"Passiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deem that there are powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed these minds of ours In a wise passiveness. ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... Paul worked in fevered haste, And everything he made he placed Before his lady. The Shadow kept Its perfect passiveness. Paul wept. He wooed her with the work of his hands, He waited for those dear commands She never gave. No word, no motion, Eased the ache of his devotion. His days passed in a strain of toil, His nights burnt up in a seething coil. Seasons shot by, uncognisant He worked. The Shadow came ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... strange visible image lying there to awe us. The dead take sudden majesty. They become as gods. We think they hear us when we speak of them, and their good becomes sacred. A dead face has all human faults wiped from it; and that Shape, that Presence, whose passiveness seems infinite, how it fills the house, the town, the whole ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap. ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and yet his passiveness, his 'inertia'; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps, the influence of a princess, whose choice of him had royalized his state, may ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... "Do? When I don't know whether I'm on my feet or my head?" he said. His drugged passiveness showed Oliver with desolating clarity that anything that could be done would have to be done by himself. He crept over toward the window with a wild wish that black magic were included in a Yale curriculum—the only really sensible thing he could think of doing would be for both ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the watch, and when it was usual to retire for the night. Most of the party went below, leaving no one on deck but Cap, the Sergeant, Jasper, and two of the crew. Arrowhead and his wife also remained, the former standing aloof in proud reserve, and the latter exhibiting, by her attitude and passiveness, the meek humility that characterizes ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... the state of Pravritti, as active, or in the state of Nirvritti, as passive. Human beings, who, like everything else, exist svabhavat, 'by themselves,' are supposed to be capable of arriving at Nirvritti, or passiveness, which is nearly synonymous with Nirvana. But here the Svabhavikas branch off into two sects. Some believe that Nirvritti is repose, others that it is annihilation; and the former add, 'were it even annihilation (sunyata), it would still be good, man being otherwise doomed to an ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not invariable, with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposition—to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But, indeed, I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap. But one afternoon the evil impulse ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... from a mother; for she did not intend to insult you; and I cannot but lament that so sensible and so fine a woman should stoop to so much art as that letter is written with: and which also appears in some of the conversations you have given me an account of. See you not in her passiveness, what boisterous spirits can obtain from gentler, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... turned outward signifies strength, power, audacity, domination, arrogance, abruptness, activity, abundance. The elbow drawn inward, signifies impotence, fear, subordination, humility, passiveness, poverty of spirit. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... inducements—as Mahomet with his sword and his houris, or indeed almost as that theory of religion, called, since the sermon was written, "muscular Christianity;" but that our Lord, on the contrary, has substituted meekness for haughtiness, passiveness for violence, and innocence for craft: and that the event has shown the high wisdom of such an economy, for it has brought to light a set of natural laws, unknown before, by which the seeming paradox that weakness should be stronger than might, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... whole forming a wrinkled and aged mask as of one far advanced in life. In addition to this singularity of aspect there was the extraordinary seclusion and sordid miserliness of his mode of existence, more in harmony with the passiveness of extreme old age, than with the energy of a man still in the prime of his days. The village mothers frightened their children with tales about Jean Merle's gigantic strength, which made him an object of terror to them. He sought acquaintanceship with none of his neighbors; ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton |
