"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physician. There was healing in the touch of his big hand. Healing light streamed from his brown eyes, and his iron-gray beard sparkled with it. His presence in a sick-room seemed to fill it with waves of life, and his influence over the patients to whom he ministered was little short of hypnotic. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... And such was her hypnotic power, or my adaptability, that in the atmosphere of Runnymede I became a Conservative of the good old type, and actually enjoyed the communion of soul necessarily subsisting between a pedigreed lady and a pedigreed gentleman. We habitually ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States. Those papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse, can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their attention to any ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... clever, and the experiments are renewed often enough), will say or suggest to him that on the next day, or the one following, or, in fact, any determined time, he shall visit a certain friend, or dance a jig, or wear a given suit of clothes, or the like, he will, when the hypnotic sleep is over, have forgotten all about it. But when the hour indicated for his call or dance, or change of garment arrives, he will be haunted by such an irresistible feeling that he must do it; that in most cases it will infallibly be done. It is no exaggeration ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... such workaday elements as the hypnotic fascinations of a sleek music-master, the follies of a runaway schoolgirl and the well-disciplined affections of a most superior young gentleman, Mr. W.E. NORRIS has contrived to create yet another new story, without infringement of his own or anyone else's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... not only made ill by his own negative thoughts and emotions, he is also under the hypnotic spell of the race mind. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not." We are all under the spell, more or less, of a huge illusion. The evil, disease, sickness and other imperfections ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... Montjoie, a quaint small town somewhere in that hilly region of the Ardennes along the border between Luxemburg and Belgium. Our memory is rather vague as to Montjoie, for we got there late one evening, after more than seventy up-and-down miles on a bicycle, hypnotic with weariness and the smell of pine trees and a great warm wind that had buffeted us all day. But we have a dim, comfortable remembrance of a large clean bedroom, unlighted, in which we duskily groped and found no less than three huge beds among which we had to choose; and ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... you considered it the greatest play that had ever made its bow to Broadway; and you actually persuaded yourself to believe it—at least those who made the real successes were men who possessed that hypnotic power. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... interpretation—necessarily personal—of the message his books have conveyed to a particular reader. And the plain message that all these romances—including those that follow—have conveyed to me is the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic suggestions of parents and early teachers, of the parochial influences of immediate surroundings, of the prejudices and self-interested dogmatisms and hyperboles of common literature, especially of the daily and weekly ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... must speedily be acknowledged by scientists, when the latter take the trouble to study these facts and arguments. And with geology once adjusted to a system of real inductive science, instead of being as hitherto under the hypnotic control of speculative fancies and subjective methods, there is no longer any room for speculations regarding the origin of our world by evolutionary processes. It becomes almost a mathematical Q.E.D. that ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... every conceivable illness and for every subdivision of it. If I fall ill, there is a whole battery of modern science to be turned upon me in a moment. There are X-rays ready to penetrate me in all directions. I may have any and every treatment—hypnotic, therapeutic or thaumaturgic—for which ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... completely attained. St. Augustine, even at the period when he wrote his Confessions, mentions, as a matter of course, that sexual dreams "not merely arouse pleasure, but gain the consent of the will." (X. 41.) Not infrequently there is a struggle in sleep, just as the hypnotic subject may resist suggestions; thus, a lady of thirty-five dreamed a sexual dream, and awoke without excitement; again she fell asleep, and had another dream of sexual character, but resisted the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... or has himself been, the teller of a story which held an audience, knows that there is something approaching hypnotic suggestion in the close connection of effort and effect, and in the elimination of self-consciousness from ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... rotation had brought the earth almost to the zenith, the little point shining with the unmistakably steady ray of a planet. Huge bats fluttered about him, and the great cloud-masses swept across the sky, being part of Saturn's ceaseless whirl. He found he was in a hypnotic or spiritualistic state, for it was not necessary for him to have his eyes open to know where he was. In passing one of the pools they had noticed, he observed that the upper and previously invisible liquid had the bright ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... must hear me through in silence, Enoch. I remember my father telling me that Seaton believed that you had been made the victim of almost hypnotic suggestion by that beast, Luigi. Not that Luigi knew anything about auto-suggestion or anything of the sort! He simply wanted to enslave a boy who was a clever gambler. And so he planted the vicious suggestion in your mind that you were necessarily bad because your mother ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the crystal cube without looking at it. Clenching it in his fist, he put his hand in his pocket. Fenwick guessed he was trying to avoid any direct view and thus avoid the possibility of hypnotic effects. This seemed ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... happened? Damned if it—pardon me, Mr. Culpepper—blessed if it didn't burn him—carries the scars to this day. Then there was that case in Denver. Ever hear about that? A young girl, nervous patient. Nails driven through the palms of her hands,—tenpenny nails,—under the hypnotic suggestion that she wasn't being hurt. Didn't leave a cicatrice as big as ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... certainly have been non-suited, if his case had been carried into court. We are permitted to suppose that Zenobia, in order to clear her path of a successful rival, assists the mountebank, Westervelt, to entrap Priscilla, over whom he possesses a kind hypnotic power, and to carry her off for the benefit of his mountebank exhibitions; but it remains a supposition and nothing more. We cannot but feel rejoiced, when Hollingsworth steps onto the platform and releases Priscilla from the psychological net-work in which she ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Mail dock to the Heads, Warning the people you're about to wreak Upon the human ear your Sunday freak?— Whereat the most betake them to their bed Though some prefer to slumber in the pews And nod assent to your hypnotic views. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... and only Chopin: brooks and pools of sound to which you did not listen, but in which you bathed. And in his soul the legless man was playing only for Barbara, and only to Barbara. And so powerful was this obsession that it stole out of him like some hypnotic influence, affected the others, and gave him away. First Blythe looked toward Barbara, not realizing why, then Haddon looked, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... at their table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with solemn lips and an attractive shyness in his glance. There was an air of privilege around that corner table, as though past masters were eating there. Jon was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean in the chaps, pervaded with such free-masonical deference. He seemed to hang on George Forsyte's lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind of sympathy, to follow the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Until this moment, I suppose, the strangeness and unexpectedness of these happenings had numbed my brain. To precede Buck meekly upstairs and to wait with equal meekness while he interviewed Mr Abney had seemed the only course open to me. To one whose life has lain apart from such things, the hypnotic influence of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... on the third day, the gaping Spectators observed that the Youngun had an open Countenance, somewhat like a Channel Cat, a full head of Hair bushing at the nape of the neck, and a hypnotic Eye; so they knew he was destined for the Service of ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... After a time she discovered that she was mechanically nodding and shaking her head at the questions he was putting to her, but had only the vaguest idea what they were. By and by she began to tell him about Longorio, speaking in a sort of hypnotic murmur, as if her words issued at his mental suggestion. And all the time ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... matter. One has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in this manner ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... was still more terrible. Notwithstanding his zeal, and the fact that he had given evidence against his own wife, he was arrested, charged with a similar offense. Whether hypnotic influences were exerted, or whether the examining justices merely imagined things against the prisoner, cannot be known at this time. The court records, however, state that while the witnesses were on the stand, they ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... understand him better she attempted to argue with him, and he told her of the incredible explanation that Charcot, the eminent hypnotist, had had to fall back upon in order to account materialistically for some of his hypnotic experiments, and she was forced to admit that the spiritualistic explanation was the easier ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... savage (Zapotec, tona; Guatemalan, nagual; North America, Manitou, 'medicine') is not that savage's totem. {89a} The nagual, tona, or manitou is selected for each particular savage, at birth or puberty, in various ways: in America, North and Central, by a dream in a fast, or after a dream. ('Post-hypnotic suggestion.') But a savage is born to his kin-totem. A man is born a wolf of the Delawares, his totem is the wolf, he cannot help himself. But after, or in, his medicine fast and sleep, he may choose a dormouse or a squirrel for ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... few minutes he was absorbed, as only Dumas has power to absorb his readers. The man of action in that great romancer exercised a sort of hypnotic power over Flint. The robust virility passed into the sinew of his soul. The romance possessed him utterly, and left him without even the power to criticise. It was he himself who stood in Queen Catherine's box, and watched the spouting of Salcide's blood, as he was drawn ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... its relations; that is, as the poet has put it, to seeing life "steadily and seeing it whole." The sane view is to see things in their relation to other things; the non-sane view is to see them isolated, in such a way that they exercise a kind of hypnotic spell over us. And it makes no difference what a man's habitual interests may be, whether they be sordid or lofty, he needs ever and anon to get away from them. In reality, nothing wherewith a man occupies himself need be sordid. The spiritual attitude ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... curious part. When a man is shouting for joy he can scatter largesse with a free hand, but he cannot loosen his purse-strings while he is holding his breath; and even when it is only being held for him by a sort of hypnotic suggestion, his nature is still ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... stories in which they are heroes and villains, are all possessed by the power of the second sight, but second sight is not the most remarkable of their supernatural powers. Hypnotic suggestion Gloom uses as an everyday agent in his affairs. It is through hypnotic suggestion that he puts madness upon Alasdair M'Ian, playing to him the Pibroch of the Mad, Alasdair M'Ian, in telling ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... moments they all gazed at the paper as if the mysterious blue letters exercised upon them some hypnotic influence. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... and the after-play had been allowed to run its course, Farrel told the Pornsens to go into the next room and shower. They came back soon, looking refreshed. Farrel ordered them to get back into their clothes. Under the power of the hypnotic drug which their chairs had injected into them at the touch of the button, they did so. Then he told them to sit down in the ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... the hypnotic to-and-fro of those swaying, poised, alert human figures, he encountered Marise, coming on her suddenly, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... known to the Chinese, and is mentioned in literature so far back as the middle of the seventeenth century. With all the paraphernalia of altar, candles, incense, etc., a medium is thrown into a hypnotic condition, during which his body is supposed to be possessed by a spirit, and every word he may utter to be divinely inspired. An amusing instance is recorded of a medium who, while under hypnotic influence, not only blurted out the pecuniary defalcations of certain men who ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... property at Fort Worth from a Miss Minnie Williams, and transferred it to Pitezel. Pitezel was a drunken "crook," of mean intelligence, a mesmeric subject entirely under the influence of Holmes, who claimed to have considerable hypnotic powers. Pitezel had a wife living at St. Louis and five children, three girls—Dessie, Alice, and Nellie—a boy, Howard, and a baby in arms. At the time of Holmes' arrest Mrs. Pitezel, with her eldest daughter, Dessie, and her little baby, was living at a house rented by Holmes at Burlington, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... as a diagnostic; as an equalizer of the circulation; as a general counter-irritant; as a general invigorant and tonic—Its hypnotic and sedative influence—Its improvement ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... indulged in simulations and lies. Delbruck denominated it a case of direct lying with a tendency to phantasies, delusions, and dissimulations. Delbruck from this case argues that a mixture of lies and delusions is possible, comparing such a state with dreaming and with the hypnotic condition in which one follows the suggestion of the hypnotizer and is still aware of the fact. It was evident at times that this girl half believed her own stories, then again that she had forgotten her former lies. In her, Delbruck considers perverted sex feeling and hysteria revealed ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... that I had become the victim of the hypnotic power of Tushegoun Lama; but I preferred this to seeing an innocent Mongolian die, for I had not believed that Tushegoun Lama, after slashing open the bodies of his victims, could repair ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... following her half-hypnotic gaze, in time to see Colonel Von Ritz bending over her hand. With recognition, Benton started up, then his jaw dropped and, doubting his own sanity, he fell back into his chair and sat gazing with ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... was still at his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . . There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . . The father's sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... you go, I'll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr. Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... I could do was keep 'em reminded there was ladies present and it wasn't a barroom where anything could be rightly started. Doc Martingale's feelings was running high, too, account, I suppose, of certain full-hearted things his wife had blurted out to him about the hypnotic eyes of this here Nature lover. He was quiet enough, but vicious, acting like he'd love to do some dental work on the poet that might or might not be painless for all he cared a hoot. He was taking his own drinks all ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the first to make a sound—a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... as it has been called, noctambulation, is a curious phase of nocturnal cerebration analogous to the hypnotic state, or double consciousness occasionally observed in epileptics. Both Hippocrates and Aristotle discuss somnambulism, and it is said that the physician Galen was a victim of this habit. Horstius, ab Heers, and many others of the older writers recorded interesting ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... wary by bitter experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd surges toward the ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out his foot against the fender, almost overturning it, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to work himself up into one of the rhapsodies for which he was noted. "Brother Frank," he began, "I want to bear my testimony to you that this is the work of God—and nothing can stay its progress—and all who interfere will be swept away as chaff"—rising to those transports of auto-hypnotic exaltation which such as he accept as the effect of the spirit of God speaking through them. "You were born in the covenant, and the condemnation is more severe upon one who has the birthright than upon one ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... of pictures, even those of Saints or Holy Families, had given enormous pleasure. But why? Not because the crowds that flocked to the galleries really cared for them, but because gifted writers had for centuries been setting up hypnotic suggestions that in this way was pleasure to be obtained. He had often seen men and women standing before a canvas of REMBRANDT, hating the grubby muddle of it in their hearts, but adoring it in their heads—all because some well-known critic had told ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... one form of human activity that this hard-headed physician regarded with particular detestation it was that of mediumship. All mediums, in his opinion, were knaves or fools and their so-called occult manifestations were either conjurers' trickery or self-created illusions of a hypnotic character. He had never attended a spiritualistic seance and had no ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... the blood pours from the wounds, and a friend of mine who had witnessed the performance on one occasion seemed to think that in some cases the wounding and bleeding were not really objective facts, but represented to the audience by a species of hypnotic suggestion. As, however, my visit to Somerset West took place during the month of Ramazan there was no opportunity of witnessing the "Khalifa," which would be celebrated during Bairam, the month of rejoicing which amongst ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... blue-and-gold streamers suddenly drifted toward him on an unfelt current. Cully was held, entranced. They flowed before him, their colors dazzling, hypnotic. ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... Forrest was real; my walk and talk with her that day were real. Ay, and the hateful glitter of Voltaire's eyes was real too; his talk with Kaffar behind the shrubs the night before was real. The biological or hypnotic power that I had felt that very night was real, and, above all, a feeling of dread that had gripped my being was real. I could not explain it, and I could not throw it off, but ever since I had awoke out of my ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... on his feet and, after bestowing on the jury a stern hypnotic stare, he plunged into his reply with a really admirable air of conviction and sincerity. "My lord and gentlemen of the jury: The case which is now before this Court is one, as I have already remarked, in which human nature is presented in a ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... grotesque nature. Figures increasingly horrible and menacing crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all the strength ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... lecture, can supply the want of fine intelligence and judgment in all these matters, and not until the teacher "comprehends the genesis of any principle from deeper principles can she emancipate herself from even the hypnotic suggestion of the principle itself, and convert external ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... according to the rule which defines traumatic hysteria, i. e., as ideogen. The ideational complexes in question are forced into the subconsciousness, whence, on occasion, by aid of associative processes, hypnotic concentration, and such other similar elements, they can be raised into consciousness. In this case, the suppressed ideational complex manifested itself in signing ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... lovely little girl who was visiting my wife helped me to decide whether I should write in one verse "a flimsy shift" or "a filmy shift" or other versions, and her opinion on "flimsy" decided me. She is the only person that ever had anything to do with it—as far as I know! What hypnotic influences were at work or what astral minds may have intervened, I know not. But I have always thought I did it all. It was not much to do, except for a certain 17th Century ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... Bunnell, Superintendent of Telegraph of the P. Q. & X. Railroad at Kansas City, Missouri, saying I was an expert operator and desired a position on his road. Mr. Bunnell must have been laboring under a hypnotic spell, for by return mail he wrote, enclosing me a pass to Alfreda, Kansas, and directing me to assume charge of the night office at that point at the magnificent salary of $37.50 per month. This was a slight decrease from my former ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... staring with avidity at us all; the great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... very pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was he that did it. And it's he who ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... few references to the originals of the characters in the novel, and to the hypnotic experiments in which Du Maurier was interested in his youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... up business, say, in Nero's Rome or Montezuma's Mexico. An Agent was physically and psychologically fitted to the era he was to explore. Then he trained, and how he trained!" Ross remembered the weary hours spent learning how to use a bronze sword, the technique of Beaker trading, the hypnotic instruction in a language which was already dead centuries before his own country existed. "You learned the language, the customs, everything you could about your time and your cover. You were letter perfect before you took even a ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... undertake to pronounce upon the validity of the theory which is here advanced. The play is an inquiry into the significance and authenticity of miracles. Incidentally the theme is faith-healing, the hypnotic effect of prayer, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in question is a most interesting one, in which hypnotic suggestion may or may not be an ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... Professor of the Medical Faculty in Nancy who is a champion of hypnotism has written a book on 'Suggestion and its Application in Therapeutics,' in which a great many hypnotic ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... is, there will your heart be also." 181:30 If you have more faith in drugs than in Truth, this faith will incline you to the side of matter and error. Any hypnotic power you may exercise will diminish your 182:1 ability to become a Scientist, and vice versa. The act of healing the sick through divine Mind alone, of casting 182:3 out error with Truth, shows your position ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... coal-hod, he told her something of his own life. For a little while she listened, but soon the room became blurred to her and she sank farther and farther among the heavy shadows and the old paintings on the wall. The rain beat against the muffled windows drowsily. The fire warmed her brow like some hypnotic hand. Then his voice ceased and she drew her feet beneath her and slept in the chair, looking like a soft ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of Young's studies of light might perhaps have gained earlier recognition had it not chanced that, at the time when they were made, the attention of the philosophic world was turned with the fixity and fascination of a hypnotic stare upon another field, which for a time brooked no rival. How could the old, familiar phenomenon, light, interest any one when the new agent, galvanism, was in view? As well ask one to fix attention on a star while a meteorite ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... she caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister's white form, that was clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Fixing a hypnotic gaze upon a bland, blue-eyed bystander who had just joined the charmed circle, he murmured, invitingly: "Better try your luck, Olaf. It's Danish dice—three chances to ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... religious phenomena, we find in Japan, as in other lands, the practice of ecstatic union with the deity. In Shinto it is called "Kami-oroshi," the bringing down of the gods. It is doubtless some form of hypnotic trance, yet the popular interpretation of the phenomenon is that ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a person who had rights over her—a tone which before he had been more willing ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... for a long minute the two women faced each other, Grace Draper defiant, Lillian, with all the compelling, almost hypnotic power that is hers when ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... floor parlour window, nor even the contemplation of the remarkable sacred pictures that adorned its walls, had the interest they might have held earlier in the day, and the dirty cruet-stand on the dirtier tablecloth was endued with an almost hypnotic fascination in its suggestion of coming sustenance. At the end of the first hour a stupor verging on indifference had set in; it was far on in the second when the dish of fried mutton chops, the hard potatoes, and the tepid whiskies and sodas were flung upon the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... in a packed football stadium when the Flying Eyes appeared and cast their hypnotic power over half the crowd. Thousands of people suddenly began marching zombie-like into the woods where they vanished ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... in a towel, he left it in his room overnight, he buried it in his cellar, and he cleaned up the blood the following morning. But there was one ghastly difference: Emil Drukker had committed his crime with full purposeful foreknowledge, whereas I had committed my crime under hypnotic inducement! ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... all dese faces and fancies. Out with your violin! [He taps his umbrella imperiously on the table.] Keinen Mut verlieren! [DAVID takes out his violin from its case and puts it to his shoulder, PAPPELMEISTER keeping up a hypnotic torrent of encouraging German cries.] Also! Fertig! Anfangen! [He raises and waves his umbrella like a ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... something more to be considered. The man who could appreciate the value of the personal consolations brought by the Bible-woman to the poor and down-trodden, and the infinitely comfortable assurance of the mystic, firm as hypnotic conviction, that he is the direct associate and instrument of the Almighty, whether submissive or arrogant, from Stephen to the Bab, from Cromwell and Gordon to Bismarck and his Imperial associates, such a man might well say: "I wish I could be so magnificently ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... laughing, weeping, smacking, throwing oneself about and so on, or occasionally to complicated actions, which begin with leaving the bed. Further comparison shows the night wandering as symptomatically similar to hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism. This interpretation might be objected to upon the ground that unfortunately we know nothing of the origin of the motor phenomena of the dream and that understanding of the hysterical ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... too long or closely," said Phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "As I have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. You are, of course, aware that many Eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... There could be no question at all upon the point. For me hypnotic suggestion was finally established. It took its place from now onward as one of the facts of life. That Agatha, who of all women of my acquaintance has the best balanced mind, had been reduced to a condition of automatism appeared to be certain. A person at a distance had worked her as ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to laugh at myself for the fool I had been. I arose. It was useless to sit longer with folded arms and determined eyes fixed on her face, to break her will by hypnotic power. I knew that I was defeated, and however better defeat might be than victory, judged in wisdom, it was not pleasant to a man of spirit. I stood before her pulling on a glove and she looked up at me with a suggestion ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... would go at once to the Hotel Europa! The power of suggestion! And she had followed it blindly—unawares, leading Hugh Renwick into this deadly trap which Goritz had laid. She read the plan now in all its insidious perfection. There was something malign—hypnotic—in an influence which could so easily compel compliance. And Hugh? She had written him to come here—to the door in the court below, where men would be waiting—perhaps to take his ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... stood near the coping, one hand on a low abutment, all her conscious being centred on the adventuring flame that swayed and curtsied at the caprice of the wind. The effect of her concentration was almost hypnotic: as if her soul, deserting her still body, flickered away there on the water; as if every threat of wind or wavelet struck at her ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... out of his half-hypnotic daze—a daze which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the hideous ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... him. Every new craze then in vogue among his set was alluded to in his speech; everything that then was, and some things that still are, considered to be the last words of scientific wisdom: the laws of heredity and inborn criminality, evolution and the struggle for existence, hypnotism and hypnotic influence. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It is suggestion, not direct will power, that acts. No ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... you know—much older than me." She had put her hands up to both cheeks of Jolly's horse, and was rubbing her nose against its nose with a gentle snuffling noise which seemed to have an hypnotic effect on the animal. Val contemplated her cheek resting against the horse's nose, and her eyes gleaming round at him. 'She's really ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his fluctuating fortunes as only a sister of infinite love and infinite tact could know. But she never had dreamed that he could be enmeshed by the wiles of the wife of his friend. The crux of the whole matter lay in the possibility of saving him, not only from Eva's hypnotic charm, but from the less intricate and more thinly concealed machinations of Mr. Moore. Winifred felt her first smart of anger revive toward Mrs. Latimer as she recalled how ingenuously Charlie had been led to the juggernaut ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... made to him by Margrave, a wanderer in many countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some occult fashion, knit ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... was gentle, almost hypnotic—"of course you know who the woman is that Mr. Warren was planning to ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... The son of a physician, he studied medicine in Edinburgh, and after obtaining his degree of M.B., in 1873, he settled at Goole, Yorkshire. Fired by the unfinished work of Braid, Bernheim and Liebeault, he began, in 1889, a series of hypnotic researches, which, together with a number of successful experiments he had privately conducted, created considerable stir in the medical world. Abandoning his general practice and settling in London in 1892, Dr. Bramwell became one of the foremost authorities in the country ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... peculiarly about the room. Janet watched her. She stood in front of the bureau, just as Janet herself had done, her hands at her throat. At last she let them fall, her head turning slowly, as though drawn, by some irresistible, hypnotic power, and their eyes met. Lise's were filmed, like those of a dog whose head is being stroked, expressing a luxuriant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... if Flora would even consent to let her furniture be displayed in the centennial; but she did. Everybody consented to everything. I don't know whether Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson had really any hypnotic influence over us, or whether we had a desire for the celebration, but the whole village marshalled and marched to her orders with the greatest docility. All our cherished pieces of old furniture were loaded into carts and conveyed ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Now it is lovely... only in the light of street lamps... Mary... surrounded with dark rain— This is the way it should be. I would like to be with you. What are mountains and the flat land to me— What are cities to me and colorful hypnotic nights— Back to the ocean... back to the starry shore. You are not entirely Mary, whom I sought. But you are also Mary—boundless... Beloved... a fool... cursed ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... skin all over his body seemed to creep in disgust. He had been bending over as he hauled up the rope and the squid's tentacles around his arms held him poised half out of the boat, his head not more than a foot and a half from the surface of the water, looking straight into the hypnotic, black, unwinking eyes of ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... I trembled. My secret seemed to be safely planted, but what would the harvest be? I knew I should watch those upper windows with hypnotic zeal, and listen with straining ears for the inevitable squall of a child or the bark of a dog. My brain ran riot with incipient subterfuges, excuses, apologies and lies with which my position was to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... seemed to have a hypnotic effect on the freckled boy; his big pupils contracted each time Abner came ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Turtle's only answer was a renewed succession of yells. Suddenly he stopped short where he stood, and for a space of minutes he regarded his companion with a pair of glassy eyes under whose hypnotic spell ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... belonged to or been touched or handled by the person about whom he proposes to question her. Mme. M. operates in a state of trance; but there are other celebrated psychometers who retain all their normal consciousness, so that the hypnotic or somnambulistic state is not, generally speaking, by any means indispensable when we wish to arouse this ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... honorable member entitled to the floor. That gentleman will rise, train his compelling orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhaust his alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorable member of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power and hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of the method are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" will no longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech," to the irritating abridgment of the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... synthesis of images seems to take place without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... honour of the Sun. They invited all the Sioux to come, and the whites invited themselves. Belle and Jim were there and saw much to please and much to disgust them. The general impression was one of barbaric splendour, weird chanting, noisy tom-toms, and hypnotic pulsation. It was mostly repellent, but sometimes the rhythm stirred them, and provoked a response which showed that the wild musicians were playing on instincts and impulses that are as wide ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... literature. That he stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one is without defence. It is the sound of a ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... seated, her foot still restlessly tapping, but her gaze arrested by the hypnotic movements of the smoke, when at last a sound from the outer world, penetrated to the room. A church clock struck the hour of seven, its clangor intruding upon the silence only as a muffled boom. Almost coincident with the last stroke came the sweeter note of a silver gong from somewhere ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... "mechanisms" have been set up. There is in many people a tendency to project outward the blame for those acts or thoughts which they dislike. In the pathological field we get those delusions of influence that are so common. Thus a patient will attribute his obscene thoughts and words to a hypnotic effect of some person or group of persons and saves his own face by the delusion. In lesser pathological measure, men have fiercely preached against the snares and wiles of women, refusing to recognize that the turmoil of unwelcome desire into which they were thrown was ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... fire with a half open eye and when you said "Fido" his ears would answer you, taut with response, while his tail would beat the floor in indolent happiness. Is there anything in life so infectiously joyous as a wagging tail? Worry, distress, crossness, all melt at the sight of it—a hypnotic conductor's, baton beating the rhythm of triumphant ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... you are in a hypnotic state or under the power of others, portends disastrous results, for your enemies will enthrall you; but if you hold others under a spell you will assert decided will power in governing ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... genius. Says Lombroso: "I have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarce reached the age of puberty; they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noticed among all a strange apathy for everything which does not concern them; as though, plunged in the hypnotic condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed them, they grew tender, at once hastening to attend them; but it was a fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... that of the Future and was devoted to divinations, the oracles being given by a Vestal in a hypnotic condition, seated over a burning brazier. The doctor was accommodated with a test, but another inquirer who had the temerity to be curious as to what was being done in the Vatican received a severe rebuff; in vain ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... they couldn't—" There was something hypnotic in the persistence of the nurse in ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer |
