"Receptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abundance of pollen, but sunlight and warmth are essential to its maturing into a condition in which it can easily reach the stigma. The structure and development of the flower are such that while occasionally, particularly in healthy plants out of doors, the stigma becomes receptive and takes the pollen as it is pushed out through the stamen tube by the elongating style, it is more often pushed beyond them before the pollen matures, so that the pollen has to reach the stigma through some other means. Usually this is accomplished by the ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... excitement and the moment had come for its inevitable crystallization into fateful words. The man spoke as though he were not wholly conscious of what he was saying. He stepped beside her like one in a dream. He could not take his eyes from her, from her flushed, grave, receptive face, from her downcast, listening eyes, her slow, trance-like step as she waited for him to go on. He went on: "It becomes, my dear, I assure you—the idea of that possibility becomes absolutely an obsession—even to a man usually ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... being of man." And no man can hope to dominate those forces, if he is content to let his opinions crystallise at the age of thirty-five or so. If he would retain his powers of criticism and construction he must have the patience and the energy to maintain the normal, receptive mind with which he is naturally endowed. Unfortunately with that endowment commonly comes another—namely, a tendency to avoid the irk or constant struggle by taking the line of least resistance; by adopting ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... two kinds of blessing which answer to one another—God's blessing of man, and man's blessing of God. The one is communicative, the other receptive and responsive. The one is the great stream which pours itself over the precipice; the other is the basin into which it falls and the showers of spray which rise from its surface, rainbowed in the sunshine, as the cataract of divine mercies ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in profusion what once would have delighted her, and what she now felt ought to be the source of almost unmingled happiness, she was still thoroughly wretched. It was the old fable of Tantalus repeating itself. Her sin and its results had destroyed her receptive power. The world offered her pleasures on every side; she longed to enjoy them, but could not, for her heart was preoccupied—filled and overflowing with fear, remorse, and a ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... deepest lake, and to sit down in the heather and wait half an hour maybe while the curlew called, and then have Dancing Town take form and color before his eyes, hold it until every detail was visible, and then fade gently out as twilight fades into night. He had thought to be prepared and receptive. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... genuine love of science. "Science—the rock foundation of all effort," he wrote; and whether discussing ice problems with Wright, meteorology with Simpson, or geology with Taylor, he showed not only a mind which was receptive and keen to learn, but a knowledge which was quick to offer valuable suggestions. I remember Pennell condemning anything but scientific learning in dealing with the problems round us; 'no guesswork' was his argument. But he emphatically made an exception of Scott, who had an uncanny ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... something of this kind has certainly taken place in Boston. The New England metropolis of to-day may be described as sunny, (there is something else that makes warmth, mastering even winds and meteorologies, though those are not to be sneez'd at,) joyous, receptive, full of ardor, sparkle, a certain element of yearning, magnificently tolerant, yet not to be fool'd; fond of good eating and drinking—costly in costume as its purse can buy; and all through its best average of houses, streets, people, that subtle something (generally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that all the workers should quit their tasks and meet at the Chapel. In five minutes we had an audience of three hundred—men in blouses and overalls, girls in big aprons—a very jolly, kindly, receptive company. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... them in their lonely captivity in a strange land. The trial was continued several months. During this time the anti-slavery friends provided instruction for the Africans. Their minds were active and receptive. They soon learned to read, write, and do sums in arithmetic. They cultivated a garden of some fifteen acres, and proved themselves an intelligent and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Europe can be richer than this Elche in fruits and vegetation, more beautiful in its surrounding aspects of plain and mountain, more blessed with constant, glorious sunlight; and the effect of these charms upon the quick, receptive spirit of our Molly was like a gentle May upon a nightingale, so that the days were all too short for her enjoyment, and she must need vent her happiness in song; but on us they made no more impression than on two owls in a tower, nay, if anything they did add to that weariness which arose ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... condition, a carriage had been ordered, the first one in which they had ever ridden. Esther was quietly explaining to Rosa more of Jesus and His love for the children, while her receptive little soul was eagerly taking it ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... revenge, cruelty and deceit, increased with it, being directed against all who opposed that love; for from the proprium, in which those are who are in the love of self, nothing but evil springs, inasmuch as man's proprium is nothing but evil, and, as the proprium is evil, it is not receptive of good from heaven: therefore the love of self, when it is the reigning love, is the father of all such evils[ddd]; and that love is also of such a nature, that in proportion as it is left without restraint, it rushes on until at length each one who is of such ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... bowed gravely. Mr. Gwynn's strength lay in bowing. He was also remarkable for the unflagging attention which he paid to whatever was said to him. On such occasions his unblinking stare, wholly receptive like an underling taking orders, and never a glimmer of either contradiction or agreement or even intelligence to show therein, was almost disconcerting. Mrs. Hanway-Harley, however, declared that this receptive, inane stare was the hall-mark of exclusive English circles. Mr. Gwynn gave ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... citation of historical precedents surprising even to those who thought they had themselves exhausted the subject. His temper was too amiable and serene for stinging wit or biting sarcasm, but he had a playful humor which kept the minds of his hearers in that receptive and compliant state which disposed them the more readily to give full and generous consideration to all the strong parts of his argument. It might well indeed be said of Mr. Seward as Mr. Webster said of Samuel Dexter, "The earnestness of his convictions wrought conviction ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... then a torrent of facts, criticisms, quotations, all bearing upon the particular volume which you were supposed not to like; and so on, hour after hour. There was no limit save that imposed by the receptive capacity of the guest. It reminded one of the word spoken concerning a 'hard sitter at books' of the last century, that he was a literary giant 'born to grapple with whole libraries.' But the fine ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... is to dispose the auditors to be favorable to us in the other parts of the discourse. This, as most authors agree, is accomplished by making them friendly, attentive, and receptive, tho due regard should be paid to these three particulars throughout the whole ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... in my own person to the somewhat rapidly-acquired and long-retained fancies concerning the clean and unclean, upon which Jews and Mussulmans lay such curious stress. It was the result of my happening to spend a year in the East, at an age when the brain is very receptive of new ideas, and when I happened to be much impressed by the nobler aspects of Mussulman civilisation, especially, I may say, with the manly conformity of their every-day practice to their creed, which ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... successful camping-out trip are personal. One must have the receptive and acceptive spirit. No matter what comes it is for the best; an experience worth having. Nothing must be complained of. The "grouch" has no place on a camping-trip, and one who is a "grouch," a "sissy," a "faultfinder," a "worrier," a "quitter," or who cannot or will not enter fully into ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... passion of a play being hidden by the paint, and of sentiment being killed by scenery, is mere emptiness and folly of words. A noble play, nobly mounted, gives us double artistic pleasure. The eye as well as the ear is gratified, and the whole nature is made exquisitely receptive of the influence of imaginative work. And as regards a bad play, have we not all seen large audiences lured by the loveliness of scenic effect into listening to rhetoric posing as poetry, and to vulgarity doing duty for realism? Whether this be good ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... You ask me why? Why can't a telegram travel on a fence instead of on a wire? Your friends could come back to you if you could put yourself in a receptive condition; but if you cannot, you must depend upon a ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... hardly necessary, for in his features there was much of what were the specialities of his father. There was an air of quiet resolution about him, and in the greeting which he gave me he exhibited rather a reticent character; but I attributed that to a receptive nature, which augured well for ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little Methy into a receptive mood. He is having ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... Mercury:—let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, {124} bee-like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at. But let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit—Sap will be given us for meat, and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive. "Why did you land your ship on this planet?" the ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... of knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle, and for the same object—ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Here, as elsewhere, the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded and informed a matter which was not, in its nature, easily receptive of a clerical impression. The whole accumulated store of the lay learning of the ages—geometry, astronomy, and natural science; grammar and rhetoric; logic and metaphysics—this was the matter to be moulded and the stuff to be permeated; and on ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... stood ready to pour forth his healing love, a Divine Spirit waited only the means, to lay a healing touch on sore hearts. What was needed was a simple, practical, real way to make it understandable to men, to bring them into the right environment, to make their hearts and minds receptive, to point the way to peace, joy and eternal life. He brought to bear on this problem all the practical, trained skill of the lawyer, the keen insight and common sense, the knowledge of the world, of the traveler and writer. Every experience of his own life he probed ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... heart, the experience of many an ardent soul in those spirit searching days. Growing up happily under the care of the simple monks of Beaulieu he had never looked beyond their somewhat mechanical routine, accepted everything implicitly, and gone on acquiring knowledge with the receptive spirit but dormant thought of studious boyhood as yet unawakened, thinking that the studious clerical life to which every one destined him would only be a continuation of the same, as indeed it had been to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Hayti he had stepped back a century or so into the age of credulity. Credulity, he believed, was a good thing, almost a divine thing, if it were properly used; he did not carry his processes far enough to realize that credulity could never become fixed—that it was always open to conviction. A receptive and not an inquiring mind seemed to him the prerequisite for a convert. And black people, he had ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Walter Winfield, the third son, was born. His father died in his childhood. After his education was complete, his mother placed him with Mr. Benjamin Cooke, whose name as a manufacturer is still remembered in Birmingham. Mr. Winfield's mind, being a peculiarly receptive one, readily grasped all the details of the business, and he soon wished to enter life on his own account. His trustees having great faith in his prudence and industry, advanced him the necessary ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... became more and more indistinct. The soothsayers of the long past had been forbidden by Nature to doubt that which was the lore of the camp. Was it that Nature re-asserted her influence—that the essences of the scene, subtle and pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but a casual ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... one day after dinner, as was their wont in the summer—he, on this occasion, under the influence of a good cigar, mellow in mind and moral in sentiment, but inclining to be didactic for the moment because the coffee was late; she in a receptive mood, ready to gather silently, and store with care, in her capacious memory any precept that might fall from his lips, to be taken out and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... school she is hardly old enough to enter service, and too often in the year or so that elapses before she 'goes out' much mischief is done. She is then at an age when the mind is peculiarly receptive, and the ways of the young labourers with whom she is thrown into contact are not very refined. Her first essay at 'service' is often as day-nursemaid at some adjacent farmhouse, taking care of the younger children in the day, and returning home to sleep. She then wanders with the children about ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... powers of sex relationship, marriage and parenthood, should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine role and vice versa, the tragedy of compelled ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... insights. It is something more than opinion, but something less than faith. Faith abides, but knowledge passes away. Faith abides, because it is a positive sight of truth. It is an experience of the soul, by which it opens itself in trust, and becomes receptive of spiritual influence. Faith, therefore, remains, and its results are permanent in the soul. They make the substance of our knowledge as regards the spiritual world. This substance becomes a part of the soul itself, and constitutes ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... night," in old Judea, passes through the priest, the minister, the preacher; it echoes in cathedral, church, open-air meeting; it gently and mysteriously imparts to human life the distinctive quality which is the exponent of Christian civilization. Upon the receptive nature of children it makes an impress that forever afterward exhales a fragrance and irradiates a glory for the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... are still the most wide-hearted and receptive of people, a people that cannot live if it does not make its own the spiritual values of the other peoples. We can already say that we know the outer world better than they know us.—PROF. F. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... travelling through Swabia and Switzerland, he met Gassner and witnessed some of his cures. Mesmer claimed that they were performed by his newly discovered magnetism. He arrived in Paris in 1778 and found this city more receptive to his arts. He at first established himself in an humble quarter of the city and began to expound his theory. The following year he published a paper in which he summed up his claims in twenty-seven assertions to which he rigidly held through his life. His doctrines were well received, and acquired ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand, Beowulf may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But let anybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first part of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt (unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and graces) about its excellence as such. There is character—not much, but enough to make it more than a mere story of adventure—and adventure enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... he looked further at the Telegraph. He was rather surprised to find more than a column of enticing palaces, each in the finest position in London; London, in fact, seemed to be one unique, glorious position. And it was so welcome, so receptive, so wishful to make a speciality of your comfort, your food, your bath, your sanitation! He remembered the old boarding-houses of the eighties. Now all was changed, for the better. The Telegraph was full of the better, crammed and packed with tight columns of it. The better burst ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Waldo, and who makes some innocent remark about "Literary Ethics," or the "Conduct of Life." We have known this little boy too long to bear a parting from him. Indeed, the mere suggestion that all Bostonians are forever immersed in Emerson is one which gives unfailing delight to the receptive American mind. It is a poor community which cannot furnish its archaic jest for the diversion of ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They may not ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... vital balance between the indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which, as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive of God." ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... immortality of the soul was firm, but whether we are to live in another world or not, he said there is no higher wisdom than to live here and now—live our highest and best—cultivate the receptive mind and the hospitable heart, "partaking of all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... what is called "reading matter" rolling out of our presses every year; while, significantly, we are producing very few books of permanent literary value. If the college study of literature is to encourage this indolent receptive temper, and relax the intellectual fiber of the student, then we might better drop it from the curriculum. The student must somehow learn that the book that is worth while will tax his thought, his imagination, his sympathies. He cannot be content merely to leave the door of his mind lazily ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... great his vices, was always master of them. From his right cheek-bone to the corner of his mouth ran a scar, very well healed. Instead of detracting from the beauty of his face it added a peculiar fascination. And the American imagination, always receptive of the romantic, might readily and forgivably have pictured villas, maids in durance vile, and sword-thrusts under the moonlight. But the waiter, who had served his time in one or another of the foreign armies, knew that no foil or rapier could have made ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... blackboard. The window adjoining this display exhibited a miniature classroom in which the "F.E. & S." system of classroom ventilation maintained air so pure and fresh that the most comatose pupil could not but keep alert and receptive ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... in her home were united by Barbara's unaffected vivacity and frank, enthusiastic temperament, receptive to the veriest trifle. These evening entertainments rarely lacked music; but she had learned to retire into the background, and when there were talented artists among her guests she gave them the precedence. The way in which she understood how to discover ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Prince Albert traveled in Switzerland and Italy with Baron Stockmar—everywhere winning the admiration and respect of the best sort of people by the rare princeliness of his appearance, his refined taste, his thoughtful and singularly receptive mind. And so three years went by. They were three years of uncertainty in regard to the great projects formed for him, of happiness, and a noble and useful, if subordinate career. King Leopold, the good genius of the two ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... contributed a great gift to Science Fiction readers in offering this magazine to the receptive public.—Theodore L. Page, 2361 Los Angeles Ave., ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the evening, the whole family went out for a drive. They did not return home till nine o'clock, when they had a light supper. The conversation in no way turned upon ghosts, so there were not even those primary conditions of receptive expectation which so often precede the presentation of psychical phenomena. The subjects discussed, as I have since learned from Mr. Otis, were merely such as form the ordinary conversation of cultured Americans of the better class, such as the immense superiority of Miss Fanny Davenport ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, is neither voluntary nor constant. The appearances have no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, detained, or recalled. The impression is sudden, and the effect ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... would talk about him enthusiastically, the next day, none the less. The journalist's silence was enforced by the topics; but what expression and manner the light allowed them to see was friendly and receptive, as though he listened to brilliant suggestions. He had a nice courtesy, and Miss Hinsdale felt continually that she was cleverer than usual this evening, and no one took his silence to be churlish, though they all innocently wondered why he did not talk more; however, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary hypnotism which he exerts ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... river dam. The men's faces differed as much as their attire. Orde's worn and wrinkled around the eyes, and grizzled at the temples, was the harder and more square of the two, and it was with something like envy that the owner looked at the comfortable outlines of Pagett's blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which, unfinished though it be, shows us how clever ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... they result largely from association, it is obvious that what may be poetry to some minds may not be poetry to others,—may not be poetry to the same mind at different periods of life or in different moods. The most sympathetic, most catholic, most receptive mind will always be the best qualified to detect and appreciate poetry under all its various forms, and would as soon think of denying the devotional faculty to a man of differing creed, as of denying the poetical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... have been here in your own land engaged in the great work of the organization and reorganization which is molding the destinies of the women of our times, and those that come after us. That is what I want to talk to you about, and devoutly have I been praying that your heart will be receptive to the call that has claimed the life of Mary Elizabeth and me. There is a particular work, for which you are fitted as no other woman I have ever known is fitted, and I want to lay the case plainly before you to-night. Will you give ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the tropics were finally left behind, he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour, an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor, in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound. Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and humiliated silence. Each of them was mysteriously lowered in his own estimation, and knew that he had been made to seem futile and foolish in the eyes of his fellows. They were all conscious, too, that the clerk had been acutely receptive of Judge Pike's reading of them; that he was reviving from his own squelchedness through the later snubbing of the colonel; also that he might further seek to recover his poise by an attack on them for cluttering ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... perfectly well I remembered it from your playing it to me. As I come to study it more closely I perceive that no feature of any importance had escaped me, even the smallest and finest details were perfectly familiar to me from that time. This at least is good evidence of my receptive faculties; but I believe that the credit is really due to the peculiar grandeur ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and by means of an angel there. The Divine in the whole heaven and the Divine in an angel is the same; therefore even the whole heaven may appear as one angel. So is it with the church, and with a man of the church. The greatest form receptive of the Divine is the whole heaven together with the whole church; the least is an angel of heaven and a man of the church. Sometimes an entire society of heaven has appeared to me as one angel-man; ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... under modern conditions. For Goethe, who was to pass most of his days in a town of some 7,000 inhabitants, and to whom no form of human activity was indifferent, it was a fortunate destiny that he did not, like Herder, pass his most receptive years in a petty village remote from the movements of the great world.[4] In these years he was able to accumulate a store of observations and experiences which laid a solid foundation for all ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... at the Spotted Woodpigeon and talked pleasantly with the villagers, who, on learning that he had never even heard of the Surrey cattle-maimings, were at great pains to pour information and theories into his receptive ear. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... frequent visitor to our cottage on the hill. He always came and went rejoicing. The Gospel of John was his daily study and delight. To his ardent and receptive nature it was a diamond mine. Two things he wanted to do. He had a strong desire to translate his favorite Gospel into Chinese, and to lead his parents to Christ. When he spoke of his father and mother his voice would soften, his ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... receptive side, the sensibility, the most prominent. His senses are alert. He handles and examines objects about him. He sees more, and he learns more from the seeing, than he will in later years unless his perceptive powers are definitely trained and observation made ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... most truly delightful holes of a picturesque course," said Booverman, taking out an approaching cleek for his second shot. "Nothing is more artistic than the tiny little patch of putting-green under the shaggy branches of the willows. The receptive graveyard to the right gives a certain pathos to it, a splendid, quiet note in contrast to the feeling of the swift, hungry river to the left, which will now receive and carry from my outstretched hand this little ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... decided to reserve his story for more receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying "Oh?" ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... best of our power, in order to secure not only a greater and more independent individual efficiency, but also a deeper and more lasting influence on the men; but this influence of the superiors must always remain limited if it cannot count on finding in the men a receptive and intelligent material. This fact is especially clear when we grasp the claims which modern war will make on the individual fighter. In order to meet these demands fully, the people ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... theory that the essential forms of Reality are to be found in the Object and are thence supplied to the Understanding, which plays the part merely of a receptive surface ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... excitement, the thrill, the difference felt in himself, experienced the preceding night, had extended on into his present. And the possibilities suggested by the conversation he had unwittingly overheard added sufficiently to the other feelings to put him into a peculiarly receptive state of mind. He was wild to be one of the Belding rangers. The idea of riding a horse in the open desert, with a dangerous duty to perform, seemed to strike him with an appealing force. Something within him went out to the cowboys, to this blunt ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... collapse, dropped into a chair on her veranda, her faithful Major by her side. He had come to offer help and sympathy as soon as he heard of her distress, and, finding her in such a softened, dependent, and receptive mood, the Major had remained to try to cheer ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth "says he," and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... gradations that contemporary manufacturers could produce—subjects selected from the creation down to the life of Christ, in addition containing a complete alphabet of early Christian symbolism. The roof surfaces being one succession of over-arching curves become receptive of innumerable waves of light and broad unities of soft shadows, giving the whole an incomparable quality of tone ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... is Sergius. He was scarcely out of boyhood when I came here; it was not long, however, before I discovered in him the qualities which drew me to thee during thy prison life at the old convent of Irene—a receptive mind, and a native proneness to love God. I made his way easy. I became his teacher, as I had been thine; and as the years flew by he reminded me more and more of thee, not merely with respect to mental capacity, but purity of soul and aspiration as well. Need I say ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... it lovingly down with the cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free—and then for your saeckerhets taendstickor! A day so begun is well begun, and sin will flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... like so many charming women, perfectly natural and perfectly at her ease, and full of receptive interest. When she talked it was always to draw out her interlocutor and never to show off her own cleverness. She was quite as popular, indeed I had almost said more popular, with women as with men, and had as great a fascination ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... among the fog and the shadows. Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... certain surroundings. The education which my daughter has received, has inoculated her with ideas which I am far from blaming in a woman—I have my religion myself too—but the abuse of which I resent. I am not then at war with my daughter because she has her own, and her own is more receptive, but what I blame with all my power, and what I am determined to oppose with all my power is the excessive attendance at church and on the priest ... on the priest, above all. You are a man, sir, and you understand me, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... to grasp, and all in vain, some problem in mathematics or a puzzling legal question, or even to remember some refractory word in a foreign language which would not remain in the memory. After a certain amount of effort in many of these cases, further exertion is injurious, the mind or receptive power seems to be seized—as if nauseated—with spasmodic rejections. In such a case pass the question by, but on going to bed, think it over and will to understand it on the morrow. It will often suffice to merely desire that it shall recur in more intelligible form—in which case, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Pendlam, "has indisputable uses. It opens the avenues to an influx of spiritual magnetisms. But where the mind is kept in the receptive condition without the aid of the external form of prayer, this becomes like a scaffolding after the house is built. Step by step, I have been led to this high ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... book—a volume of pious meditations. Events had drawn him into a receptive attitude toward religion. He ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... diversity of race, was very large; and their presence in their home circles and in social gatherings and all they had to tell of their experiences opened men's minds, stirred their imaginations, and aroused an interest and a curiosity, which made even the stay-at-home Hollanders alert, receptive ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... world before he has reached his majority. The change in the author's position is, indeed, equally marked in a different way. The youthful heroes of Disraeli's early novels are creative; in his later they become chiefly receptive. Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming show their genius by insubordination; Coningsby and Tancred learn wisdom by sitting at the feet of Sidonia; and Lothair reduces himself so completely to a mere 'passive bucket' to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... desire for the primal being; for matter requires light from that which is in the essence of will, which compels matter to move toward will and to desire it: and herein will and matter are alike. And because matter is receptive of the form that has flowed down into it by the flux of violence and necessity, matter must necessarily move to receive form; and therefore things are constrained by will and obedience in turn. Hence by the light which it has from will, matter moves toward will and desires it; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... these months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed. There had always lingered in his receptive mind a memory of profound beauty, a stark beauty of color and outline, an unhampered freedom, opportunity as vast as the mountains that looked from their cool heights down on the changeful sea and the hushed forests, brooding ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... hear'; make a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in my heart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and the fathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to me. ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... practice or sport, Raymond remained within the house, generally the companion of the studious John; and as the latter grew strong enough to talk, he was always imparting new ideas to the untutored but receptive ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... application. It is difficult to lay down any rule as a guide to the proper division of effort; but from the writer's point of view, it is a mistake to attempt to crowd into a course too many facts. At best they cannot all be given; and in the attempt to do so, the student is brought into a passive and receptive attitude, requiring maximum use of his memory and minimum use of his reasoning power. Presentation of a few fundamental facts, combined with vigorous discussion tending to develop the student's ability to use these facts, and particularly ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... afterward the youthful nephews of the great Mr. Melnor appeared. They closed and locked the door behind them as they were tersely bidden, then stood in a row, politely and attentively receptive—well-bred, pleasant-faced, expensive-looking young fellows, typical of the metropolis. Mr. Trinkle eyed ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... looks forward. Honore and Frowenfeld are walking arm-in-arm under the furthermost row of willows. Honore is speaking. How gracefully, in correspondence with his words, his free arm or hand—sometimes his head or even his lithe form—moves in quiet gesture, while the grave, receptive apothecary takes into his meditative mind, as into a large, cool cistern, the valued rain-fall of his friend's communications. They are near enough for the little doctor easily to call them; but he is silent. The unhappy feel so far ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... open air like an explorer. You know already his mastery of delicate and sensitive words; many of these pages catch with exquisite skill the subtle charm of the country between land and wave, as it would present itself to a receptive summer visitor rather than the returned native. Mr. SYMONS' similes are essentially urban; the sea (to take an example at random) has for him "something of the colour of absinthe." In fine, though he can and does get into his pages much of the exhilaration ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... no question that the power to throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a pass or two which shall give you his virgin attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody has the knack of this more strongly than Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase or a common remark he creates an ideal atmosphere ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... very agreeable. Godfrey was interested in everything, being of a quick and receptive mind, and Miss Ogilvy proved a fund of information. When they had exhausted the scenery they conversed on other topics. Soon she knew everything there was to know about him and Isobel, whom it was evident ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... era is about to dawn. Planed and smoothed off as they are, the Algonkian and Archaean masses are to be submerged once more in the ever receptive ocean. A period of subsidence occurs, and the whole area is soon hidden under the face of the sea. But, all around these are masses, some day to be mountain peaks, that refuse to sink again into the sea. Then the forces of the air assail them. If they cannot be drowned, they shall ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... and he had a hopeless sense of the futility of the effort he had made. Natalie had got by with a bad half-hour, and would proceed to forget it as quickly as she always forgot anything disagreeable. Still, she was in a more receptive mood than usual, and he wondered if that would not be as good a time as any to speak about his new plan as to the mill. He took an uneasy turn or two about the room, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last. How sweet through the long convalescence to lie, And from the low window, gaze out at the sky, And float, as the zephyrs so tranquilly do, Aloft in the depths of ineffable blue:— In painless, delicious half consciousness brood,— No duties to cumber, no claims to intrude,— Receptive as childhood, from trouble as free, And feel it is bliss ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... from the lips of Maarda herself. It was hard to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater than beauty, something more like lovableness, than any ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... hand all walnut, pecan, and hickory species are self-fertile and cross-fertile, but may be self-unfruitful because of dichogamy, because they may shed their pollen either before or after the stigmas of the pistillate flowers are receptive to it. In all nut species cross-pollination is generally recommended so as to assure a set of nuts. With cross-pollination a better set of nuts is to be expected than with self-pollination, as well as better ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... occupied with sensible things. Hence Gregory says (Dial. iv, 26) that "the soul, at the approach of death, foresees certain future things, by reason of the subtlety of its nature," inasmuch as it is receptive even of slight impressions. Or again, it knows future things by a revelation of the angels; but not by its own power, because according to Augustine (Gen. ad lit. xii, 13), "if this were so, it would be able to foreknow the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... which she had passed in France—wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of humanity. Few could have passed through such an experience and remained unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... man, an amazingly self-satisfied toiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay; Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... The receptive plate must be smaller than the plate whereon the light impinges. The design being thus reduced will be the more perfect from the dots formed by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... vagabonds and disguised Boxers, who had hidden panic-stricken during the first hours after the relief, were now prowling about armed from head to foot. The vast city, which had been given over for weeks to mad disorders and insane Boxerism, was in a receptive condition for this final climax. There was no semblance of authority left; with troops of many rival nationalities always pouring in, and a nominal state of war still existing, with the possibility of a Chinese counter-advance ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature, Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things, Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought, Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee, or far north or inland, A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these States or of ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... which the Comas agent had been removed as tempter and tale-bearer had not been staged by Felix for calculated effect; he had thought only of getting Kyle out of the way. But never was an audience in more keenly receptive mood for a sequel than were those men who crowded closely in the patch of camp-fire radiance and ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... and emotional, and incredibly receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... ancestors, before they have acquired a direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color of age. Knowing and satiated when the mind is most receptive, such individualities rarely develop beyond their first brilliant phase. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was for a long time considered a perfect specimen of that type. For the hero of that first work, as of every work published by him during the first ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... only served to confirm me in the belief, almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive and elastic or progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the number of cases one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the stationary ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson |
