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Vitality   Listen
noun
Vitality  n.  The quality or state of being vital; the principle of life; vital force; animation; as, the vitality of eggs or vegetable seeds; the vitality of an enterprise.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vitality" Quotes from Famous Books



... marvels of antique art, with the indifference which any preoccupation of the feelings is apt to produce, in reference to objects of sculpture. Being of so cold and pure a substance, and mostly deriving their vitality more from thought than passion, they require to be seen ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... life, was the greatest architect in America. Some of the finest buildings in New York are due to his signal genius, and here I am led on to reflections of a yet more extensive kind. My own impression was that architecture in America generally possesses a vitality which to-day is absent from it in older countries. This observation is pertinent to New York more especially. New York being built on a narrow island, it has there become necessary, to a degree hardly to be paralleled ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... important element of wisdom? The world it so sagaciously aims to inaugurate, what is it but a stationary and decrepit world,—a world which would soon decay, and drop into the abyss of nothingness, were it not for the rejuvenating vitality poured into it by the youth it cynically despises? True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... swarming mass of the great mammalian life of Africa and, in a less degree, of tropical Asia; indeed, it does not even approach the similar mammalian life of North America and northern Eurasia, poor though this is compared with the seething vitality of tropical life in the Old World. During a geologically recent period, a period extending into that which saw man spread over the world in substantially the physical and cultural stage of many existing savages, South America possessed ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... and more the strong individuality of William II, who had early—earlier, perhaps, than anyone else—recognized his country's new needs, and who put all of his immense vitality into his efforts to fill them. Some results were: the beginning of a very definite and extensive naval program, the building and completion (1895) of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Canal between the Baltic and the North Sea, active participation in the development of Turkey in Europe and Asia, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... my house. My children, with the charming imitativeness that belongs to youth, have caught the spirit of these passing corteges, and reproduce in the back yard, with creditable skill, the salient features of the lugubrious procession. A doll, from whose features all traces of vitality and expression have been removed, represents the deceased. Yet unfortunately I have been obliged to promise them more active participation in this ceremony at some future time, and I fear that they look anxiously ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... stones piled under the trees. In China it has been customary from time immemorial to plant trees on graves in order thereby to strengthen the soul of the deceased and thus to save his body from corruption; and as the evergreen cypress and pine are deemed to be fuller of vitality than other trees, they have been chosen by preference for this purpose. Hence the trees that grow on graves are sometimes identified with the souls of the departed. Among the Miao-Kia, an aboriginal race of Southern ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... masterful handling of the raw material of music, there is so little depth of thought in their compositions that many of them have failed to live. Neither Haydn nor Mozart can be considered as a great character and we miss the note of sublimity in their music, although it often has great vitality and charm. Beethoven, however, was a thinker in tones and often ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... earliest opening of youth to the entrance of manhood, had chiefly been occupied within the precincts of his own Principality in quelling the spirit of rebellion which had burst forth there with great fury, and had been protracted with a vitality almost incredible, is from this date to be viewed and examined under a totally different combination of circumstances. Early in the year 1409 he was appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover for life, with a salary of 300l. a year. Thomas ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?—it had faith in the name. But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... services—induced a more frequent and devout attention to the sacraments of confession and the eucharist; established and promoted the catechetical instruction of youth; and, in a word, restored to Romanism much of its vitality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... For as theology progresses it becomes less consistent and less durable, and as its conceptions become less irrational, the intensity of the emotions which they excite decreases. Fetishism had deeper roots than polytheism and lasted longer; and polytheism surpassed monotheism in vigour and vitality. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... the herald that my friend would give a Bear Dance, at which he was to be publicly proclaimed a medicine man. It would be the great event of his short existence, for the disease had already exhausted his strength and vitality. Of course, we all understood that there would be an active youth to exhibit the ferocious nature of the beast after which the dance ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... beneficent yoke of the Law of God, much miraculously heightened courage would be needed. I am therefore able to accept the Muslim authority's statement. The conferring of new names was not to add fuel to human vanity, but sacramentally to heighten spiritual vitality. ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... dismember it, and has steadily gained force after each; forever changing in its exact make-up, losing in the West but gaining in the East, the changes leave the structure as firm as ever, like the dropping off and adding on of logs in a raft, its mechanical union of pieces showing all the vitality ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... clearly that the cold bath is highly stimulating, and where not too prolonged, and when followed by vigorous rubbing, is undoubtedly healthful for a large number of people. The cold bath is often used by physicians in the treatment of diseases of low vitality. Many persons however, are unpleasantly affected by bathing in water of a temperature much below that of the body; particularly is this true of women, and the like may be said of thin and nervous persons of the other sex. It is claimed by the advocates ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris

... Murray's mechanical smile had gone. An expression of deep horror had deadened the curious light in his eyes. He sat nerveless in his chair, and his bulk seemed to have become flabby with loss of vitality. Bill was watching the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... he had carelessly missed it, he would repeat the thought translated into it[986]. Talking of the Comedy of The Rehearsal[987], he said, 'It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.' This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence; 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... as she spoke, her head on his shoulder, her fingers held tight in his strong, brown hand. She could get closer to him in this position, she always told him: these hands and cheeks were the poles of a battery between which flowed and flashed the vitality of two sound bodies, and through which quivered the ecstasy of ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... observer wonders not that Washington is so far below what it ought to be, but that it exists as a city at all. It has suffered calamities that would have extinguished any other place. The vitality that could survive them would seem capable of surviving anything. Other towns have had to contend against natural disadvantages, but they have had the aid of citizens who knew what they wanted, and who used the public money and energy and brains for the public good. But here has been the novel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... excited vitality having been rendered prominent by tarantism in different individuals, it could not but happen that other derangements of the nerves would assume the form of this whenever circumstances favoured such a transition. This was more ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... of servitude, and was cultivated by a servile population, in whose hands it became almost barren. The large holders were thus disgusted, and the small ruined or reduced to a condition more and more degraded. Add to this state of things in the civil department a complete absence of freedom and vitality in the political; no elections, no discussion, no public responsibility; characters weakened by indolence and silence, or destroyed by despotic power, or corrupted by the intrigues of court or army. Take a step farther; cast a glance over the moral department; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... question of her making a success of it, he said, marveling at her vitality, her exuberance, the confidence with which she ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... contemptuously, half pitifully, on what had been her life before she had written poems and sent them to the "Daily Morning Chronicle." Then her outlook had seemed scarcely wider than that of the animal crackers with their counterfeit vitality; now it seemed extended to ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull

... but with a happiness which, when the excitement is past, leaves too often—as with that hapless pair in Eden—depression, shame, and fear. Everywhere, and in all ages, as far as I can ascertain, has man been inventing stimulants and narcotics to supply that want of vitality of which he is so painfully aware; and has asked nature, and not God, to clear the dull brain, and comfort ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... share in a chill detachment from the life of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly arresting, as the blast of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... character or they lose ground. The mere possession of ambition is not evidence of the desire to grow up emotionally. One has to probe the ideals of the other person. The question is, "Does he or she have the character-vitality to develop emotional maturity?" If this is lacking, successful marriage is seldom achieved, and for one who has gained this trait to be tied to a spouse who cannot attain it is tragic for ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist her. He shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and without ambition—the trick of going about with his mental inferiors. There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar, like the owner of a ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... Boriskoff, he could now admit the preposterous nature of the comparison. True it was that nationality spoke in the contour of the face, in its coloring and its expression, but these elementals were forgotten in the amazing grace of the girl's movements, the dignity of her gestures and the vitality which animated her. Returning to the house unexpectedly, even a lad was shrewd enough to see that she returned also under the stress of an agitation she could conceal from none. Her very questions to the servants ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... knew how rare it is, how expensive to get, and how terribly difficult to bring home. Forty thousand pieces were despatched to Mr. Sander in one consignment—he hugged himself with delight when three thousand proved to have some trace of vitality. ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle

... is, on the whole, more deeply stirred, more thoroughly awake, more assertive in their personal demands, and more confident of satisfying them. In a word, they are more alive, and they must be credited with the moral and social benefit attaching to a larger amount of vitality. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... at that cry; an icy shudder crept through me, every hair of my head seemed endowed with separate vitality. To go down into the tomb—and such a tomb!—unwept, unknown, the very lights from the English coast still discernible in distance, yet not a friend to hold forth aid; the idea was inexpressibly awful. Just at this crisis, while grasping ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various

... ogre's vitality," he said to himself. "Just so is the man-eating tiger strong. The man should have energy who has sucked the life-blood from ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... monster had shot across the entire space that separated him from Brook; and had stopped, as if its vitality had been, instantly arrested, at the distance of about twelve feet from our swimmer. Brook had drawn himself up in the most pugnacious attitude possible, and, was treading water with great activity. The shark, probably unused to any signs of making battle, remained, for one moment, quiet; and ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... could have smiled herself had she not been nearer weeping. After all, Diana's pranks and antics were in no way vicious, but seemed merely the result of the lifelong drastic restraint hitherto exercised over her. Her vitality was breaking out like a fire that has been too long covered up. But there was no knowing where she would stop, and what would not be ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... which the brain and nerves are most active. The body is not adapted to hard muscular labor, and there is not enough vitality of nutritive power to nourish the brain in the heavy demands made upon it. Such persons incline to mental effort and literary work, and for a time display great brilliancy, but sooner or later collapse, unless this condition is corrected, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor

... attention, is the small number of simple substances (earthy and metallic) that enter into the composition of animated beings, and which alone appear fitted to maintain what we may call the chemical movement of vitality. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... conditions that influence it. The time and place of administration; the degree of pathologic lesion in the subject; the difference in the physiologic capability of individual organs of similar nature in the same body; the degree of human vitality influencing absorption and resistance; the peculiar epochs of life; the element of habituation, and the grade and strength of the drug, influencing its virtue,—all have an important bearing on untoward ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... a head—however loving we may suppose it to be intrinsically—bend toward the object of its contemplation, and let the shoulder not be lifted, that head will plainly lack an air of vitality and warm sincerity without which it cannot persuade us. It will lack that irresistible character of intensity which, in itself, supposes love; in brief, it ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... cause of Smith's own position in the company was his own vitality and industry, but next to that was the fact that Mr. Wintermuth had originally given him a chance and then declined to permit any one to impede his natural progression. This attitude was due principally ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... Fernald had had a person of his own age to talk with. In fact, he had never before seen a lad whose friendship he desired. Most boys were so well and strong that they had no conception of what it meant not to be so, and their very robustness and vitality overwhelmed a personality as sensitively attuned as was that of Laurie Fernald. He shrank from their pity, their blundering sympathy, ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... more time in the library; but, on the other hand, when work in the shop was pressing, he could give less time to study. After a while he began to think that he might perhaps earn his subsistence in part by his knowledge of languages, and thus save much waste of time and vitality at the forge. He wrote a letter to William Lincoln, of Worcester, who had aided and encouraged him; and in this letter he gave a short history of his life, and asked whether he could not find employment in translating some foreign ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various

... they have reached the surface. The waves have torn off masses and thrown them up so as to form an elevation above the water; then birds have come, dropped seeds, and formed their nests, and dwelt there; and timber and plants floating about have been cast on shore, and their vitality not yet destroyed, have taken root; and more coral and shells have been heaved up and ground fine by the toiling waves to form a beach; and thus a fit dwelling-place for man has been formed. Nearing the sandy beach we heave-to for soundings, but finding none, the ship ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... cursed it at the time. That it is not the army occupation which is causing the grave infections of Flanders and France is shown by the fact that the trouble dates from the beginning of the war. It is not that living in a trench undermines the vitality of the men and lays them open to infection. On the contrary, with the exception of frost bite, there is a curious absence of such troubles as would ordinarily result from exposure, cold ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... that it is like being dead and being raised again with a great resurrection. Ask John what it is and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is being born again. See the variety that comes from vitality—no stiff methods, no stiff routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good news of an illuminating, liberating, transforming experience that can ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... Lord's sight they are all as one. Moreover, love is the very being [esse] of everyone's life; consequently from love both angels and men have life. Everyone who reflects can know that the inmost vitality of man is from love, since he grows warm from the presence of love and cold from its absence, and when deprived of it he dies.{1} But it is to be remembered that the quality of his love is what determines the ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg

... into triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in an age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers. Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, the reproach of immorality is thrown at his head." When we study the record of the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young soldiers round ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... self-evident that this anomalous union with a Directorium invested with governing and judicial powers, to whose decisions Lutheran as well as Reformed pastors and congregations had to submit, lacked vitality, and, apart from flagrant denials of the truth, was bound to lead to destructive frictions. After an existence of several years the "Unio Ecclesiastica" died a natural death, the Directorium, as far as has been traced, holding its last meeting in 1794. By 1804, the ministers ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... nevertheless conveys an admirable picture of undergraduate life as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding the changes that have taken place since then, it is still remarkably full of vitality, and the description of the boat races, and the bumping of Exeter and Oriel by St. Ambrose's boat might well have been written to-day. In spite of its defects, the story, with its vigorous morals, is worthy to rank with anything ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... age from twelve to fifteen years is characterized by a rapid and uneven growth during which vitality and energy alternate with languorousness, and the boy is awkward and lazy, with bones greatly outgrowing muscle. The boy also begins to take a new interest in sex and sex relations, his features and voice change, and the inherited tendencies begin to assert themselves. His ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander

... health, mind and body. Going to his library he took down an early edition of his Thanatopsis, pointing out the nineteen lines written some time before the rest. Mottoes hung on the wall such as "As thy days so shall thy strength be." I ventured to ask how he preserved such vitality, and he said, "I owe a great deal to daily air baths and the flesh brush, plenty of outdoor air and open fireplaces." What an impressive personality; erect, with white hair and long beard; his eyebrows looked as if snow had fallen on them. His conversation ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes. You cannot ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... watered with the blood of martyrs; and, although the tender shoots had been trodden down with an iron heel as soon as they appeared, they gathered additional strength and vigor from the repression, and soon sprang up with a vitality that defied all efforts to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... rare beauty of face, feature and bodily grace, combined with superior strength and vitality, Hypatia took up her father's work and gave lectures on astronomy, mathematics, astrology and rhetoric, while he completed his scheme for the transmutation of metals. Hypatia's voice was flute-like, and used always well within its compass, so as never to rasp or ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... respects for tea-cultivation as China itself, and its introduction, therefore, into that country is a matter of equal interest and importance. In procuring the additional seeds, implements, and workmen, Mr Fortune succeeded beyond his expectations. Tea-seeds retain their vitality for a very short period, if they are out of the ground; and after trying various plans for transporting them to their destination, he adopted the method of sowing them in Ward's cases soon after they were gathered, which had the effect of preserving them in full life. The same plan ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... children loved. Then he fell into a kind of doze. That afternoon Mrs. Morel was ironing. She listened to the small, restless noise the boy made in his throat as she worked. Again rose in her heart the old, almost weary feeling towards him. She had never expected him to live. And yet he had a great vitality in his young body. Perhaps it would have been a little relief to her if he had died. She always felt a mixture of anguish in ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... to draw rightly, and, therefore, to know correctly the spirals of springing ferns—not that you may give ugly names to all the species of them—but that you may understand the grace and vitality of every hour of their existence. Suppose you have sense and cleverness enough to translate the essential character of this beauty into forms expressible by simple lines—therefore expressible by thread—you ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... lately ambassador in England. This gentleman closed by saying, that when the illustrious Governor of Hungary uttered the solemn truth, that Europe had no hope but in republican institutions—that was a renunciation to the world that the Austrian monarchy was sick and dying, and that vitality remained in the people alone. And as he uttered that truth, not his own race only—not the Magyars only, but every nationality of Hungary, all the fifteen or twenty millions within its limits—all cried out that he was the representative of their convictions—that he was ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth

... have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not very well ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... reproduction they remind one of those anomalous animals, in whom, when a limb is lopped, it rapidly grows again, or even if cut in pieces each part will enter on a separate life quite unconcerned about his fellows. But as the naturalist is far from regarding this superabundant vitality as a characteristic of a higher type, so the philologist justly assigns these tongues a low position in the linguistic scale. Fidelity to form, here as everywhere, is the test of excellence. At the outset, we ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... the human economy: they betray at once the mental condition of the individual. Joy is a great tonic, and acts on the vocal cords and mucous membrane as does an astringent; a brilliant and clear quality of voice is the result. Grief or Fear, on the other hand, being depressing emotions, lower the vitality, and the debilitating influence communicates to the voice a ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... nearly supplied among elementary school children than among those who have more "educational advantages"; they "go out to play" in the streets for hours every day, and one cannot help thinking that it is the vitality thus evolved that keeps most of them healthy and happy in spite of ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... not corrupt, they might go on well and quickly, but really it is most irritating to see the jealousies of the mandarins of one another. The people are first-rate, hard-working, and fairly honest; but it seems as soon as they rise in office they become corrupt. There is lots of vitality in the country, and there are some good men; but these are kept down by the leaden apathy of their equals, who hate to see ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... figure on horse-back appeared at the head of the arroyo. It was Red Bill himself. On his ankle was a bandage, but his amazing vitality had left no other traces of the bite ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... wheel, and the site of the old mill, which is now also torn down, is easily traceable. When the author visited the spot in the fall of 1905, all these points were verified and the distances measured. It was a long shot that Roberts made, and down hill. The vitality of the man who made it, his courage, and his tenacity alike of life and of purpose against such odds make Roberts a man remembered with admiration even to-day in that ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough

... is complete. Toggle and cinch perform their proud functions, and I sleep undisturbed by Arctic nightmares, for I have substituted green ties for the stoneware buttons which reduced my vitality by absorbing heat. My only trouble is my increasing reluctance to rise in the morning. I don't like changing out of my beautiful things so early in the day. I am beginning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various

... changed with his coming. He seemed to fill it with his tremendous vitality. Men who entered from the street felt it immediately, and in response to their queries the barkeepers nodded at the back room, and said comprehensively, "Burning Daylight's on the tear." And the men ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... nothing to change into," said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer's hand. On she plodded ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... wear the dull, glazed look by which they had too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... observed. To observe a simple cell in movement, it is necessary to have a hollow glass slide with cavity for the hanging drop; to have ready "fresh solutions" in which the living cells may be immersed, to ensure their continued vitality; to have ready soils for cultures, etc. For all these ends there are special avocations, those of the so-called "preparers," who are not the assistants or helpers of the professor, but employes who were at one time upper servants, and then become superior workmen. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... sending it false news of our battleship strength, or to enable the battle of the Falkland Islands to be won by piling dummy battle cruisers up outside Plymouth harbour, the merit of Mr. COPPLESTONE'S book does not lie in the complexity or vitality of his plots. It lies in a keen sense of humour and clever character suggestion, and the recognition that the thing written about is of less importance than the manner of writing. We earnestly desire that Mr. COPPLESTONE should devote another volume—a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various

... balance; a devotee of moderation, of the via media. Hardly less averse to war than his mistress, he would yet have preferred war to some of the ignominious shifts by which she evaded it; for he had a cool level-headed confidence in England's essential vitality and power of weathering the storm, if it should burst, even at times when outside observers imagined that that confidence was hurrying her to ruin. When obliged to lean to one side or the other in religious controversy, he adopted the cause of "his brethren in Christ" as Elizabeth dubbed ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... the goodness of the carving than to express her approval of its spirit. Johnnie's flowers were indeed wooden, but his birds and insects, though flat and rough, were all intended to be alive. He had too much directness, and also real vitality, to carve poor dead birds hanging by the legs with torn and ruffled feathers, and showing pathetically their quenched and faded eyes; he wanted his birds to peck and his beetles to be creeping. Luckily for ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... Duerer. But it was the faith, not of humble men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or ecstatic visionaries, so much as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators and merchants, for whom religion was a function among other functions, not a thing apart, not a source of separate and supreme vitality. Even as Christians, the Venetians lived a life separate from the rest of Italy. Their Church claimed independence of the see of Rome, and the enthusiasm of S. Francis was but faintly felt in the lagoons. Siena in her hour of need dedicated herself to Madonna; Florence ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... some of their most characteristic qualities permanently; to retain and therefore to impress these upon the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely prepotent ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... But this display of power was exhausting; it ate away the life of the nation, because it drew wholly upon itself and not upon the outside world, with which it could have been kept in contact by the sea. In the war that next followed, the same energy is seen, but not the same vitality; and France was everywhere beaten back and brought to the verge of ruin. The lesson of both is the same; nations, like men, however strong, decay when cut off from the external activities and resources which ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... Colonel. "George, you are always taking me upon suppositions. I only related it to the Captain in order to show the power and integrity of our law, and how South Carolinians frequently sacrifice their own interests to maintain it intact. Nothing could be more fatal to its vitality than to make provisions which would entail legal preferences. The law in regard to free niggers leaving the State should be looked upon in the light of protection rather than alienation, for it is made to protect property and society. Yet where ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... of the artist's father, and is represented with such truth of nature and so much vitality of expression and character as at once to give rise to the remark, 'I must have known that man, he seems so living ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... fermenting must or beer. Is there, you may ask, any organism to be detected in the putrefying pus? Yes, gentlemen, there is. If any drop of the putrid matter is examined with a good glass, it is found to be teeming with myriads of minute jointed bodies, called vibrios, which indubitably proclaim their vitality by the energy of their movements. It is not an affair of probability, but a fact, that the entire mass of that quart of pus has become peopled with living organisms as the result of the introduction of the canula and trocar; ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... way he seemed to be settling down. She felt a deeper change in him, something she did not understand. The worn harassed expression she had so often seen on his face while his wife had been alive, the look of a man driven and drained of his vitality, was now gone; and in its place was an unconscious look of content. He often stayed very late at the office; and more and more in his evenings at home he went to his desk and became absorbed in ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole

... veiled, her face radiant as a Romney in its frame of gauze. She looked so big and beautiful, and Sypher looked so big and strong, and both seemed so full of vitality, that Septimus felt criminally insignificant. His voice was of too low a pitch to make itself carry when these two spoke in their full tones. He shrank into his shell. Had he not realized, in his sensitive way, that without him as a watchdog—ineffectual ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... worthy of a lower order, buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour, might have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, but to the pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who could expect any one effect to testify more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of the Piazza took up the tale ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... all this. All this seemed to me to be fine, seemed to throw off the true, fine, romantic savour of life. I would have altered nothing in it. Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric—yes, but what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast community unconscious of itself! I would have altered nothing even in the events of the night. I thought of the rooms at the top of the staircase of the Foaming Quart—mysterious rooms ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... things; for fire is the most active thing in nature, and all production is either motion, or attended with motion; all the other parts of matter, so long as they are without warmth, lie sluggish and dead, and require the accession of a sort of soul or vitality in the principle of heat; and upon that accession, in whatever way, immediately receive a capacity either of acting or being acted upon. And thus Numa, a man curious in such things, and whose wisdom made it thought that he conversed with the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... interview with Talleyrand, with whom he had often crossed swords in debate. His weakness dated from February, 1788, when he was attacked with violent internal pains, and was bled to such an extent by a surgeon that he never recovered his wonderful natural vitality. After much suffering, endured with the most heroic fortitude, he passed away as if in sleep, with a sweet smile on his features. France mourned the loss of the greatest orator that had ever graced her tribune. His funeral was celebrated ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... of a praying machine, which could run off, as it were, from the reel, so many litanies in a given time, with little effort of intellect, and only a blind exercise of faith; both fatal to religious vitality. The dissolution of the monasteries, which were, perhaps, more abundant in our own neighbourhood than in any other similarly limited area in the kingdom, is not only a fact in history, but also ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... Yule-tide feast. Diana was a highly-strung little person, whose nerves were apt to get on edge, and who made the common mistake of trying to live too fast. Her father's "lightning methods", which she much admired and imitated, were decidedly wearing to her vitality, and left her sometimes like a squeezed orange or an india-rubber ball that has lost its bounce. Then secondly, the French mails had been delayed, and, since the holidays began, Diana had not received a single parcel, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... as an emptiness, a solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it to be instinct with a movement and life too great for you to apprehend. You are thrilled by a mighty energy, uncontrolled by you, unsolicited by you: its higher vitality is poured into your soul. You enter upon an experience for which all the terms of power, thought, motion, even of love, are inadequate: yet which contains within itself the only complete expression of all these things. Your ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... putting the patient into the trance state at all, an effort is made to relieve his pain, to remove his disease, or to pour vitality into him by magnetic passes) stands on an entirely different footing; and if the mesmerizer, even though quite untrained, is himself in good health and animated by pure intentions, no harm is likely to be done to the subject. In so extreme a case as that of a surgical ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... unquestionably be dealt with by a law of guarantees, similar to those which have played so conspicuous a part in the theory, but sometimes also in the practice, of the Dual Monarchy. So many severe amputations might, however, prove too much for the vitality of the patient; and in any case we may assume that either Austria-Hungary will be able to prevent the operation, or that the Allies, if they can once bring matters thus far, will insist upon completing the process by a drastic post-mortem inquiry. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... head and seemed to draw in the strong odour of the gum trees and the pure vitality of the weltering sun. His anger appeared to have left only compunction behind it. And again he begged her to forgive him for having subjected her to an experience so disagreeable. They were on a stretch of clear road now, and the roans trotted pleasantly along. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... what an air of humorous resignation Townsend Ripley stepped into the skiff and the mock air of ebbing vitality which the others showed was as ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... of a College Friendship, prolonged through Manhood, and retaining all its Vitality ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price. They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which, in ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... authorities, I mean to the ancient corporations. These have been dissolved by revolutionary law and have no longer a representative who can sign for them. Nevertheless, in spite of revolutionary law, one of these corporations, with more vitality than the rest, still subsists with its proper, if not legal, representative, its regular and undisputed chief. This chief is qualified and authorized to bind the body; for, institutionally, he is supreme, and the conscience of all its ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... while Sogrange, shabbier, and in ready-made American clothes, was transformed into a Canadian having some connection with the theatrical business. They plunged into the heart of New York life, and found the whole thing like a tonic. The intense vitality of the people, the pandemonium of Broadway at midnight, with its flaming illuminations, its eager crowd, its inimitable restlessness, fascinated them both. Sogrange, indeed, remembering the decadent languor of the crowds of pleasure seekers thronging his own boulevards, was never ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... represented nearly the whole past sovereignty of the land over which she reigned.[1] The blood of both Cerdic, the first Saxon king, and of William the Conqueror,[2] flowed in her veins,—a fact which strikingly illustrates the vitality of the hereditary and conservative principles in the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... Cornwall wreckers into honest men; and the formally pious spoke of the worshippers at this new shrine of faith with a serene sneer, and classed them as a parcel of fiercely ejaculating, hymn-singing nonentities. But there was vitality at the core of their creed, and its fuller triumphs were but a question of time. In 1817, Methodism became dissatisfied with its Back-lane quarters, and migrated into a lighter, healthier, and cleaner portion of the town—Lune-street—where ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... communions, to visible movements, to outwardness, in short, more than to the central depths within. The defects in your preaching, which I have heard pointed out by the discerning, are the want of consistency,—of one six months with another six months,—and the want of spiritual depth and vitality; of that calm, deep tone of thought and feeling that goes to the depths ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... desolate Simiti, life to her was an endless series of delightful experiences, of wonderful surprises in the discovery of God's presence everywhere. Her enthusiasms were always ardent and inexhaustible. Sparkling animation and abounding vitality characterized her every movement. Her thought was free, unstrained, natural, and untrammeled by those inherited and educated beliefs in evil in which Jose had early been so completely swamped. In worldly knowledge she was the purest novice; ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... me out of Fredericksburg, and leave these men to rot in the old theater. Already their wounds were infested by worms, which gnawed and tormented them; some of those wounds were turning black, many were green; the vitality of the men was sinking for want of food and warmth. I could not forsake them to look after reform; would not fail to do what I could, in an effort to do what I could not or might ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... down beside her, and placing one of his own broad, warm palms upon the little hands, as if he would thus communicate to them some of his own strength and vitality. "I am glad to find you better," he continued; but Bessie shook her head and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes



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