"Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hope and pride as its mother had been her favorite. By a strange contrariety the sunny-faced little mother had set herself to accomplish her son's union with the tall, dark, and haughty cousin, who had expired in giving birth to little Hildreth. There was nothing of spontaneity and no display of conjugal affection on the part of the young husband or his wife; but during the absence of her son, the invalid was well cared for and entertained by the wife, whom she came to love with an intensity second ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which knew the movement as a living thing. The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom. "The nature ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... is all the difference between this conception of freedom {158} and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is not free in the sense that he could have wanted something different.[12] ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... letters of Alciphron as embodying a literary unity. He did not attempt to write one single symmetrical epistolary romance; but the individual letters are usually slight sketches of character carelessly gathered together, and deriving their greatest charm from their apparent spontaneity and artlessness. Many of them are, to be sure, unpleasantly cynical, and depict the baser side of human nature; others, in their realism, are essentially commonplace; but some are very prettily expressed, and show a brighter side to the picture of contemporary life. Those especially which are supposed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially suitable ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... height of discourtesy. It is invariably true that the same spirit with which you mete out social slights will be shown you in return. Resent each one, whether intentional or a mere oversight, and you will surely crush the spontaneity out of all attentions shown you, and be met ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... disarmed understandings as far down the vale of tears as he deemed wise, then permitted himself a magnificent burst of spontaneity. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... effectively accomplish such feats as we have related of Whitefield, Savonarola, and others: and doubtless the first time they were used they came in a burst of spontaneous feeling, yet Whitefield declared that not until he had delivered a sermon forty times was its delivery perfected. What spontaneity initiates let practise complete. Every effective speaker and every vivid actor has observed, considered and practised gesture until his dramatic actions are a sub-conscious possession, just like his ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the other from Janet, was clapped over the unruly mouth. When she promised to speak lower she was allowed to proceed. "But think of missing the court room scene! I am sure she went through a Lady Macbeth act and tried to stab poor old Sour Sandy!" Again the spontaneity of Dozia illustrated the talk, and she made a jab at Jane with ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... course, was said. But after the ladies had withdrawn, Harbinger, with that plain-spoken spontaneity which was so unexpected, perhaps a little intentionally so, in connection with his almost classically formed face, uttered words to the effect that, if they did not fundamentally kick that rumour, it was all up with Miltoun. Really this was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline—that it should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it play. He believes that to be sincere we must ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the class suffered no such uncertainty. They voted solidly for spontaneity in a self which ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... we could evolve "genius" out of it. Audrey is a very genial person; she also, in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well expresses the way ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... phrase which he had heard the night before, and which he flung off casually with an air of spontaneity, twisting the old Spanish ring on his bony, white fingers, which he held invariably in front ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... deserves less commendation as a writer than as a thinker. There is a manifest straining to secure style, by manipulation and rehandling, which contrasts unfavorably with the unaffected ease, the pregnant spontaneity, of his unpublished writings. His periods are almost interminable, and his rhetoric is prolix and monotonous. We can trace the effort to emulate the authors of antiquity without the ease which is acquired by practice or the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... practically no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... confined herself to any especial manner in her literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as it were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated, and formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of modern French novel-writing. Her work in this ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay. Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his contemporaries little else than cold propriety of form and color, studied negations of spontaneity and imaginative abandon; yet such was the force of his imagination, that these qualities, almost more than any other, characterize his conceptions: but the perpetual contact and presence of elements so uncongenial to his good genius produced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... from the notion of a formal shaping out of design in any great life, so unlike the endless freedom and spontaneity of nature (and He is the Nature of nature), I cannot help observing that his first miracle was one of creation—at least, is to our eyes more like creation than almost any other—for who can say that it was creation, not knowing ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... intimate friend of Du Quesnoy, he was a devout pupil of Domenichino, for whom he had the greatest reverence. It is not surprising therefore to find in his earlier works, such as the Plague at Ashdod, a certain academic dulness and lack of spontaneity. He was not the forerunner of a new epoch, but one of the last upholders of the old. He was trying to arrest decay, to infuse a healthier spirit into a declining art, so that he errs on the side of correctness. The influence of Titian, however, was too strong for him to remain long ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Charm, sweetness, spontaneity, Marguerite had them all, and I was forced from time to time to admit that I had no right to ask of her anything else; that many people would be very happy to be in my place; and that, like Virgil's shepherd, I had only to enjoy the pleasures that a god, ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... entertaining. His anecdotes embraced three continents; his wit, though Teutonic, was genial and mirth-provoking. When Mrs. Gerard took time from her worshipful regard of her daughter to enter the conversation, she spoke with easy charm and spontaneity. As for Natalie, she was intoxicated with delight; she chattered, she laughed, she interrupted with the joyful exuberance ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant anecdote, but told with such enjoyment ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... XIV such cooeperation of the ruler and the ruled became impossible. The government of France had become a machine depending upon the action of a single spring. Spontaneity in the population at large was extinct, and whatever there was to do must be done by the central authority. As long as the government could correct abuses it was well; if it ceased to be equal to this task, they must go uncorrected. When at last the reform ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... and morality and overstep that union between religion and the State which has for thousands of years supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society—one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate its rational sides, not overlooking nature ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Hence the spontaneity of the allegory, its ease and freedom of movement, its unlabored development, its natural and vital enfolding of that old pilgrim idea of human life which had so often bloomed in the literature of all climes and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of Sidney Greenstreet. We are accustomed to more physically attractive Touchstones, fools with finer bodies, and yet this keen-minded, stout person spoke his lines with such pertness and spontaneity that they rarely failed of their proper effect. As for Orlando, it seemed to me that Pedro de Cordoba was a little too rhetorical at times to fit in with the spirit of the performance, but Orlando at times does not fit ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... rests in the cemetery at Shiraz, where the nightingales are singing and the roses bloom the year through, and the doves gather with low murmurs amid the white stones of the sacred enclosure. The poets of nature, the mystical pantheist, the joyous troubadour of life, Hafiz, in the naturalness and spontaneity of his poetry, and in the winning sweetness of his imagery, occupies a unique place in the literature of the world, and has no rival ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... blossoming of "high-boughed hedges"; but it is not every one who has sung out of the fullness of his heart and with a naive delight in that of which he sung: and so by reason of their faithfulness to every-day life and to nature, and by their spontaneity and tenderness, his lyrics, fables, and eclogues appeal to cultivated readers as well as to the rustics whose quaint speech he made ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... worth seeing. The natural gayety of the Parisians, a characteristic noticed (if we are to believe the historians) as far back as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, breaks out in all its amusing spontaneity. If the day is fine, the entire population gives itself up to amusement. From early morning the current sets towards the charming corner of the Bois where the Longchamps race-course lies, picturesquely encircled ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... are of incomparable value. Nowhere else can be found such graphic and complete accounts of the action so renowned in Irish Story. The descriptions convince by their reticence and restraint, and by a certain spontaneity in the narrative, which shows Byrne to have been a literary artist of no mean calibre.... We cordially commend these two volumes to the study of young Irishmen.... The production reflects great credit on ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... discussion of outlines. They are necessary, if any subject is to be covered comprehensively. But if they are overelaborated, the whole performance becomes automatic and dull. A little spontaneity is always needed. Even when working from a manuscript, a speaker should be ever-ready to depart from his text if a sudden idea pops into his mind. It is better to try this and to stumble now ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... saw the two women and only a close observer would have noticed that his greeting lacked its customary spontaneity and heartiness. He at once made himself particularly agreeable to Fanny; but, while he chatted and laughed with his sister-in-law, anyone could see that he studiously avoided addressing his wife directly or even meeting her eye. To one who knew him well, his manner would ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... have, one and all, been written with the sober conviction, upon the part of the writers, that they accurately conveyed the meaning they desired. Intentionally humorous efforts have been carefully excluded, and the interest of the collection consists in the spontaneity of expression and in the fact that it offers fair samples of the possibilities which lie hidden in the orthography and construction of our language. Let it be remembered, then, that anybody can write English as she "should be wrote," and ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... or your works would expect anything else. What you say about the vagueness of what I have called the direct action of the nervous system, is perfectly just. I felt it so at the time, and even more of late. I confess that I have never been able fully to grasp your principle of spontaneity, as well as some other of your points, so as to apply them to special cases. But as we look at everything from different points of view, it is not likely that we should agree closely. (Professor Bain expounded his theory of Spontaneity in the essay ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... and I get each day just as much as, by putting our hand to the plow of activity, we are able to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... being the home of Keltic treasure. Precisely in fact the right kind of place, and the sort of story that hardly anyone can put down unfinished. I am bound to add that, perhaps a hundred pages from the actual end, the humour of the affair seems to lose spontaneity and become forced. But till the real climax of the tale, the triumphant return of the various hunters from Inisheeny, I can promise that you will find never a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... as we have seen, had all the spontaneity of her race, accentuated by a life of caprice and reckless abandon. To conceive was to execute. Consequences were an after-consideration, if at all worthy of such a ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... putting it a bit too strongly." Sheldon laughed, but the strain in his voice destroyed the effect of spontaneity. "You know yourself how ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... harmony of character and work, of breadth of interest, and of that fine intelligence which instinctively allies itself with the best in its time. Of this class Addison is an illustrious example. His gifts are not of the highest order; there was none of the spontaneity, abandon, or fertility of genius in him; his thought made no lasting contribution to the highest intellectual life; he set no pulses beating by his eloquence of style, and fired no imagination by the insight and emotion of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... much I have enjoyed it," he said. "It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table always an inspiring place. I expect to dictate ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... neglect of duty, and so sorry that he, of all others, should have been the one to cast the first shadow across the bright future which she had been anticipating before his ill-timed arrival. It was love out of time and season, and lacked the savour and spontaneity which are the result of proper conditions. Jamie felt the unhappy atmosphere, ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... attempting to deceive her this time. But he could say no more. Many a strong man would in that moment have sobbed aloud and shed tears, but Giovanni was not as other men. Under great emotion all expression was hard for him, and the spontaneity of tears would ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... pains with his verses," always aiming at a more perfect finish, with no loss of that naturalness which, as has been said, characterises all his work. According to the saying quoted by Matthew Arnold of Joubert, he "s'inquietait de perfection." Perfection, to him, implied an appearance of spontaneity: what looked laboured or artificial must be elaborated till it looked spontaneous—as it was in thought if not altogether in development. His critical sense seems to have grown keener with his interest in the making of verses: "he was a great student of verse," Mr Birrell says, ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... his experience of intimate civilisation was too brief to allow him to protest with effectiveness. The truth was, he could not say these things naturally. He had to compose them, and then pronounce them, and the result failed in the necessary air of spontaneity. He could not help thinking what marvellous self-control women had. Now, when he had a headache—which happily was seldom—he could think of nothing else and talk of nothing else; the entire universe consisted solely of his headache. And here she was overcome with a headache, and during ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... very closely woven in the hamlet bearing this name. The floral designs scattered over the field of rose, dark red, or blue show a spontaneity of workmanship that is not governed by Western enterprise, though, curiously enough, aniline dyes prevail. The wool is very fine. The border is composed of a wide middle stripe, with a ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... his image has become so clear that he can express it in a less real way. Few children fail to draw and paint reasonably well when afforded this opportunity that should be denied to none. In order to secure the best results the teacher should be careful not to repress spontaneity by criticising too severely; on the other hand she should induce the child to make such comparisons of his work with his image and with the object when present, as to prevent the formation of careless habits of work. Although water colors are used in some schools, such materials present ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... youngster who looked on, this love-making seemed an idyll without a disturbing breath. Joanna, though she had lost the gay spontaneity of her Paris holiday, smiled none the less adorably on Paragot and myself. She wore a little air of defiant pride when she introduced him to her acquaintance as "my cousin, Monsieur de Nerac," which was very pretty to behold. Convention forbade the announcement of their engagement at ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... I may be able to do something stronger some day, and perhaps not. But at all events I sha'n't force my mood. I shall wait for my inspiration. One thing I've noticed, that as a man grows older he loses his spontaneity and gets more critical with himself. I could do more, no doubt, if I would only let myself go. But I'm like this meerschaum here,—a hard piece and slow ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... already have been surmised by you who read, was more of a humorist than anything else, but the enthusiasm of his humor, its absolute spontaneity and kindliness, gave it at times a semblance to what might pass for true poetry. He was by disposition a thoroughly sweet spirit, and when I realized that he had gone before, and that the trips he and I had looked forward ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... qualities, however, been of the kind that appealed only to the collectors of his time, he would scarcely rouse the strong interest we take in him. We care for him chiefly because he has so many of the more essential qualities of great art—truth to life, and spontaneity. He has another interest still, in that he began to beat out the path which ended at last in Velasquez. Indeed, one of the attractions of the Venetian school of painting is that, more than all others, it went to ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... which he gives for setting Erechtheus above Atalanta in Calydon, the fact remains that there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of Miss More, with that detailed description which Goodrich had found so fascinating. If a little overdone in this respect, the narrative has certainly a freshness sadly deficient in many later volumes. Even the second tale seems to lack the engaging spontaneity of the first, and already to grow didactic and recitative rather than personal. But both met with an equally generous and appreciative reception. Parley's educational tales were undoubtedly the American pioneers in what may be readily styled the "travelogue" manner used in later years by Elbridge ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... gives a smile to those majestic Lombard buildings, the terra-cotta decorations add the element of life and movement. The thought of the artist in its first freshness and vivacity is felt in them. They have all the spontaneity of improvisation, the seductive melody of unpremeditated music. Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient to the brain,' the plasticatore has impressed his most fugitive dreams of beauty on it without effort; and what it cost him but ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... physiological adaptation, establishes itself as a result of the spontaneity of the exercises; the free development of a personality which grows and organizes itself is that which determines such an internal condition, just as in the body of the embryo the heart, in process ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... subjects for intercessory prayer may be jotted down and distributed over the days of the week for use in due rotation. Such schemes, however, if drawn up and used, should be revised from time to time, and not suffered to become a mechanical burden or a legal bondage. There should be freedom and spontaneity in a Christian's prayers. It is well to have rules, and to try not to be prevented by mere slackness from keeping them. But it is important to see to it that the self-imposed rule is so framed as to prove genuinely conducive ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... balance of contents and form which makes for perfection, Schnitzler's renaissance drama The Veil of Beatrice is the most noteworthy specimen. But in all his work his style is his greatest achievement. It is of a rare spontaneity, vivacity and grace—qualities that make his dialogue appear an impromptu performance rather than a carefully planned structure. It abounds in paradoxes that do not blind the vision, but reveal vistas, and that do not impress ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... make the pressure of opinion, directed by the Spiritual Power, so heavy on every individual, from the humblest to the most powerful, as to render legal obligation, in as many cases as possible, needless. Liberty and spontaneity on the part of individuals form no part of the scheme. M. Comte looks on them with as great jealousy as any scholastic pedagogue, or ecclesiastical director of consciences. Every particular of conduct, public or private, is ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... the Greek age, Propertius, like the minor Roman poets, aspired to nothing more than the imitation of the graceful, but feeble strains of the Alexandrian poets. If he excels Tibullus in vigor of fancy, expression, and coloring, he is inferior to him in grace, spontaneity, and delicacy; he cannot, also, be compared with Catullus, who greatly surpasses him in his ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... confession of failure; while to urge that one has but to ask for the key to be able to enter a church is no true reply, since hospitality, whether to the body or the soul, loses in sweetness and effect as it loses in spontaneity. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... precisely the same as led him to write the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... malice, envy and all uncharitableness which Lucia managed to put into this quite unrehearsed speech was positively amazing. She had not thought it over beforehand for a moment; it came out with the august spontaneity of lightning leaping from a cloud. Not till that moment had Georgie guessed at a tithe of all that Olga had felt so certain about, and a double emotion took hold of him. He was immensely sorry for Lucia, never having conjectured ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... common sense, science, taste, poetic feeling, rich and highly dramatic orchestration, ingenious musical characterization of individuals and situations, and the many passages of beautiful music found in this elaborate work, but denies to him the highest inspiration, the spontaneity of genius, and the attainment of any very lofty ideal in the production of continuous, elevated, and soul-entrancing melodies. We think this a pretty fair statement of the facts in the case. Mr. Dwight, however, says: 'Not ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... leaders and aggressors in love is not fiction but the common fact of real life. Man's tendency towards leadership in love is not scientifically explained by any superficial assumption that established social conventions have repressed an original spontaneity of women. On the contrary, there are the best of physiological and psychological reasons for believing that the social conventions have arisen as an expression of masculine aggressiveness and natural tendency towards leadership in affairs of the heart. The ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall below the standard of the thorough-bred ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... with elephants foreshortened and ivory tusks looking out from amongst tree-trunks, and most naturalistic monkeys, peacocks, fruit, and foliage. All this we saw rapidly dug out in the hard brown teak with delightful vigour, spontaneity, and finish. One might fear that a geometrically carved lintel would not be quite in keeping with a florid jamb, but why carp, we should look at the best side of things. I think these same craftsmen working to the design of one artist, or artist and architect in one, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... earlier and purely secular work there is something, though less of this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainly no poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity and want of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, and which he used with most success—the trochaic dimeter catalectic of seven syllables—lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable to this frequently fatal fluency; but in Wither's hands, at least in his youth and early ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... he had served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was not only a consummate ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... in reunions, of which he was the presiding genius, and to which his American friends were admitted with fraternal cordiality. It was then that his clear and strong mind often displayed itself with the spontaneity of his race. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... not play the organ as well at St Blank's as I played it in the little church where I gave my services and was unknown. People are praising me too much here, and this mars all spontaneity. ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... herself to be the instrument of the will of God. No doubt that was an habitual attitude and not one taken up on the spur of the moment. It is indeed very rarely that what seem spontaneous actions are really such; and S. Mary's first word was nearer spontaneity than the second. Her exclamation in answer to the angelic Ave was the natural expression of her surprise at so unexpected a message: its variance from all her thought about her life was the thing that struck her; ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... leave, but he sat down again on being asked if he would stay and have a cup of tea. He hardly knew for a moment what he did; a dim thought that Avice—the renewed Avice—might come into the house made his reseating himself an act of spontaneity. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... selection, though naturally restricted, is fairly representative; every variety of folk-tale has a place in it, and it should never be forgotten that the Ruthenian kazka (Maerchen), owing to favourable circumstances, has managed to preserve far more of the fresh spontaneity and naive simplicity of the primitive folk-tale than her more sophisticated sister, the Russian skazka. It is maintained, moreover, by Slavonic scholars that there are peculiar and original elements in these stories not to be found in ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... would sometimes keep at his writing until two or three o'clock in the morning. There is a frequently expressed fear that letter writing is an art of the past; that the intervention of the stenographer has destroyed its spontaneity; yet it is evident that in Page the present generation has a letter writer of the old-fashioned kind, for he did all his writing with his own hand and under circumstances that would assure the utmost freshness ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... repetitions; repetitions and "turns of words and thoughts" rare in Milton; double meanings of words; Milton's puns; extenuating circumstances; his mixed metaphors and violent syntax, due to compression; Milton's poetical style a dangerous model; the spontaneity and ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... then our internal intuition would be intellectual. This consciousness in man requires an internal perception of the manifold representations which are previously given in the subject; and the manner in which these representations are given in the mind without spontaneity, must, on account of this difference (the want of spontaneity), be called sensibility. If the faculty of self-consciousness is to apprehend what lies in the mind, it must all act that and can in this way alone ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... young writers who begin a promising career with so much spontaneity and charm of expression as is displayed by Miss ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... the exhortations a certain gloomy enthusiasm had been kept up by singing, which had the effect of continuing in an easy, rhythmical, impersonal, and irresponsible way the sympathies of the meeting. This was interrupted by a young man who rose suddenly, with that spontaneity of impulse which characterized the speakers, but unlike his predecessors, he remained for a moment mute, trembling and irresolute. The fatal hesitation seemed to check the unreasoning, monotonous flow of emotion, and to recall to some extent the reason and even ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... quaintly humorous touches. Often in describing some character or something that is commonplace enough, a droll fancy seems to strike the author, and forthwith he gives us the benefit of it. Consequently there is a spontaneity in his pen which is extremely fascinating.... We can only say generally that Mr. Murray's plot is sufficiently original and worked up with enough of skill to satisfy any but the most exacting readers. We found ourselves getting ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... study is one of the most charming of the composer. There is more depth in it than in the G flat and F major studies, and its effectiveness in the virtuoso sense is unquestionable. A savor of the salon hovers over its perfumed measures, but there is grace, spontaneity and happiness. Chopin must have been as happy as his sensitive nature would allow when ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... society's standard. The reasons are really many. In the first place, if unmarried lovers take steps to prevent their intimacy from having its due fruit in a child, they are robbing their experience of its fine spontaneity, and introducing an element of calculation and caution into what should be a thing unbound. While, on the other hand, if they do not prevent the coming of a child they are, in the present state of society, ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... stranger had made his appearance at Waddy; he was believed to be a drover, and he was on the spree and 'shouting' with spontaneity and freedom. His horse, a fine upstanding bay, stood saddled and bridled under McMahon's shed at the Drovers' Arms by day and night. His behaviour in drink was original and erratic. He would fraternise with the man at the bar for a time, and then go roaming ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... moment—"I have come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity. At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody of living—and—oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... unexpected, the ever-bubbling, and the ever-joyous; restless as a school-boy ten minutes before recess, quick as a grasshopper and lively as a cricket. He is, besides, brimful and spilling over with a quality of fun that is geyserlike in its spontaneity and intermittent flow. When he laughs, which he does every other minute, the man ploughing across the river, or the boy fishing, or the girl driving the cow, turn their heads and smile. They can't help it. In this respect ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... PROVES you are a genius! Heavens, what would I not give to have you spontaneity, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... ended this time of discomfort. Guests came to the house, and Bert addressed his wife with some faint spontaneity, and Nancy eagerly answered him. They never alluded to the quarrel; it might have been better if they had argued and cried and laughed away the pain, ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... formerly Executive Secretary for the Philippine Government. It has been edited and amplified but is substantially as written by him. A man of unusual facility, Mr. Ferguson composed the verses under circumstances somewhat similar to those set down herein, and with like spontaneity. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... yet only an illustration of one of the ordinary phases of human nature after all, as father would have said, I thought, this reflection passing through my mind with that instantaneous spontaneity with which such fancies do occur to one, as Rooney placed me in my assigned position. Then, recalling my mind to the present, I noticed that Matthews, my whilom fellow apprentice and lately promoted third mate, sinking the dignity of his new rank, had come forward ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... with skill and discretion in larger work, its psychological effect upon the mind is that of uncompromising and somewhat repellent austerity; it suggests the prison-like palace rather than the domestic atmosphere of a true home,—an atmosphere to be had in stone only by preserving the greater spontaneity of irregular shapes and rock faces characteristic ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... forget that he had never spoken to her of marriage till Mr. Royall had forced the word from his lips; though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Lyons. A second soon followed. The affairs of the Ligurian Republic were in some confusion; and an address came from Genoa begging that their differences might be composed by the First Consul. The spontaneity of this offer may well be questioned, seeing that Bonaparte found it desirable, in his letter of February 18th, 1802, to assure the Ligurian authorities that they need feel no disquietude as to the independence of their republic. Bonaparte undertook to alter their constitution ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... years old. She was capable of anything; in her remote avoidance of any passion, any regret, any anticipated pleasure, any spontaneity, she was inhuman. Hortense thought that she detected in the chit's mother something of her ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... fiction as a very young journalist was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to have a novitiate in youth. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... to man; nay properly there is nothing else interesting.' In which light also, may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome? Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible developement of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer's time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody Battles ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... did foreknow, Or that, foreknowing, yet our choice is free, Not forced to sin by strict necessity; This strict necessity they simple call, Another sort there is conditional. 530 The first so binds the will, that things foreknown By spontaneity, not choice, are done. Thus galley-slaves tug willing at their oar, Content to work, in prospect of the shore; But would not work at all if not constrain'd before. That other does not liberty constrain, But man may either act, or may refrain. Heaven made us ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other artists of their day represented the children of their wealthy patrons in attitudes which savor somewhat of burlesque, though it may have been intended quite seriously to hedge them about with spontaneity. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... deaf, but wholly dumb. He could express no more than the possibilities of his nature. It was not the fine and essential difference between man and woman, but that more fatal gulf in which there would appear no certain glimpses of a royally endowed love in all its spontaneity, its glow of feeling, its variation of rich emotions. How would she, with her versatile, changeful soul, with its cycle of moods, ever live in the strong, steady prison ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... their minds the conception of a definite order of the universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as arise out of that ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of it, but eminently good for all of them. And then suddenly it ceased. He made an effort, but there was no spontaneity in him. He came in quietly, never whistled, and ate very little. He began to look almost gaunt, too, and Edith, watching him with jealous, loving eyes, gave voice at last to the thought that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... starts from the mere sense of oppression, and people break down some established form, without any qualms about the capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order, intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be laid on the second phase of the transformation, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius, a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, in part constitute the weapons ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... criticism is not an unmixed evil. The verse-writer who can be snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone, is a poetaster silenced for his country's good. It is true, however, that to original minds, bubbling with spontaneity, or arrogant with the consciousness of power, the discipline is hard, and the restraint excessive; and that the men whom their colleges are most proud to remember, have handled them severely. Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... of the conditions of poetic production, and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... parched lips, and no man that ever came to Him and said 'Heal me!' was sent away beggared of His blessing. Sometimes He healed in response to the beseeching of those who, with loving hearts, carried their dear ones and laid them at His feet. But sometimes, to magnify the spontaneity and the completeness of His own love, and to show us that He is bound and limited by no human co-operation, and that He is His own motive, He reached out the blessing to a hand that was not extended to grasp it; and by His question, 'Wilt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... so. It is electricity—spontaneity. It is instantaneous. I knew I should love you from the moment I saw you. Do ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Universe show spontaneity: Down with ridiculous notions of Deity! Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists; Truth must be ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... all art: it is true that they began by recognizing, as perhaps no other revolutionary government would, the importance and spontaneity of the artistic impulse, and therefore while they controlled or destroyed the counter-revolutionary in all other social activities, they allowed the artist, whatever his political creed, complete freedom to continue his work. Moreover, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... usual spontaneity. And she felt, if she did not explain, the wideness of her eyes. Her father did not look as if anything worried him. It was a way of his, however, not to show stress or worry. Lenore ate in silence until Rose left the dining-room, and then she asked ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... fertile fancy, their glowing language, and by thought which, if seldom profound, is never commonplace, and seems always the spontaneous and easy outcome of the author's mind. In no form of composition does excellence depend more on spontaneity than in the meditation. The ruin of such writers as Hervey, and, to some extent, Boyle, has been, that they seem to have set themselves elaborately and convulsively to extract sentiment out of every object which met their eye. They seem to say, 'We will, and we must ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... phenomena on the one hand, and vital phenomena on the other. At present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think we shall exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us at least, this successive assumption of different states (external conditions remaining the same)—this spontaneity of action—if I may use a term which implies more than I would be answerable for—which constitutes so vast and plain a practical distinction between living bodies and those which do not live, is an ultimate fact; indicating as ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell |
