"Prone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other subject are people so prone to become panegyrists of the past as in this matter of the weather. "Ah," they say, "we never now have the lovely summers we used to have." Reading the other day Walpole's Letters, I discovered that ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... of an army in the field. On the north, Russia is almost wholly invulnerable. The Czar might retreat until his pursuers perished of fatigue and hunger. The unquestionable result of the whole is, that Russia is the real terror of Europe. France is dangerous, and madly prone to hostilities; but France is open on every side, and experience shows that she never can resist the combined power of England and Germany. It is strong evidence of our position, that she has never ultimately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Why the prone bucks were so comparatively shy I do not know, for right on the ground with them we came upon deer, and, in the immediate neighborhood, mountain sheep, which were absurdly tame. The mountain sheep were nineteen in number, for the most ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... defects of style in the speech are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears 'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... act without control; I ne'er have cherished hate for such as thee. Of all the spirits who deny, The scoffer is least wearisome to me. Ever too prone is man activity to shirk, In unconditioned rest he fain would live; Hence this companion purposely I give, Who stirs, excites, and must, as devil, work. But ye, the genuine sons of heaven, rejoice! In the full living beauty still rejoice! May that which works and lives, the ever-growing, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to sea—slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A] With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most prone,—an ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... fraction of an intolerable second, the ship, in the fiercer burst of a terrible uproar, remained on her side, vibrating and still, with a stillness more appalling than the wildest motion. Then upon all those prone bodies a stir would pass, a shiver of suspense. A man would protrude his anxious head and a pair of eyes glistened in the sway of light glaring wildly. Some moved their legs a little as if making ready to jump ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Him in the garden, prone, While He poured His soul to God; Then He bore affliction ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... weak in discipline and prone to straggling, they none the less bore themselves with conspicuous gallantry. Their native characteristics came prominently to the front. Patient under hardships, vigorous in attack, and stubborn in defence, they showed themselves worthy of their commander. Their enthusiastic patriotism was not ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in her efforts to give no trouble, and yet she never had the air of a dependent or a beneficiary; but held her head high, and when called upon gave an opinion as though she had a right to it. The very first morning Susan, who was prone to be late to breakfast, came down in a great state of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers—looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain— are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Spain would not listen to any negotiations for the hand of his sister, unless the persecution of his co-religionists in England was stopped; and James, in order to carry out his foreign policy, blinded by his admiration for the Spaniard, and always prone to follow the line of least resistance, promised what he certainly could not perform, the parliamentary repeal ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... imperfect creatures, wayward and foolish as little children, horribly unreasonable, selfish and willful. We are not capable of enduring the shock of finding at every turn that our idol is made of clay, and that it is prone to tumble off its pedestal and lie in the dust, till we pick it up and set it in its place again. I was struck with Ernest's asking in the very first prayer he offered in my presence, after our marriage, that God would help ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... "So prone is man to society, and so happy in it, that, to relish perpetual solitude, one must be an angel or a brute. In a solitary state, no creature is more timid than man; in society, none more bold. The number of offenders lessens the disgrace of the crime; for a common reproach is no reproach. A man ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... struck my ear, and the body under my foot seemed to heave. I started back, and simultaneously the apparent corpse rose up, a tall, blood-besmeared figure, which stared horribly upon me for a moment and then, with another loud and horrid groan, fell prone on his back, his arms widely extended. I lost no time in scrambling past him after my companions, who had run away, and small blame to them, for it was like the rising of a corpse suddenly endowed with volition. Both were by this time in what has been forcibly and ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... as in men, a taste for gaming arises from the want of better occupation, or of proper emotion to relieve them from the pains and penalties of idleness; both the vain and indolent are prone to this taste from different causes. The idea of personal merit is insensibly connected with what is called good luck, and before avarice absorbs every other feeling, vanity forms no inconsiderable part ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... saw a girl or boy So prone as Sophie to destroy Whate'er she laid her hands upon, Though tough as wood, or hard as stone; With Sophie it was all the same, No matter who the thing might claim, No matter were it choice or rare, For naught did the destroyer care. Her playthings shared ...
— Slovenly Betsy • Heinrich Hoffman
... if Lary had not been disguised in liquor," said Josiah, "he never would have committed so base an action. Daniel Simpson, at times we are all prone to do ill; and as for the few shillings thou just now proposed, to give up the culprit, since my loss cannot affect thee, there is a crown to keep the affair a secret; as the disgrace of this thoughtless man might deprive his innocent wife ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... and nights together, refusing all intercourse with his friends. It seemed as if he had lost Buelna for good and all. At times, as the certainty of this defined itself more clearly, Felipe would fling his hat upon the ground, beat his breast, and then, prone upon his face, his head buried in his folded arms, would lie for hours motionless, while his pony nibbled the sparse alfalfa, and the jack-rabbits limping from the sage peered at him, their ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... unable to contribute in any degree or manner toward his own justification and conversion; moreover, that, being an enemy of God, man, of his own natural powers, is active only in resisting the saving efforts of God, as well as able and prone only to do so; that God alone and in every respect is the Author of man's conversion, perseverance, and final salvation; and that, since the grace of God is universal and earnestly proffered, man alone is responsible for, and the cause of, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... seen her; she keeps her chamber with the migraine. As she comes from her kinsman, General Sir Frederick Haldimand, Governor of Canada, she may be useful, being lately untethered from the convent and no more than seventeen or eighteen, and vain, no doubt, of her beauty, and so, I conclude, prone to babble if flattered. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... it. Lawler saw the weapon belch smoke and fire as it cleared Antrim's hip; he felt a shock as the bullet struck him; felt still another sear his flesh near the arm as he let his own pistol off. He saw the outlaw plunge forward and fall prone, his arms outstretched. He ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and to this love he fell a martyr; dying of a decayed and ruined constitution before he was forty. The town's people thought him a shrewd and sensible man, and regretted his death. As for me, I never greatly loved him; I had not grown up with him; and he was too prone to repulse my little advances to familiarity, with coldness, or anger. He had certainly some reason to be displeased with me, for I learned little at school, and nothing at home, though he would now and then attempt to give me some insight into the business. As impressions of any kind ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... to suck this singing weed; And while the morning gathers up its strength, And while the noonday runneth on in might, Until the shadows and the evening light Come and awake me with a fear at length, Prone in some hankering covert hid away, Fain am I still my piping to prolong, And for the largess of a bounteous day Dare pay my maker with a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... to a species of envy, we think may be more justly regarded as having its foundation in the love of sensationalism to which human nature is prone—sensationalism which appears to become all the racier when it finds its food in high quarters. The particular direction the tendency took was influenced by the blindness of George III. and of his grandson, the Crown Prince of Hanover, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... and now stood, breathing loudly, one hand clenched upon his breast, and turning swiftly, took a stumbling pace toward the open window, tripped, and fell prone upon ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... foliage-masses and aromatic odor. It seems a sacrilege to destroy them so ruthlessly. When stripped of their bark and stained with the dark-red sap, they look like fallen giants spoiled of their armor, lying there prone and white-naked, as if there had been a battle of the giants and the gods. These giants were perfumed, it seems. Their huge green plumes are now withered and torn, and their red blood oozes slowly from their bodies in thin and trickling streams. You think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... parties, it would be impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not prone to use that ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... stamped with austere simplicity. The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was almost certainly a Calvinist. He habited himself in black and was served by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery. If a woman was not flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil masquerading for the downfall of man—and no doubt with some justice, too. Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good time ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... deadly white at the horrifying spectacle I presented as I lay prone at her feet, but her evident alarm quickly vanished upon my assurance that ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... water during heavy rains, drainage must be provided. Notice whether any cellar windows have been closed. Countrymen are prone to do this as a cheap and easy method when the framework gets beyond repair. Replacing stoned-up windows is not expensive or difficult but just one more thing which must be done. Notice the extent of the cellar. Old builders sometimes did only a partial job of excavation because of economy. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... prone on the ground, in an awful stillness, with his white face turned to the sky. His eyes were fast shut, his arms flung wide, one hand still grasping the whip which he had wielded so fiercely ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... advance of their age. They, like all their contemporaries, were besieged by errors, ancient, inveterate, traditional; and accidentally, from one cause special to themselves, they were not merely liable to error, but usually prone to error. This cause lay in the polemic form which so often they found a necessity, or a convenience, or a temptation for assuming, as teachers or defenders ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... way. Gibbs had risen to his knees unaware that the Italian, with yet another knife, was close behind him. At a bound Hilary arrested the lifted blade and hurled its wielder aside, who in the next breath seemed to spring past him head first, fell prone across the prostrate Gibbs, turned face upward, and slid on and away—lassoed. Both bull-drivers clattered ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... out; level, flatten; prostrate, knock down, floor, fell. Adj. horizontal, level, even, plane; flat &c. 251; flat as a billiard table, flat as a bowling green; alluvial; calm, calm as a mill pond; smooth, smooth as glass. recumbent, decumbent, procumbent, accumbent[obs3]; lying &c. v.; prone, supine, couchant, jacent[obs3], prostrate, recubant[obs3]. Adv. horizontally &c. adj.; on one's back, on all ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stuffy hall, A frantic shouter, greater duffer, A mob more prone to stamp and bawl, Noise, suffocation still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... took the loaded gun, and, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the spot, stretched myself prone on the deck, with the barrel of the weapon resting upon the rail of the schooner's very low bulwark. Sighting the piece carefully, I brought it to bear immediately on the spot where I thought I ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... new attachment. Thus did I reason, and thus I believed; and though I was a kind of consultation opinion among my friends in "suits of love," I was really then unaware that at no time is a man so prone to fall in love as immediately after his being jilted. If common sense will teach us not to dance a bolero upon a sprained ancle, so might it also convey the equally important lesson, not to expose our more vital and inflammatory organ to the fire the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... how lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to explain their injurious influence. The lees deposited from vinous fermentation consist of mineral salts, tartaric acid, and organic matters. Of these the 'organic substances are the most to be dreaded, and for this reason, that they are very prone to rapid decomposition. They consist of yeast-cells, cells of other micro-organisms, of DEBRIS and minute particles of grape stalks and skins, and of other bodies, all readily liable to decompose. All these various materials, therefore, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... enemy outside the shop, he had another within, who was ready to improve every opportunity to trouble him. This was a small, thinfaced man who worked with him, and whose name was Mires. Besides being physically unable to carry an even end with him, this workman was prone to shirk every part of his work that he could, this portion falling largely on Jack to do in ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... than saw the body lying prone, with her head on the ground; and the paler shadow of her hair reminded me of the dear beauty of her. I grew calmer. The comfort of having said all that I had to say relieved my heart and sent rippling ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... who was my friend— It's pretty clear you got on badly; Your ribs, somehow, seem prone to bend, Your silken dress seems wearing sadly. It's very hard, I know, to part, And sentimental feelings smother, But even though it break my heart, I'm going, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... full circle comes the wheel, And, prone across the knees of Fate, You are to hear, without appeal, The final terms that we dictate; And, when you whine (the German way) On presentation of the bill: "Ach, Himmel! we can never pay," "Can't you?" we'll cry; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... the house and came upon the prone figure of a cow-puncher, rolled close against the house. The man's head was bloody, his hands were tied behind him, and his neckerchief had been stuffed into his mouth and held there by another. He was half-dead when Stelton, with ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... appeared near the surface, and with a quick slice Clee made his first incision. With the cut, the prone slave bucked and snarled. Clee murmured soothing words to it in English, and, as the creature quieted down, made another cut. Again came the bucking and throaty protest; and this time, to Jim's dismay, he saw in the bestial faces of the animal-men ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... would bring her books, and read to her The poems of Dr. Donne, and the blue river Would murmur through the reading, and a stir Of birds and bees make the white petals shiver, And one or two would flutter prone and lie Spotting the smooth-clipped grass. The days went by Threaded with talk and verses. Green leaves pushed Through blossoms stubbornly. Gervase, unconscious of dishonesty, Fell into strong and watchful loving, free He thought, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... banks of the murmuring stream on her road to a wealthy weaver's. The young fellows saluted the fair one as they greeted no other. No one ventured, however, to accost her with unseemly speeches—a kind of thing, by the way, that young men at all times are very prone to. Maud was treated by every one like a saint. Maidens even, her equals in years, prized her highly; and in no way envied her the general admiration. This might be founded in the behaviour itself of Maud. More forward to oblige, to do good offices, more sweetly behaved, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Next arrives the Prone to Err Very ancient Chronicler, All that mythologic lore Swallowing whole and wanting more, Crediting what wholly lacked All similitude of Fact, Building on this wondrous basis All we know of early races; So the Past as seen by him Furnished from its chambers dim Hypothetical foundations Whence ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion, watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... charge their followers, / did crash of shafts resound. Risen eke was Hagen, / who erst unto the ground Was borne by mighty lance-thrust, / prone upon the grass. I ween that unto Gelfrat / nowise of ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... motive had placed her in this extraordinary situation, nor had I long to conjecture. Puss was skulking in a corner, and though the mutton was untouched, yet her conscious fears clearly evinced that she had been driven from the table in the act of attempting a robbery on the meat, to which she was too prone, and that her situation had been occupied by this faithful spaniel to prevent a repetition of the attempt. Here was fidelity united with great intellect, and wholly free from the aid of instinct. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... strong a man's health is, so much the more prone is he to sin. The more fat the sow is, the more she loves the mire. It is not so hard to sit up a night or two, as to watch for a whole year; just as it is not so hard to start well as it is to hold out to the end. One leak will sink a ship, and one sin will kill a man's soul. If a man ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... to preserve Dare from the consequences of folly, and a gentlemanly wish to keep as close to the truth as was compatible with that condition, his answers had not appeared to Paula to be particularly evasive, the conjuncture being one in which a handsome heiress's shrewdness was prone to overleap itself by setting down embarrassment on the part of the man she questioned to a mere lover's difficulty in ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... strode on—Kunti's strong son— And Bhima, and Arjuna followed him, And Nakula, and the hound; leaving behind Sahadev in the sands. But Nakula, Weakened and grieved to see Sahadev fall— His loved twin-brother—lagged and stayed; and next Prone on his face he fell, that noble face Which had no match for beauty in the land,— Glorious and godlike Nakula! Then sighed Bhima anew: 'Brother and Lord! the man Who never erred from virtue, never broke Our fellowship, and never in the world ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Yet in such hideous subter-human form, Vulgar as venomous! Dragon indeed, And dangerous, but with no soul save greed, No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind, The common enemy of humankind; Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns to blast, To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast Prone—as itself is prone—in common dust. The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the Just, All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought, All that co-operant Man hath won or wrought, All that the heart has loved, the mind has taught Through the long generations, hoarded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... onward, while the Texan searched the trail with keen eyes that missed nothing. Suddenly he drew up his horse. Blizzard had shied at something lying prone ahead of them, and The Kid's eyes had seen ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's book and the butcher's bill through the little ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... will tell you: yet, if you were not dunces, you would never ask me such a question; for is not he corpus naturale? and is not that mobile? then wherefore should you ask me such a question? But that I am by nature phlegmatic, slow to wrath, and prone to lechery (to love, I would say), it were not for you to come within forty foot of the place of execution, although I do not doubt to see you both hanged the next sessions. Thus having triumphed over you, I will set my countenance ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... words these for our black brother; but see how prone men are to invert truth, justice, and mercy in dealing with women. During the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... prone upon the ground, one bathed in blood and motionless, with his face toward the earth; this one was dead. The other leaned against a tree, supported there by the two valets, and was praying fervently, with clasped hands and eyes raised to Heaven. He had received a ball in ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... so prone to believe the marvellous, had faith in Mesmer, and reverenced him as a saint. Why should he not perform miracles with his hand, as did Moses with a rod, when he struck the rock? Why should not the power of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in the process of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that he could not close eyes ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... not soured Harry's temper, but he certainly appears more prone to take offence than in former days," was my inward comment, as I pondered over his last words. "I am afraid Fanny has annoyed him; I must speak to her, and give her a hint to be more careful for ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... been reading over this letter, dear Aunt Janet, and I am afraid the record is rather an alarming one. But don't you go building up superstitious horrors or fears on it. Honestly, I am only joking about death—a thing to which I have been rather prone for a good many years back. Not in very good taste, I suppose, but certainly very useful when the old man with the black wings goes flying about you day and night in strange places, sometimes visible and at others invisible. But you can always hear wings, especially in the ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... hath passed word to help His people in their need; but He saith not any where that He will alway help them right as they would have it. We be prone to think there is but one fashion of help, and that if we be not holpen after our own manner, we be not holpen at all. Yet, if thou take a penny from a poor beggar, and give him in the stead thereof an angel [half-sovereign], thou hast given him alms, though he ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... library work. Consequently we have this feminization to reckon with, and to me it is an active factor in the diversity of library practice to which I have referred, for women far more than men are prone ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... large harbour which struck his fancy was named in honour of the saint's day, Puerto de la Conversion de San Pablo, for the sun seldom went down without a Spaniard of those days thus propitiating a saint. We are more prone to honour the devil in these matters. The Gila they called Rio del Nombre de Jesus, a name never used again. So it often happens with names bestowed by explorers. The ones they regard most highly vanish, while some they ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... him along the garden-path, with the endless messages and warnings girls are so prone to give; and the young man, with a great softness at his heart, went away, as many another John has gone, feeling better for the companionship of innocent maidenhood, and stronger to wrestle with temptation, to wait and hope ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... could not fill his father's shoes; they were too big for him. He did become member for East Barsetshire, but he was such a member—so lukewarm, so indifferent, so prone to associate with the enemies of the good cause, so little willing to fight the good fight, that he soon disgusted those who most dearly loved the memory of the ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle he suddenly succumbed; his head dropped, and he lay prone in the grass, apparently as lifeless, as the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... transparent hot waves swam up and danced themselves into nothing; while from the river bank, a half-mile away, came a sound hotter than even the locust's midsummer rasp: the drone of a planing-mill. A chance boy, lying prone in the grass of the Court-house yard, was annoyed by the relentless chant and lifted his head to mock it: "AWR-EER-AWR-EER! SHUT UP, CAN'T YOU?" The effort was exhausting: he relapsed and suffered with increasing malice but ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... of mind. He heard a sound of voices at the front of the house, and sprang to his balconied window to listen. Captain Stewart and O'Hara were walking upon the brick-paved terrace and chatting calmly over their cigars. The man above, prone upon the floor, his head pressed against the ivy-masked grille of the balcony, listened, and though he could hear their words only at intervals when they passed beneath him he knew that they spoke of trivial matters in voices free of strain ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... half-breech'd legions swarm'd like moths around; But, ah! the half-breech'd legions, call'd in vain, Dismay'd and useless, fill'd the cumber'd plain; And while for servile aid the Doctor calls, [41]By P——t subverted, prone to earth he sprawls. [42]E'en then were heard, so Brazenose students sing, The grass-plot chains in boding notes to ring; E'en then we mark'd, where, gleaming through the night, Aerial crosses shed a lurid light. Those wrestlers, too, whom naked we behold Through many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... as the nature of the soul and immortality are prone to concentrate their attention on death and neglect the phenomena of birth, which surely are equally important. For if a soul survives the death of this complex of cells which is called the body, its ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Norridgewock on the Kennebec River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims to lands about ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... naturally prone to seek the company of those they love; and as their impulses are often at such times impatient of control, etiquette prescribes cautionary rules for the purpose of averting the mischief that unchecked intercourse and incautious familiarity might give rise to. For instance, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... might escape, and then she saw Ellerey with the sweat and grime of the conflict upon him. For an instant their eyes met, her lips whispered his name, and then she threw up her arms, and with a low cry fell prone upon ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... lain in wait With tender greetings, and the lights within Gleamed on the grave of Bliss that once had been. Fair Hope who daily poured into his ear Her rainbow promises gave way to Fear Who smote him blindly, leaving him to moan With bitter tears before the gateway prone. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... did I say?" shouted Shaddy excitedly, as all at once there was the sound of splashing and agitation in the water down beneath the submerged trees; and directly after the serpent's tail rose above the trunk of one of those lying prone, and gleamed and glistened in the blaze as it undulated and bent and twined about. Then it fell with a splash, and beat the water, rose again quivering seven or eight feet in the air, while the water all around seemed terribly agitated. There ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... foul-spoken, repulsive wretches inside and out. In all the party there obtains a certain twitching character of mouth and furtiveness of eye, that hint how the coward is lurking under the bully. The hint is quite correct, for they are a slinking sneaking set, far more prone to lie down on their backs and kick out, when in difficulty, than to make a stand for it. (This may account for the street mud on the backs of Numbers five, six, and seven, being much fresher than the stale splashes ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... back. We kept on. There was hardly one who lost in step. The commanders whispered in the darkness, "Close up the ranks." The men behind those who had fallen jumped across the bodies of their comrades lying prone, and joined in immediately behind those in the ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... frosty or begins to rub off in spots, we are so prone to say, "I am aging rapidly." It pays to advertise. We always get results. See the one shrivel who goes around front-paging his age. Age is not years; age ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... progress and decline of conservatism. For better or for worse the modern man is intellectually more self-reliant than his ancestors, more prone to try new inventions and to profit by new discoveries, more conscious and therefore more critical of conditions about him, more convinced that he lives in a better world than did his fathers, and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... appellation of Roughhead; and Herbert Roughhead being assailed, at his entrance into the room, by a variety of petty reproaches and maternal witticisms upon his uncouth appearance, became bashful and awkward, averse from polite society, and prone to the less fastidious company of servants in the stable and the kitchen. Mrs. Harcourt absolutely forbade his intercourse with the postilions, though she did not think it necessary to be so strict in her injunctions as to the butler and footman; because, argued she, "children will get to the ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... score which, by the after-judgment of five nations, remains unsurpassed in the history of opera save by the music-dramas of one Richard of Bayreuth. Already, in his heart, Ivan knew the value of his work. But his nature, ever prone to self-depreciation, never wholly believing in his own power till another had assured him of it, cried out for confirmation of his secret hope. With the stamp of Zaremba's approval, Petersburg, first ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... which he felt it his duty to interpret to men, hinderances and trammels to the development of his genius. The laurel tree of Petrarch's garden is a fair type of one phase of the poet's own speech, prone to derive its significance from extraneous sources and overloaded with borrowed metaphor. But the laurel receives a new meaning if we picture to ourselves Madonna Laura reclining in its shadow on the banks of the little river, with flowers scattered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... indignation, the boys, freely ringing the changes of rebellion, had avowed to one another that they would acquaint the dean with the head-master's favouritism, and request his interference—as too many of us do when things happen that annoy us. We are only too prone to speak out our mind, and to proclaim what our remedy or revenge shall be. But when our anger has subsided, and we see things in their true light, we find that those boasts were only loud talking, and cannot be acted upon. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the moment for the intervention of that tiny glimmer of reason which Darwin so generously grants to animals. Do not, if you please, confound reason with intelligence, as people are too prone to do. I deny the one; and the other is incontestable, within very modest limits. It was, I said, the moment to reason a little, to discover the cause of the hitch and to attack the difficulty at its source. For the Tachytes the matter was of the simplest. She had but to grab the body by the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... by the name of Cape Cod, no one can positively tell, not even themselves. The last opinion seems to be that of the most sensible people of the island. So prevailing is the disposition of man to quarrel, and shed blood; so prone is he to divisions and parties; that even the ancient natives of this little spot were separated into two communities, inveterately waging war against each other, like the more powerful tribes of the continent. What do you imagine was the cause ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... black sea, the thrust of the vessel threw up a great welt which bordered the wedge of disturbed waters: phosphorescence gleamed like great wet stars. The tips of cigarettes glowed on the forward deck where members of the crew lay prone, exchanging occasional words in the hushed voices races not far from nature use in the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... and Fred had reached the sill, when there was a bright flame, which illumined the smoke-filled room, and he uttered a cry for help, and hesitated, for he had caught a glimpse of those who had preceded him lying prone ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... doubted if Mr. Croker realizes how prone and dead he is. One knows when one is wounded, but one knows not when one is killed. Some near day, or some far day, Mr. Croker will seek to return. Then, and not until that time, will he comprehend the palsy that has stricken his supremacy. Mr. Croker ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; waterborne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... jealous disposition of the Turk, has a mortality of three out of every four, according to Chardin, and of two out of every three, according to Clot Bey, the chief physician of the Pasha,[36] and of nine out of ten, according to Bisson. So prone to reach high offices were intelligent eunuchs that it is related that parents were at times induced to treat their boys in the manner above stated, that they might be on the highway to royal favor, honor, and rank; such is the ennobling tendency ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the teapot and eyed her parent with a puzzled frown. That frown had sat too often on her cheerful face during the past three months. In truth, Mr. Benny as a regrater fell disastrously short of success, being prone to sell at monstrous overweights, which ate up the profits. When Nuncey at length forbade him to touch the scales, he gave away apples to every child that chose to edge around the ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Creator—for we were like-minded friends, and no subject was tabooed. We conversed freely about whatever chanced to enter our minds—of things past, present, and to come. We spoke of God the Saviour, of redemption and of sin. Then, with that discursive tendency to which most minds are prone, we diverged to home and civilised lands, contrasting these with life in the wild-woods of the Great Nor'-west. After that we became sleepy, and our converse was more discursive—at times even incoherent—in the midst of which Lumley reverted to his unfinished exposition of grossness, and, ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... that it might be because Socialists as a class, speaking roughly, are generalizers. They do not see vividly and deeply the universal in the particular, the universal in the individual, the national in the local. They are convinced by counting, and are moved by masses, and are prone to overlook the Spirit of the Little, the immensity of the seed and of the individual. They are prone to look past the next single thing to be done. They look past the next single man to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... flung his right hand toward his pistol butt. There was a silent struggle; a shot, one of the young man's arms swung out—flail like—the clenched hand landing with a crash. The big man went down like a falling tree—prone to the ground, his revolver flying ten feet distant, a little blue-white smoke curling lazily upward out of its muzzle. The big man was raised again—bodily—and hurled down again. He lay face upward in the white sunlight—a mass of bruised and ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... beyond the sunset's golden choir, Instead of one august enduring sleep, There waits a life where memory shall keep Her ancient force and hope her old desire, Now, even now, on altars cleft and prone Rekindle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... the prone position is resumed, make a uniform and efficient pressure along the spine, removing the pressure immediately, before rotation on the side. (The pressure augments the expiration, the rotation ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... moralising, was not prone to indulge in sentiment when circumstances called him to action. He had come suddenly in sight of the wreck on turning the point of the frowning cliff where the gallant ship had met her doom, and stood only for a few seconds to gaze sadly ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... his horse rared up on his hind legs till he fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise. Vainly the neighbours averred ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of Dickens whilst at school," Mr. Thomas continues, "is that of a healthy-looking boy, small but well built, with a more than usual flow of spirits, inducing to harmless fun, seldom or never I think to mischief, to which so many lads at that age are prone. I cannot recall anything that then indicated he would hereafter become a literary celebrity; but perhaps he was too young then. He usually held his head more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Ayala, in his recent novel, La Pata de la Raposa, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... sage, while, slyly stealing, The nymphs their fetters around him cast, And,—their laughing eyes, the while, concealing,— Led Freedom's Bard their slave at last. For the Poet's heart, still prone to loving, Was like that rack of the Druid race,[1] Which the gentlest touch at once set moving, But all earth's power couldn't cast ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... as one might suppose. It was surrounded by swamps everywhere. And it had been raining, of course. It always seems to have been raining in France during this war. There were duck boards over the swampy ground, and a single mis- step might send one prone in the ooze up to ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... we are all prone to stare backward. Who lives in the present? Do you? When we are young we pant for the future, that pitches painted tents before us. When we are older, we live in the past, that wraps itself in a sacred gilding glamour, and is vocal with ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
