing of this can be done till to-morrow. But as you have given me an insight into the nature of your thoughts I can tell you what may be done at once. We may go and look at ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and not by words have they written their definition of anarchism, and I am taking and using the term in this volume in the sense in which it is used most commonly by people in general. If this offends the anarchists of the non-resistant or passive-resistant type, it cannot be helped. It is the meaning that the most active of the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... so adroitly managed his affairs that when peace came he was able quickly to recover much of the ground lost during the war. With a rare genius for adapting himself to new conditions, he accepted the changed order of things with a passive resignation, but with a stern determination to make the most out of any good that might be ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... giving our worthy governess credit for somewhat milder feelings upon this subject than she actually entertained; the overseers in question, accustomed to such circumstances, harbouring no stronger sentiment than a cold, passive indifference towards the parish boy, whilst she, good sort of woman as in general she was, did certainly upon this occasion cherish something very like an active ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... concern. For if we inquire, who corrupt the natives? the answer is, our vile and worthless population, the very scum of mankind, whom we have cast out as evil from the bosom of their native land. But a further question naturally offers itself. Who were, in many instances, the passive, if not the active, corrupters of these very corrupters themselves? Who have neglected to provide means for their christian instruction, and so let them grow up to be worse than heathens, until they could be endured no longer in the land? What nation had within a single century more than doubled ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the sagacity of the horse; passive and obedient, they are easily trained; bring them up the way you want them to go, and they'll go it! The horse in his old age does not forget the precepts of his youth. A very touching anecdote is told of ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... it is with the most painful reluctance that its summons is obeyed. When they join, the officers may ill-treat them, pull their hair, and strike them with impunity. The officers have generally a fair supply of professional knowledge, and some are highly educated. The men have a larger amount of passive courage than of dashing bravery; yet they will usually follow where their officers lead them. The private has a possibility of rising to the rank of an officer after twelve years' probation, and even sooner by some dashing act of bravery; and several even thus have become generals. There are ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... hollowed by disease. It seemed as if Bartolommeo sought to kill some enemy sitting at the foot of his bed by the intent gaze of dying eyes. That steady remorseless look was the more appalling because the head that lay upon the pillow was passive and motionless as a skull upon a doctor's table. The outlines of the body, revealed by the coverlet, were no less rigid and stiff; he lay there as one dead, save for those eyes. There was something automatic about the moaning sounds that came from the mouth. Don Juan felt something ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... Razumov saw a white shapely hand extended to him. He took it in great confusion (it was soft and passive) and heard at the same time a condescending murmur in which he caught only the words "Satisfactory" and "Persevere." But the most amazing thing of all was to feel suddenly a distinct pressure of the white shapely hand just ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Lee Fu sharply. I started, whirled around. His voice had lost the level, passive tone; it had taken on the timbre ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... together.' It was a national rebellion, a flood which swept away even some faithful, timid hearts. No voices ventured to protest. What were the elders, who shortly before 'saw the God of Israel,' doing to be passive at such a crisis? Was there no one to bid the fickle multitude look up to the summit overhead, where the red flames glowed, or to remind them of the hosts of Egypt lying stark and dead on the shore? Was Miriam cowed too, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... local officials and the capitalists of the department. Du Croisier's salon, a power at least equal to the salon d'Esgrignon, larger numerically, as well as younger and more energetic, made itself felt all over the countryside; the Collection of Antiquities, on the other hand, remained inert, a passive appendage, as it were, of a central authority which was often embarrassed by its own partisans; for not merely did they encourage the Government in a mistaken policy, but some of its most fatal blunders were made in consequence of the pressure brought ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... sundry conversational encounters which they had had with the natives of the district. They gave themselves the usual airs which people who have been laboriously amusing themselves inflict upon those wiser individuals who prefer the passive pleasure of repose, and made a merit of having exposed themselves to the meridian sun, in the pursuit ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... The word "passive" is used in three ways. First, in a general way, according as whatever receives something is passive, although nothing is taken from it: thus we may say that the air is passive when it is lit up. But this is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... community apart, consist of "nowhere people," of dreamers who live constantly in expectation of some stroke of luck, some kindly smile from fortune, and of wastrels who, intoxicated with the abundant bounty of the opulent region, have fallen passive victims to the Russian craze for vagrancy. These folk tramp from hamlet to hamlet in parties of two or three, and, while purporting to seek employment, merely contemplate that employment lethargically, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... The new movement in the North-west, in the lower Rhenish districts, and the adjacent Westphalia sprang up and extended itself, therefore, under the domination of this idea of the reign of the saints in the approaching millennium and of the notion that passive non-resistance, whilst for the time being a duty, only remained so until the coming of the Lord should give the signal for the saints to rise and join in the destruction of the kingdoms of this world and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes,—when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... which had been lately issued, and had incurred excommunication; the imperialists insisted that he should be proceeded against for contempt, and that the excommunication should at once be pronounced. However great might be his own personal reluctance, it was not possible for him to remain passive; and if he declined to resort at once to the more extreme exercise of his power, the hesitation was merely until the emperor was prepared to enforce the censures of the church with the strong hand. It stood not "with his honour to execute such censures," ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude |
