"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be trifled with. Her little figure absolutely quivered with dignity, and though physically she was shorter than her pupil, morally she seemed to tower yards. She fixed her clear dark eyes in a kind of hypnotic stare ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in Petrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers, engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do to the mere mortals ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... as yet about those psychological methods which themselves introduce abnormal mental states like hypnotism, and which also not seldom are only means for diagnostic purposes. The hypnotic state may bring to memory forgotten experiences of which the physiological effects may have lasted in the brain and which may have brought injury to the psychophysical system. Hypnotic inquiry can thus lead to the recognition of the first causes in many hysterical states and where ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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, and, throwing back his head, clasped his hands behind ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... influence is demonstrated in hypnotism. The hypnotic subject is told that he is in the water; he accepts the statement as true and makes swimming motions. He is told that a band is marching down the street, playing "The Star Spangled Banner;" he declares he hears the music, arises and stands ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... on one complaining note and Anne, wise also in the troubles of birds, looked low for the reason and found, sitting with tail wickedly twitching at the tip, a brindled cat. Being gentle in her ways and considering that all things have rights, she approached him with crafty steps and a murmured hypnotic, "kitty! kitty!" got her hands on him, and carried him off down the drive, to drop him in the street and suggest, with a warning pat and conciliating stroke, the desirability ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... 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 ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... melody is clear and consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually exist is a question we need not determine. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... startling object comes within its field of vision, but under certain conditions of excitement induced by strong stimuli it remains perfectly quiet, as do many animals which feign death, until forced to move. Whether this is a genuine instinctive reaction, or the result of a sort of hypnotic condition produced by strong stimuli, I am not prepared to say. The fact that the inhibition of movement is most frequently noticed after strong stimulation, would seem to indicate that it is due to the action of stimuli ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... crowds of their special 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 an aptitude very contrary to ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... first 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 ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... have a hypnotic effect on the freckled boy; his big pupils contracted each time Abner came to the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the ten-foot-square plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, a ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... sister as a medium, a clairvoyante. Her brain was not, therefore, under normal control. I determined instantly to tell him on the first opportunity that if he did not wish to see the girl permanently injured, he would have to curtail his hypnotic influence. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... affairs association plays a very 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 undergoing a certain ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... 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 ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... up from the opposite side of the room under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,—"did you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape from our wicked doctor here? What a reputation you ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... exercise a sort of hypnotic power over the fretful, nervous invalid who shared Judge Lawrence's name, and this influence was not wholly lost upon the Judge himself, who never looked upon the Baroness's abundant charms, glowing with health, without giving vent to a profound sigh like some hungry child standing ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... arrives. You take his name and address. Call on him, attended by referees. Maintain a general temperature of not more than sixty-five when you meet him on the campus. Buy him one ten-cent cigar during the fall and introduce him to one girl—age, complexion and hypnotic power to be carefully regulated by the rushing committee. Then you send him a little engraved invitation to amalgamate with you; and when he answers, per the self-addressed envelope inclosed, you are to love him like a brother for ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... straight-looking, expressive eyes, too, and a big, wide, really beautiful mouth, with square white teeth in it, which, when she smiled or yawned—and she yawned more luxuriously than any girl who had ever sat in his classes—exerted a sort of hypnotic effect on him. All that, however, left unexplained the quality she had of making you, whatever she did, irresistibly aware of her. And, conversely, unaware of every one else about her. A bit of campus slang occurred to him as quite literally applicable to her. She had all the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... they left the cafe, the sheik arose and placed himself partly in the girl's way. She paused while his dark eyes caught and held hers. A long moment went before she seemed able to free herself from the hypnotic tension he put upon her. Then he bowed low, and the girl with a ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... can Caranby," said Mallow, smiling; "he loved Miss Loach, but Emilia exercised a kind of hypnotic influence over him. However, she is dead, and I can see no connection between her ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... it is difficult to exculpate the Graevenitz, seeing she herself refused to deny her magic practices, and there is little doubt that she possessed that magnetic or hypnotic power, the use whereof our ancestors called witchcraft. It is curious to speculate how much of this power, in wonderfully subtle and varied forms, exists in every human being of whom we say: 'They have great ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... 740; gentle, mild, mellow; cool, sober, temperate, reasonable, measured; tempered &c v.; calm, unruffled, quiet, tranquil, still; slow, smooth, untroubled; tame; peaceful, peaceable; pacific, halcyon. unexciting, unirritating^; soft, bland, oily, demulcent, lenitive, anodyne; hypnotic &c 683; sedative; antiorgastic^, anaphrodisiac^. mild as mother's milk; milk and water. Adv. moderately &c adj.; gingerly; piano; under easy sail, at half speed; within bounds, within compass; in reason. Phr. est modue in rebus^; pour oil ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... grace in every movement, save when at times she held herself rigid, with fixed blank eyes as though fascinated, or gripped by some invisible power. More than once I had wondered whether she were under hypnotic influence, but that theory had been completely negatived by ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... to answer him. Even supposing that he forced me, by the wicked, and unconscionable exercise of what, I presumed, were the hypnotic powers with which nature had to such a dangerous degree endowed him, to carry the adventure to a certain stage, since he could hardly, at an instant's notice, endow me with the knack of picking locks, should the drawer he alluded to be locked —which might Providence permit!—nothing serious might ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... up in them, as 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
... into the work. He did not dream of the magnitude of his coming trust, but had a sensation that the curtain was about to rise on a new scene. He was, perhaps, more than the rest impressed with the visitor's force and hypnotic power which seemed prophetic and almost mystical. Then his glance, wandering down stream, caught a trace of smoke where the afternoon steamer was disappearing ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... Saturn's rapid 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 colour of gold, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... virtue of mere proximity, and when the woman who bore it was entirely passive. If this girl had been looking at him the matter would have been easy to understand, for an eye-glance is often downright hypnotic; but she was looking at the work in her hands, and, so far as could be judged, she had altogether forgotten his presence; yet the mysterious spell, the potent enchantment, breathed from her like a vapor, and he could not be insensible to it. It was ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... impulse is undoubtedly strengthened. The whole chain of circumstances seem to direct the vision upon the rash act of the friend or relative, until at last the vision becomes fascinating, and the act is imitated. To use a concise expression one may call this the "hypnotic power of circumstances." It is not an absolute cause in itself; but, strictly speaking, may we call any cause absolute? It is not a cause which would influence a man of strong will or of sound morality. ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of the will ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... young lady. We shall cure you beyond a doubt. I think, however, that it will be necessary to employ hypnosis. All cases such as yours respond most readily to hypnotic suggestion. However, I shall observe your case for a while longer, before making a decision. You are going out for a ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... Trumpler was already 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 highly unfavourable light. But I need ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... satisfaction he sank into the nearest chair and read like one under the influence of some hypnotic spell. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... 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 them to. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... religion. And why is it—to come closer to our theme—that the round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of the flying sparks! Why, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... In those hypnotic experiments in which the operator merely makes the subject do some external act, we get no further than the fact that the person's individual will has been temporarily put to sleep, and that of the hypnotist has taken its place; still even this shows a power of impressing upon the subliminal ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... he did. A prophet induced him to turn his face again to the westward. This man, by name Tlapane, was called a "senoga"—one who holds intercourse with the gods. He probably had a touch of insanity, for he was in the habit of retiring no one knew whither, but perhaps into some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by violent action ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... What 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 a bee ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... brother lifted her in arms that remained unshaken and sat on the edge of the bed looking into her eyes with an almost hypnotic forcefulness. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... eyes upon us with hypnotic intensity she said she had felt moved, unaccountably moved, to tell the Auxiliary that we must support a foreign female missionary this coming year. The silence that met this announcement was sad and submissive. We were already paying all the dues we could afford, this meant ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... in his masterful voice was not so much in opposition to the bill as it was an exposure of it. He bared it ruthlessly and thoroughly, but he didn't use his youthful hypnotic periods of persuasive eloquence that had been wont to sway juries and to creep into campaign speeches. His wits had been sharpened in the last few months, and his keen-edged thrusts, hurled rapier-like, brought a wince to even the most hardened of veteran members. It was a complete enlightenment ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... donkey which was led by two pretty choristers in blue. Attached to the end of a long pole, a green umbrella of Gargantuan proportions, adorned with red tassels, protected his wrinkled head from the rays of the sun. One hand clutched some religious object upon which his eyes were glued in a hypnotic trance, the other cruised aimlessly about the horizon, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... as far as that. With him the process did not take more than a minute, but it was startling in its results, and reduced me to an extraordinary state of hypnotic receptibility. When it was over my instructor tapped with a finger on my lips, uttering aloud as he did so ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... 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 ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... to overcome bad habits, how to give a home performance, get on the stage, etc. Helpful to every man and woman, executives, salesmen, doctors, mothers, etc. Simple, easy. Learn at home. Only $1.10, including the "Hypnotic Eye," a new aid for amateurs. Send stamps or M.O. (or pay C.O.D. plus postage). Guaranteed. Educator Press, 19 Park ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... hypnotic, something tremendously wearisome to the mind in those thick lines flowing sluggishly along in streams like molten lead; in the hedges of gun barrels all slanting at the same angle; in the same types of faces repeated and repeated countlessly; in the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... doors of the chalet which her husband thought might be made to produce a lot of money if they were nearer London. One of the panels had a woman yawning over a fire in the early morning, and the hypnotic effect of it kept the family and their guests yawning their heads off, so that Mrs. Stevenson decided the sleepy lady would be ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... outrageous if addressed to a woman. Surely he saw her as a woman, queenly and distressed and very proud. He was physically anguished for her, and the man who loved her was the very brother of his bones. There were some words the effect of which were almost hypnotic on him—The Isle of the Blest, The Little Dark Rose, The Poor Old Woman and Caitlin the Daughter of Holohan. The mere repetition of these phrases lifted him to an ecstasy; they had hidden, magical meanings which pricked deeply to his heartstrings and thrilled ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... 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 did the spirit of the Clairvoyante strive to penetrate the "draughty ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... impressive physique, his confidence-winning voice and bearing constituted a profitable stock in trade. In the slang of his craft—shall we say "graft"?—he "played the church game strong." Under the sway of his hypnotic personality God-fearing, bank-fearing old couples brought forth hidden wealth to place in his dexterous hands; school-teachers wrecked their savings to invest with Granger. And Granger turned the receipts ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... her husband 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 were so badly afflicted with ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... of the space-trader Solar Queen found himself embroiled in a desperate battle of minds between the rational science of the spaceways and the hypnotic witchcraft of the mental wizard ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... 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 together, and that only ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... galleries. There are placers who have all the fine frenzy of a starving poet in a midnight garret, men who would make the fortune of a country hotel if they would but write for it a single testimonial advertisement, men whose flow of persuasive talk is almost hypnotic, whose victims are held just as surely as ever was Wedding Guest—and with this difference, that while that classic personage merely turned up late to the ceremony, these charmed men listen to the siren ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Weismann that biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... something; but most of them were tired, or at tea—or in the pubs—and the corners were deserted. Observe how fate makes time and things fit when she wants to do a good turn—or play a practical joke. Harry Chatswood, for instance, didn't know anything about the hypnotic business. ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... like a febrile pulse within Birnier's brain, dominating him with hypnotic suggestion to action. An urge to scream and to yell, to dance and to leap, plucked at his limbs. Resurgent desires from he knew not what subconscious catacombs, wriggled and struggled furiously within him. The great moon scattered blue stars upon the spears as ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... vibration increasing as the terrible edge almost imperceptibly approaches the prisoner. We find ourselves bound with him, suffering from the slow torture. We would escape into the upper air if we could, but Poe's hypnotic power holds us as helpless as a child while that terrible ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Gertrude 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 ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... superintendent, Mr. Brink, so I wrote to Mr. R. B. 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 ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... God of the Christians," said Koda Bux, very slowly, and approaching him with an almost hypnotic stare in his eyes, "in that book it is written that the chief God of the Christians will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. This woman bore you a daughter; your lawful wife bore you a son. The woman who was once the wife of Maxwell ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern States pull their wires ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... the Fijian called it, was still in progress. Without noise, the six half-nude figures were describing circles upon the smooth floor. The silence and the serpentlike motions had a peculiar hypnotic effect upon us, and in a sort of dreamlike trance we watched them wriggle by the narrow aperture to which we pressed our faces. With each circle more of the brown, sweat-polished bodies showed beneath the twisted mats. The pace was beginning to tell upon them now. Slower and slower ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... well be less natural. That such a convention should have been established shews that the indissolubility of marriage creates such intolerable situations that only by beglamoring the human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural feelings can it be made to keep ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the cable train came to a halt, and the hypnotic sleep of the pilgrimage through Cottage Grove Avenue ended. Sommers started up—alert, anxious, eager to see her once more, the glow of enchantment, of love renewed in his soul. Yet at the very end of his journey he was fearful for the first time. How could they meet, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "rattling good tale," but alas, that little is everything. A story-teller's craft depends not only on a sense of style, that is, form and good writing, but also on the creation of an atmosphere, shall we say hypnotic in effect, and capable of persuading the reader that he is a temporary inhabitant of the world the writer is describing, however remote in time or space that world may be from the world of the reader's own experience. And the more enlightened and culturally emotional the reader, the greater the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... not to look at it 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
... and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... had undoubted hypnotic powers, and through his success in sending people to sleep in his native Siberian village (in the neighbourhood of Tomsk), he earned the reputation of being a "holy man." As they had never heard of either suggestion or hypnotism, the Siberian peasants were all the more impressed by his miracles. ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... nervous state, the story was a grim one, and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase 'hypnotic suggestion'. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, adding a few details ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... theft of the Key that has prompted me to speak, Deacon. Madame has some sort of power—hypnotic power. She employed it on me once, to my cost! Paul Harley, of Chancery Lane, can tell you more about her. The house she's living in temporarily used to belong to a notorious Eurasian, Zani Chada. To make a clean breast of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the wind or a wandering cat. But it makes no difference what starts the door to swinging open; the bald fact of its doing so when by all known laws it should remain firmly shut, is per se potent enough, or hypnotic enough,—or whatever influence it is that it exerts,—to root you at once to the spot until the Unseen declares itself. In truth, an opening door is pregnant with ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers of that day to realise how the imagination of men was ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... charmers who, by the strains of their instrument and the movements of their hands, seem to exercise a certain power over the cobra. They seem to throw the snake into a short faint or stupor, a kind of hypnotic sleep. The charmer takes his place in a courtyard, and the spectators gather round him at a safe distance. He has his cobra in a round, flat basket. The basket he places on the ground and raises the cover. Then he rouses and provokes the snake ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... 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 ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... 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
... sell Mephisto. The artist protested, but she turned on him and gave him a tongue lashing of which I could guess the meaning, although the words were unintelligible to me. I couldn't quite grasp the situation, but the strange hypnotic power which the bear apparently exercised over cats had excited my curiosity, and I wished to investigate it at my leisure, so I politely but positively refused to name a price, and told her the animal was not for sale. The artist seemed relieved and she was very much disappointed, ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 not of the faith who fights against the authority ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... Instructions By COMTE C. DE SAINT-GERMAIN. From the works of the great medical authorities on the subject. Clear, simple style that will interest everybody. How to produce and to stop Hypnotic Sleep. How to cure disease by its use. Cloth, special cover design ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... stepped back a pace or two for the purpose of seeing the effect of his work as a whole. As Danby fell, the back of his head had struck a lump of soil or a tuft of grass which threw the chin forward on the breast. As Strong looked at his victim his heart jumped, and a sort of hypnotic fear took possession of him and paralysed action at its source. Danby was not yet dead. His right eye was open, and it glared at Strong with a malice and hatred that mesmerised the murderer and held him there, although he felt ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... does not preach the lost art of loafing. No! Nothing so direct as preaching. She merely loafs,—consistently, restfully, delightfully, but with an almost fatal hypnotic persuasiveness. She is a sort of stationary Pied Piper, luring the unwary reader to her sun-flecked porch, to watch with her the queer procession of created things go by,—from lovers and ghosts to ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... an eternity. We were suspended in a sphere. Lights or stars rushed at us or receded or whirled about. Time and distance became mere words without meaning and I had fallen into a state resembling hypnotic sleep when suddenly roused by Jack. 'There are the lines,' he shouted, and as far as the eye could see, to left and right, out of the darkness beneath us were the constant flashes of the never silent guns of the Flanders front. Every now and then we got a sudden 'bump' as a shell ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... by hypnotic suggestion and magic power what Mr. Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr. Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them carrying pencil and paper, and ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... and during the interruptions the patient explained his mutism, refusal to swallow, his filthiness and general negativism as all occasioned by delusions. He was commanded by God to act thus, the attendants were devils, and so on. He spoke, too, of being under hypnotic influence. In addition there were other delusions such as that he had killed his brother. The attack came on with the belief that he was going to die, otherwise none of the ideas were typical of the stupors we have studied. Another ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... sometimes called cohoba. This powder, says Mr. Safford, is a narcotic snuff "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations of hidden things. In treating ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... comparison. Just so: the Germans are heated too, and they no longer see clearly. And we must never forget that they have had long training in obedience to government. There are not wanting English politicians who would like to see similar training introduced here. It leads however to the hypnotic response of which Colonel Maude has written interestingly in his "War and the World's Life." The Government in Germany called for the defence of the Fatherland, the Government declared the invasion of Belgium ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... 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 ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates had substituted a few weeks of trances, and during the trances expert coaches had simply to repeat all the points necessary for adequate answering, adding a suggestion of the post hypnotic recollection of these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... and he will find still other movements and developments which set quite in the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... whom the images of celestial peace, grown rigid on the sacred walls, called in vain. All before her was silence and void. She was following paths unknown to her, swiftly, securely, as one in an hypnotic trance. She passed through dark and narrow places, through light and broad places, never hesitating, never looking to right or left, all her senses sharpened and concentrated in her hearing, following little sounds of distant whisperings, the faint complaining of one door, the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Those whose lives are spent in their creation and interpretation know that song and legend have a particular affinity for water. Hogg, the friend of Shelley, was wont to tell how the bright eyes of his comrade would dilate at the sight of even a puddle by the roadside. Has water a hypnotic attraction for certain minds? Be that as it may, there has crystallized round the great waterways of the world a traditionary lore which preserves the thought and feeling of the past, and retains many a circumstance of ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... over, 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 ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... absent thank you for the small boy, in an older and much larger and wider brother's cast-off shirt, suspenders and trousers. At the corner of the avenue she remembered and turned her horse. There stood the boy gazing after her with a hypnotic intensity that made her smile. She rode back fumbling in her pockets. "I beg your pardon," said she to the boy. Then she called up to ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... for a brief while, and then succumbed to that mysterious hypnotic influence which, in some cases, is equally potent with persons. He became humble, meek, and, if the term can be ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... undecided in her own mind whether she was a conspirator or a prophetess. She had heard of Lady Harman before, she had been longing impatiently to talk to her all through the lunch. "You are just what we want," said Agatha. "What who want?" asked Lady Harman, struggling against the hypnotic influence of her interlocutor. "We," said Miss Agatha, "the Cause. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Deeps of Space Jerry Foster Hurtles to the Moon—Only to be Trapped by a Barbaric Race and Offered as a Living Sacrifice to Oong, their Loathsome, Hypnotic God. (A Complete Novel.) ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... the window sash rattle, then a strong perfume—something like opium or hasheesh—was forced into the room, then the fellow on the outside began to work his hypnotic spell." ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... induced by mental concentration alone. Artificial methods dangerous, and not advised by best authorities. Abnormal conditions not desirable. The "one pointed" mind. The Clairvoyant "day dream" or "brown study." False "psychic development." Use of hypnotic drugs strongly condemned. Scientific psychological methods stated and taught. The laws of attention and concentration of the mind. How Clairvoyance develops by this method. The true ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... 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 cures are recorded." ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... remained as light as it had been outside the woods in the open. Darkness indeed was impossible in this land; under all circumstances the light seemed the same—neither too bright nor too dim—a comfortable, steady glow, restful, almost hypnotic ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... could not control herself. The murder of Pearce had almost overwhelmed her. She had not the strength to bite her tongue. Suggestion alone would have drawn her then—and Kells's passionate force was hypnotic. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... science and was treated by hypnotic suggestion. I would seat myself in an easy-chair midst seductive surroundings and the great metaphysician would then say: "Put your objective senses in abeyance with complete mental oblivion, and enter a state of profound passivity." This interpreted into plain United States would mean: ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... the expansion of the idea. The Army is held together by both the man and the idea, and we need not turn away from its own history to get examples of this disintegration in both ways. Take the first bond of union, the man of striking, hypnotic personality. Since the very inception of the movement, time after time, men who have gained influence in the Army, have separated from its ranks and started a movement of their own of more or less formidable dimensions. The instance most applicable here is that of the division which took place a ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... I took Dr Covernton—by appointment—to see Dr Carl Hansen, who was then giving hypnotic treatment, and also doing some work in demonstrations for the Society for Psychical Research. Dr Hansen tried in vain to put either Dr Theodore Covernton or myself under the influence, so was obliged to have recourse to his wife. Naturally this was considered a "most suspicious circumstance" by ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... 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
... 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 tendency ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have it from no less an authority than Professor Sznuysko that the Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public, writing between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. Smith's devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held by some critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to his undying honor that his Employers ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... school-boy prank? Goldsmith's writings prove him well instructed and widely read, and show his mind as curiously stored and equipped as its whole genius was charming and gracious. If he could not talk, but could only write, then the pen in his hand is taken as an instrument capable of exerting hypnotic force, and converting by magic a fool into ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... sense, and if he be shy of that desirable faculty he should be extremely careful when listening or talking, even under the weak spell of a gilt radiator. It is a fact of science that certain rays of light exert a hypnotic influence that may be employed to effect anesthesia for minor operations. Perhaps it was the influence of these rays; I know not. Nervous persons are especially subject to their vibrations, and when ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... before the door, according to order, or rather, according to hypnotic suggestion; for it seems that it is the chauffeur who alone knows anything of the way, and who, while appearing to be non-committal, is virtually planning the tour. "Valescure might be a good stopping-place for lunch," he ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... 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 alone, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the Czarina and the Monk Rasputin. The latter was a serf in Siberia, and now has a malignant, hypnotic influence in the Russian Court. If he is refused anything, he falls on the floor in a fit and froths at the mouth until he gets what he wants. The Court ladies have to lick his dirty fingers clean, for he refuses to use a finger-bowl at table. Take this for ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... 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 to the ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
