"Passively" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suppose that the discontent of the minority is the result of their unfortunate individual idiosyncrasies, and not of adverse influences in established conditions. But the history of the world shows that the vast majority, in every generation, passively accept the conditions into which they are born, while those who demanded larger liberties are ever a small, ostracized minority, whose claims are ridiculed and ignored. From our standpoint we would honor any Chinese woman who claimed the right to her feet and powers of locomotion; ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn's instep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chin with the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... gleam of lamplight from the chink of the dining-room door, he stood on the threshold of the drawing-room door and could hear with varying distinctness what those friendly voices were so absorbedly discussing. His ear seemed as exquisite as some contrivance of science, registering passively the least sound, the faintest syllable, and like it, in no sense meddling with the thought that speech conveyed. He simply stood listening, fixed and motionless, like some uncouth statue in the leafy hollow ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... The opening paragraphs, while less applicable, in their immediate purport, to the present moment, are nevertheless not inappropriate as an explanation of the general tenor of the work itself; and they suggest, moreover, another line of reflection upon the influence, imperceptibly exerted, and passively accepted in men's minds, by the quiet passing of even a ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... she had joined it to Northwick's instinct for getting; she lived and died in the hope, if not the belief, that she had contributed to his prosperity by looking strictly after all manner of valueless odds and ends. But he had been passively happy with her; since her death, he had allowed her to return much into his thoughts, from which her troublesome solicitudes and her entire uselessness in important matters had obliged him to push her while she ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... into the broader sea just beyond me. I wondered which was best—life or death,—then far down in my soul I seemed to grow strong, and could calmly say, "as God wills;" and for a long time I seemed to be passively awaiting His will. It was very strange, the thoughts I had, lying there so far within the border land; as if the faculties of mind and soul had nearly slipped the fleshly leash, and independently of their environment, boldly held counsel, and speculated on the possibilities ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... Manisty's expense. Eleanor Burgoyne first laughed at his sallies, then gently turned her head in a pause of the general advance and searched the crowd pressing at their heels. Lucy's eyes followed hers, and there far behind, carried forward passively in a brown study, losing ground slightly whenever it was possible, was Manisty. The fine significant face was turned a little upward; the eyes were full of thoughts; he was at once the slave of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... week's time Rosalie had taken absolute control of everything and everyone in the chateau. Jeanne was quite resigned and obeyed passively. Weak and dragging her feet as she walked, as little mother had formerly done, she went out walking leaning on Rosalie's arm, the latter lecturing her and consoling her with abrupt and tender words as they walked slowly along, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... morning at daybreak, Wilton and his two sons were mounted, and ready to set out, intending to take Nero with them; but nothing could induce him to leave his mistress: he resisted passively for some time, until one of the young men attempted to pass a rope round his neck, to drag him away: then his forbearance vanished, and he sprang upon his tormentor, threw him down, and would have strangled ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... and sinew whose suppleness gives ease to the body, and so moulds and manipulates them that we lose the rigidity of our mechanism, and become plastic in his hands. He turns us upon our face, repeats the same process upon the back, and leaves us a little longer to lie there passively, glistening ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... He went with me passively enough, and he did not speak until we had struck into the main trail of the Shawnees. Then ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... the misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horror in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison rather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realise them with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of man falls into hard and desolate sterility. In youth, perhaps, it is the latter aspect of Mr. Carlyle's teaching which first touches people, because youth is the time of indefinite aspiration; and it is easier, besides, to surrender ourselves passively to these vague emotional impressions, than to apply actively and contentedly to the duty that lies nearest, and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the teacher is ever insisting. It ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... which papa would highly disapprove? Would he be very much vexed with her?" Elsie asked herself half-tremblingly, as she sat passively under her old mammy's hands; for her father's displeasure was the one thing ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... sacrifice the advantages of belonging to the German confederation. British policy is not averse from Austria joining Germany, but no active steps have been taken to facilitate such an amalgamation. The treaty of Versailles practically inhibits it, and Britain remains passively loyal to that inhibition. The time may come when the French rivalry may enkindle our people to action, but it will be because the questions at issue are not brought forward into the light of ordinary publicity and discussed openly and frankly. Secret diplomacy among allies means ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... greatly dejected with the loss of his mother, and also at having lost his father but a few months before, at Barbadoes. He begged of the surgeon to speak to me to take him out of the ship; for he said the cruel fellows had murdered his mother: and indeed so they had, that is to say, passively; for they might have spared a small sustenance to the poor helpless widow, though it had been but just enough to keep her alive; but hunger knows no friend, no relation, no justice, no right, and therefore is remorseless, and ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... so Ernest felt his own function in the household a perfectly useless one; and he was always on the eve of a declaration that he couldn't any longer put up with this, that, or the other 'gross immorality' in which Lynmouth was actively or passively encouraged by his father and mother. Still, there were two things which indefinitely postponed the smouldering outbreak. In the first place, Ernest wrote to, and heard from, Edie every day; and he believed he ought for Edie's ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... settle it. But if the critic, while buttering his daily bread or putting cream into his daily coffee, had acquainted himself with the habits of the useful animal to which he is indebted, he would never have been guilty of so prodigious a blunder. So far from passively "waiting to be wooed," the cow, when the sexual impulse is awakened, will disturb the whole neighborhood by her bellowings. Should the critic reply that this is because she is kept in an unnatural state of restraint, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... some crystals and not in others You never by any chance get a quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at all which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own will or fault, it never seems to have been passively crushed But, for the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,—here is a stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once It is known as "biecciated agate," beautiful, as you see, and highly valued as a pebble yet, so far as I can read or hear no one ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... you're saying means to me?" he cried. "Don't you know how I love you?" He advanced toward her. She stood and waited passively, looking at him. "Dorothy—my love—do you ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... by assassins is not bound to let himself be tortured and butchered without using his weapons, because nobody has ever been able precisely to define the amount of danger which justifies homicide. Nor is a society bound to endure passively all that tyranny can inflict, because nobody has ever been able precisely to define the amount of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... transforms the personality, and is therefore capable of taking its stand as a true and real pedagogy. Whereas the ancient pedagogy in all its various interpretations started from the conception of a "receptive personality"—one, that is to say, which was to receive instructions and to be passively formed, this scientific departure starts from the conception of an active personality—reflex and associative—developing itself by a series of reactions induced by systematic stimuli which have been determined by experiment. This new ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... her sister in the Tribuna. The former sleeping, and protected only by her sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking goddess—or shall we not rather say woman?—who in Titian's canvas passively waits in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens. It is again Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even Giorgione—to say nothing of Titian—is when he renders the beauty of woman or ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... probable—was not conscious of it—for his gaze became fixed with a religious earnestness, which no look of mine could possibly divert or unfix. He solicited my wife to play on the guitar, but she declined, until requested by Mrs. Porterfield, when she took up the instrument passively, and sung to it one of those ordinary negro-songs which are now so shockingly popular. I was surprised at this, for I well knew that she heartily detested the taste and spirit in which such things were conceived. Under the tuition of my demon, I immediately assumed this to be another proof ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... resist, he went every afternoon to the house where she lived. He went there as passively as if in a dream. He could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay—whether on the ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry. It must have been the last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... I waited, passively, with a sense of growing content. I had no longer that feeling of unutterable loneliness; but felt, rather, that I was less alone, than I had been for kalpas of years. This feeling of contentment, increased, so that ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... little better, has no check for fools, and instead of the respectful silences of England there seems—to the ordinary English mind—an extraordinary quantity of crude and unsound judgments in America. One gets an impression that the sort of mind that is passively stupid in England is often actively silly in America, and, as a consequence, American newspapers, American discussions, American social affairs are pervaded by a din that in England we do not hear and do not want to hear. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in peace, and I gazed at her almost passively as a great objective fact. I looked at her;—at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, "This is a religion;" and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... had lived in imagination so vividly through that day that when the day really arrived it found her physically and mentally unresponsive; the endless reiteration of names sounded meaninglessly in her ears, the crowding faces blurred. She was passively satisfied to be there, and content with the touch of hands and the pleasant-voiced formalities of people pressing toward her ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... as possible, lest another "Voyage to China," which it was reported a gentleman of high reputation was now composing, should come out, and preclude mine for ever. I cannot account for my folly: the power of habit is imperceptible to those who submit passively to its tyranny. From day to day I continued procrastinating and sighing, till at last the fatal news came that Sir George Staunton's History of the Embassy to China, in two volumes ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... He was perfectly exemplary in his conduct, perhaps not so much from inherent strength of principle as from possessing that peculiarity of temperament, cold and phlegmatic, which feels not the power of temptation. He submitted passively to the arrangements for his marriage, never manifesting the slightest emotion of pleasure or repugnance in view of his approaching alliance with one of the most beautiful and fascinating princesses of Europe. Louis was entirely insensible to all ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... (Lebensphilosophie), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which originates equally in the Character (Gemueth), and equally speaks thereto, can attain its significance till the Character itself is known and seen; 'till the Author's View of the World (Weltansicht), and how he actively and passively came by such view, are clear: in short till a Biography of him has been philosophico-poetically written, and philosophico-poetically read.' 'Nay,' adds he, 'were the speculative scientific Truth even known, you still, in this ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... consciousness, in this way, plays a permanent role in the spiritual life of the individual. Now and then an impression passively received in the train of an accidental chain of ideas makes its way into the sphere of the personal consciousness as a mental image, whose novelty astounds us. In specific cases this image or illusion takes the form of a peculiar voice, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... relieved him from his wet garments, and placed him in his earliest bed. When Glastonbury bade him good night, Ferdinand faintly pressed his hand, but did not speak; and it was remarkable, that while he passively submitted to their undressing him, and seemed incapable of affording them the slightest aid, yet he thrust forth his hand to guard a lock of dark hair that was placed next to ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... his quiet conscience, Bonaparte was not willing to meet his fate passively and silently, and, perchance, it seemed to him that it was "not enough to be innocent," so as to be saved from the guillotine. He therefore addressed a protest to both representatives of the people who had ordered ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... astonished sheep. They may not have comprehended that they were being charged, or they may have despised the assailants on account of their inferiority in numbers, or they may have relied on the fire as a defensive wall; whatever the reason, they stood passively waiting. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... breath, and moved closer. "I wish you'd let us get help," he said, wistfully. It all seemed so horribly brutal, their sitting around him like that, waiting passively for ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... voice of Zicci as Glyndon, pale, wan, and silent, returned passively the joyous greeting of Merton,—"Signor Inglese, I told your friend we should meet to-night; you see you have ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it all worth it?... He argued the point with himself, almost passively, stroking his brown beard meditatively; but the fact that he could argue it at all showed that the foundations of his philosophy ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... themselves one whit lower before a Prince than before anyone else from whom they hope to worm a copper. The Swiss are freemen, and wear the fact unconsciously but palpably on their brows and beaming from their eyes. The Germans submit passively to arbitrary power which they see not how successfully to resist, but they render to rank or dignity no more homage than is necessary—their souls are still free, and their manners evince a simplicity and frankness which might shame or at least instruct ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... secure. And it was not till his pale and trembling fellow-prisoner had been conducted off on her horse some rods, that they could make him seem to comprehend that he was a prisoner, and must go with them. He then burst out into a piteous fit of weeping, and, passively receiving the kicks and cuffs of his keepers to get him in motion, went bawling along, like a whipped schoolboy, towards ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... a form of reaction means, then, that the sensation is not something done to the person, nor passively received by him from outside, but something that he himself does when aroused to this particular form of activity. What comes from outside and is received by the individual is the stimulus, and the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... gallant efforts to check herself. But her spirit was temporarily quite broken. She stood passively with the tears running down her face while Avery hastily dressed her again and set her rumpled hair to rights. Then again for a few seconds they ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Almagro, if he had remained firm on the post which gave him such advantage. But from a false point of honor, he thought it derogatory to a brave knight passively to await the assault, and, ordering his own men to charge, the hostile squadrons, rapidly advancing against each other, met midway on the plain. The shock was terrible. Horse and rider reeled under the force of it. The spears ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... nearing her desired haven), and muttering the accustomed words intended to destroy hope, and prepare anticipation, he went, in compliance with Mary's look, to ask the usual questions of Mrs. Wilson, who sat passively ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... over this thought stumbled another: he had never known her! As he reflected, his eyes roamed to a large calendar on the wall over Phil's head. This was the 12th of April, his wedding-day. The date interested him only passively; it had long ago ceased ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad, not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt its own energies. I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused. I call that ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... no resistance, passively assented to all they wished. When she was once more in the saddle, her spirits rose ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... time lose with it the possibility of an active determination, because thought needs a body, and form can only be realised through matter. He must therefore contain already in himself the active determination that he may be at once both actively and passively determined, that is to say, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... face. But, after panting a few times, the woman recovered her vivacity and began to ply him vigorously with exclamations and questions, beaming the while with delighted interest. He answered her like a schoolboy, too destitute of presence of mind to do otherwise than to yield passively to her impulse. But he made no inquiries whatever of her, and did not distantly allude to the reason of his presence in Germany. As he stood there looking at her, the real facts about that matter struck him as so absurd and incredible that he could not believe ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... to notice their answers. Only those who knew him best saw a gleam kindling in his eyes that told of a terrible vengeance drawing near. The captive waited passively, seeming neither to see ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... people so circumstanced always do. He jumped up, and, throwing his arm round the neck of the spinster aunt, imprinted upon her lips numerous kisses, which after a due show of struggling and resistance, she received so passively, that there is no telling how many more Mr. Tupman might have bestowed, if the lady had not given a very unaffected start, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... mind fixed on the idea of Energy, and away from ordinary sexual thoughts or imaginings. If these thoughts come into the mind do not be discouraged, but regard them as manifestations of a force which you intend using for the purposes of strengthening the body and mind. Lie passively or sit erect, and fix your mind on the idea of drawing the reproductive energy upward to the Solar Plexus, where it will be transmuted and stored away as a reserve force of vital energy. Then breathe rhythmically, forming the mental image of ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... I stood perfectly astounded and bewildered—shame for my ridiculous costume would have made me fly at any other time—but there I remained to be laughed at patiently, while that villain O'Flaherty leading me passively forward, introduced me to his friends—"Mrs. Bingham, Mr. Lorrequer; Mr. Lorrequer, Miss Bingham. Don't be prepossessed against him, ladies, for when not in love, and properly dressed, he is a marvellously well-looking young ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the cause of freedom and justice for all men, black or white. These rumors and discussions drifted into the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire as neighbors dropped in. Martin Conwell was not a man to watch passively the trend of events. He took sides openly, vigorously, and though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell's views later took shape in action that had a marked ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... Lingam was the union of both, as were the boat and mast and the point within a circle: all of which expressed the same philosophical idea as to the Union of the two great Causes of Nature, which concur, one actively and the other passively, in the generation of all beings: which were symbolized by what we now term Gemini, the Twins, at that remote period when the Sun was in that Sign at the Vernal Equinox, and when they were Male and Female; and of which the Phallus ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... He felt it would be useless to endeavour to explain or to expostulate; he spoke not, but was passively hurried to a carriage in which he was borne to the metropolis as fast as four horses could carry him, without rest or refreshment. Of course, after a minute examination, he was declared innocent, and was released; but justice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... relatives; for he is not one who would dream of adding to his greatness by using the wealth or position of a woman. He has all he needs, or wants, of that sort. And then, Dal reminds me, Leopold is very partial to England, who helped Rhaetia passively, in the time of her trouble eight years ago. The fact that you have lived in England and had an English education, would be favorably regarded both by Leopold and his Chancellor. And though I've ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... their mutual engagements, and to preclude, by all means, the possibility of retraction, he advised that several days should be devoted to preliminary prayer and fasting, during which season each should, with an absolute surrender of himself to the will of God, await passively the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... scenery were so glorious that it was possible to think of nothing all day, but just allow oneself passively to drink in sensations of exquisite pleasure. I wish all the hard-worked people at home, who lead joyless lives in sunless alleys, could just have one such day, and enjoy it as I did, that they might know how fair God's earth is, and how far fairer His Paradise must be, if even ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... morsel should be lying hidden within—the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. And this duality there—the fitfulness ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... say, gentlemen," Jode continued—though none of us would have said anything like that—"but unjustly discredited; and, furthermore, its testimony is well corroborated, as you will find you must admit." Jode's voice was almost threatening, and he fetched one corroborator after another. I looked passively at wet and dry bulbs, at self-recording, dotted registers; I caught the fleeting sound of words like "meniscus" and "terrestrial minimum thermometer," and I nodded punctually when Jode went through some calculation. At last I heard something ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... emotions of the moment were revealed. She implored her mother to permit her to go at once and minister to him, to learn the truth about his condition, to hear, first hand, of the catastrophe that had happened. Nor did she passively yield to her ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... disintegrated by criticism. And of organization for the really common interest—that of security against aggression—there has, in fact, been none. If there is one thing certain it is that in Europe last July the people did not want war; they tolerated it, passively dragged by the momentum of old forces which they could not even formulate. The really general desire has never been organized; any means of giving effect to a common will—such as is given it in society within the frontiers—has never ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... made to detain Paul. There could be no case against him. He went out of the hotel, and looked up and down Broadway in a state of indecision. He did not mean to sit down passively and submit to the swindle. But he had no idea in what direction to ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and divided. And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom there is hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the sentimentalist, in short, as we should ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Hessians. If such a troop of soldiers knew beforehand that the Electoral Prince was coming that way, they would certainly lie in wait for him and fall upon him, either for purposes of plunder or in order to carry him off and extort a high ransom for him. The Electoral Prince will not passively submit to capture, but will resist; a battle will ensue, and then it might easily happen that in the heat of conflict a dagger should pierce the Prince or a ball go through his head. Those Swedes and ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... of this Continent have passively submitted to the Indignity of a Tribute; and the Landholders, tho' Sharers in the Indignity, have been perhaps too unconcern'd Spectators of the humiliating Scene. Posterity, who will no doubt revenge their Fathers Wrongs, may also be ashamed, when in the Page of History they are informed of ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it. ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... criticism, and insisted that if this or that expression was not in common vogue, that was no reason why it should not be used, as it was perfectly grammatical, and, moreover, in keeping with the spirit of the language. And he, listening passively in admiring silence to her argument, thanked her even for the momentary pain because it was followed by so great a happiness. For it was so sweet to be defended by Edith, to feel that he and she were standing together side by side against ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... servant appeared, glanced at his basket, and reluctantly admitted him, as if he were some necessary domestic animal. Ah Fe silently mounted the stairs, and, entering the open door of the front-chamber, put down the basket, and stood passively on ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world's materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... have thought it a mortal sin to make a single gesture, or give a single glance, or say a single word which would reveal to others her real opinion of the imbecile Baudoyer. She even professed to obey passively all his wishes. But her ears were receptive of many things; she thought them over, weighed and compared them in the solitude of her mind, and judged so soberly of men and events that at the time when our history begins she was the hidden oracle of the two functionaries, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to submit passively to all these regulations, however injurious to majesty: he sent writs to all the sheriffs, ordering them to constrain every one to swear obedience to the twenty-five barons [o]: he dismissed all his foreign forces: he pretended that his government ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the former spelling). Phantasy or fantasy, so understood, presents numerous and varied images, often combining them into new forms with exceeding vividness, yet without any true constructive power, but with the mind adrift, blindly and passively following the laws of association, and with reason and will in torpor; the mental images being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Thomas made no attempt to get through the hours, but passively allowed the hours to get through HIM. Where other men in his situation would have read books and improved their minds, Thomas slept and rested his body. Where other men would have pondered anxiously over their future prospects, ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... a contemptuous approval. Jacobus gave up the subject passively. After a time he unglued his thick lips to ask me if I had seen his brother yet. I was ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... when the investigation was actually begun and occupied the most prominent place in the public interest at Roma, there were almost as many against the new mayor as there were actively or passively for her. Because, too, there was the large contingent of citizens who cannot make up their minds in a hurry, but must wait for popular opinion to crystallize before ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... were no steps leading to this, and, indeed, a variety of obstacles before it. And the way Grandma effected an entrance was to put a chair on a mound of earth, and a cricket on top of the chair, and thus, having climbed up to Fanny's reposeful back, she slipped passively down, feet foremost, to the whiffle-tree; from thence she easily gained the plane of the ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a little too seriously and practically. She saw him in a different light when she got him home to Boston; but he had kept on saying the charming things, and he had not done much else. In fact, he had fulfilled the promise of his youth. It was a good trait in him that he was not actively but only passively extravagant. He was not adventurous with his money; his tastes were as simple as an Italian's; he had no expensive habits. In the process of time he had grown to lead a more and more secluded life. It was hard to get him out anywhere, even to dinner. His patience ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Magda submitted passively to her ministrations. She was thinking of Michael Quarrington, the man who had come into her life by such strange chance and who had so deliberately gone out of it again. By the very manner of his going he had succeeded in impressing himself ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... without uttering a word, passively and silently placed herself on her brother's chair—he having, at the same time, taken that on ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... on the bed had swallowed it all passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood looking out where the trees along ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Elfride passively assented, and they went from the lawn by a side wicket, and ascended into the open expanse of moonlight which streamed around the lonely edifice on the summit of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... at last is come; Yet not ingloriously or passively I die, but first will do some valiant deed, Of which mankind shall ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... the ape-things for a moment. They stood passively watching the retreat of the three until they had reached the thicket. Then the creatures again began slowly closing in upon them. Blake snatched up a dead branch from the ground near the thicket, and was delighted to find that its weight ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... fact, from a health point of view, it should receive more consideration than all the rest of the house put together, for during our waking hours; we are moving about and constantly changing our location; but during sleep, when life is in abeyance to a certain extent, the system has passively to receive and be supported by whatever pure air the bedroom happens to possess. If, as too often is the case, that chamber is looked upon as a sort of cupboard, where, amongst other things, there is ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... her hand, and drew from her finger the wedding-ring which last night Shon McGann had placed there. She submitted passively. Then, with an upward wave of his fingers, he spoke in a mocking lightness, but without any of the malice which had first appeared in his tones, words from an old ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... would seem that active scandal can be found in the perfect. For passion is the effect of action. Now some are scandalized passively by the words or deeds of the perfect, according to Matt. 15:12: "Dost thou know that the Pharisees, when they heard this word, were scandalized?" Therefore active scandal can ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... found to be superfluous speculation, for the good people of Quang-shi prove, at least, passively friendly; a handful of tsin divided among the youngsters, and a general spendthrift scatterment of ten cents' worth of the same base currency among the stall-keepers for chow-chow heightens their friendly interest in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... think we see is supplied by association or unconscious inference, how much is mental interpretation, and how doubtful is the residuum which can be regarded as crude datum. From these facts it is argued by the psychologists that the notion of a datum passively received by the mind is a delusion, and it is argued by the physiologists that even if a pure datum of sense could be obtained by the analysis of experience, still this datum could not belong, as common sense supposes, to ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Sabeth, They shall be Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... with swift strides the stealthy plotter stalks I must be quick too with my counterplot. To wait his onset passively, for him Is sure success, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... carried away. The little Tirzah, in her home attire, stupefied with fear, went passively with her keepers. Judah gave each of them a last look, and covered his face with his hands, as if to possess himself of the scene fadelessly. He may have shed tears, though no ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... to hold him in thraldom now. It was irksome for him to go where she was, to passively receive her caresses as well as attempt to stay her burning tears, and to be obliged to assure her over and over again, with every breath, that he would be sure to be ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... very passively listening to an impassioned setting forth of the gospel, his hands wandering about restlessly, picking up little bits of the coverlet in that strange way so ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... all; it was a childish want of political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity, while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a childish people which wants nothing, and can ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... these, the highest results which Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the present, in the first circles of society? And if not, how is it that the country, having gained so much in intelligence and strength, lies more passively in their power than the baser country did under that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... alchymist had heard all patiently, or, at least, passively. He had disdained to vindicate his name otherwise than by his word; he had smiled at the accusations of sorcery, when applied merely to himself; but when the sublime art, which had been the study and passion of his life, was assailed, he could no longer listen in silence. His head gradually rose ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... conduct is characteristic of them. Nervous and apprehensive parents who are distressed when the child refuses to eat or to sleep, and who worry all day long over possible sources of danger to him, are forced to watch their child acquire a reputation for nervousness, which, as always, is passively accepted and consistently acted up to. Differences in type, determined by hereditary factors, no doubt, exist and are often strongly marked. Yet it is not untrue to say that variations in children, dependent upon ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... his troops into the batteries of Callao, the success was announced by the firing of guns and other demonstrations which harrowed up the souls of the Chilian officers. The patriot army thereupon passively occupied their old camp at the Legua, between Callao ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the effect of what he had said upon the girl. She turned deadly pale, and seemed about to sink upon the floor. Spikeman took her hand, which she no longer withdrew, but yielded passively, as if in a state of stupefaction, and pressing it within his own, led her ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Louis lay with his mother's hand in both of his, telling her of the events of the last two months, and often she bent her head down and kissed his broad forehead and flushed cheek; and when she would not let him talk any more, he lay very passively, his eyes filling with grateful tears, and now and then in the overflowing of his heart, raising them to his mother, with "Mamma, thank God for me. Oh, how very grateful I ought ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... seemed passively waiting the event ; and the constituted authorities appeared to be self-suspended from their functions till the droit des plus fort(270) should ascertain who were their masters. Nevertheless, while we ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... to intrude my own personality into this narrative, but as I was passively concerned, I do not see how I can avoid it. Besides, being a public man, I am not wholly averse to publicity; first person, singular, perpendicular, as Thackeray had it, in type looks rather agreeable to the eye. And I rather believe ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... relief to George the Third's Roman Catholic subjects. But it soon became evident that in this as in other instances the resolve of the most headstrong monarch, and the promise of the most yielding Prime Minister, cannot always induce a population to put up passively with a manifest grievance. In Ireland, where six out of every seven of the people belonged to the Church of Rome, and where the demand for Catholic Emancipation had long been championed by the greatest and the most patriotic of Protestant Irishmen, it was utterly impossible ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... But why? How and in what sense qualified? Not only by principle and by honour—that glorious distinction which poor men can appreciate, even when less sternly summoned to its duties; not only by courage as fiery and as passively enduring as the courage of the lower ranks, but by a physical robustness superior to that of any other class taken separately; and, above all, by a scale of accomplishments in education, which strengthen the claim to command, even amongst that part of the soldiery least capable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... "Never mind if you carry everything away. Only keep clear of the other smack." Ferrier found the water warm, and he let himself swing passively. His thoughts were in a hurly-burly. Was this the end of all—youth, love, brave days of manhood? Nay, he would struggle. Had they not prayed before they set out? All must come right—it must. And yet that spray was choking. He could not ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... eager form of the distinguished reform Governor. At Cincinnati he represented the conservative Tilden men, and although upon reaching the platform he faced a man of greater force, he betrayed no docile character, ready to receive passively whatever the Boss might allot. His speech was cleverly framed. He expressed no desire that Tilden Democrats be forgiven for the political sins which their opponents had committed; neither did he mar the good feeling of the occasion. But when, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... taciturn, had betrayed no surprise, and made no comment. In itself this indifference was not particularly significant, for Mr. Royall, in common with most of his fellow-citizens, had a way of accepting events passively, as if he had long since come to the conclusion that no one who lived in North Dormer could hope to modify them. But to Charity, in the reaction from her mood of passionate exaltation, there was ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... she really would be obliged to confess that the little trifle of eighteen hundred dollars a year more than we could possibly pay rendered the place undesirable. But a moment later I realized how little I knew her. When we got to the kitchen she remarked, passively, there was no morning sun in the windows. As the apartment faced east, and there was morning sun in the parlor, this condition seemed more or less normal, as the janitor meekly pointed out. But the Little Woman declared she would never live in ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... were driven from their cabins, forced into a little shallop, and committed helpless to the water and the ice. But there was one stout man, John King, the carpenter, who stepped into the boat, abjuring his companions, and chose rather to die than even passively be partaker in so foul a crime. John King, we who live ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... with this man passively—to an appointment which, but an hour ago, she had promised herself she would not keep. Her inmost soul was stirred, just as before. Then it had been few words, now it was a little common song. But the strange power of ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... elated by her trifling notice of me than I can quite account for. It was a distinction. She was so indescribably handsome—so passively disdainful. I think if she had listened to me with even the faintest intimation of caring whether I spoke in this tone or not, with even a flash of momentary resentment, I might have rushed into a most reprehensible ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... radiance, which reflected in our anxious faces, made us look like an expedition from the FLYING DUTCHMAN. A short spell of gradually quieting struggle succeeded as the great beast succumbed, until all was still again, except the strange, low surge made by the waves as they broke over the bank of flesh passively obstructing their ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... poor darlings," said she, as she found them sitting in the dark; she felt their cold hands, and made them all come into the nursery, where Mary was already, and, fondling them, one by one, as they passively obeyed her, she set them down on their little old stools round the fire, took away the high fender, and gave them each a cup of tea. Harry and Mary ate enough to satisfy her, from a weary craving feeling, and for want of employment; Norman sat with his elbow on his knee, and a very aching head resting ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of day was utterly gone, and in the place of it the mysterious glow of night over a city hung high and luminous. He, a town-bred cat, descended from generations of town-bred cats, listened passively to the gentle roar of traffic that stood, to him, for the running of brooks and the sighing of forest trees. It was to him the auditory background of adventure, romance, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... undaunted front to the foe, and urged his followers by encouragement and commands, to stand firm, and defend themselves to the last extremity. A few only emulated his example; the rest, seized with an unaccountable panic, sought refuge in flight, or surrendered passively to the victors. ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... he had been prepared; but this horror of the medicine in the bottle went beyond him, and he seemed to himself to be parting the last strands that united him to God. The boat carried him on to reprobation, to damnation; and he suffered himself to be carried passively consenting, silently bidding farewell to his better self and his hopes. Huish sat by his side in towering spirits that were not wholly genuine. Perhaps as brave a man as ever lived, brave as a weasel, he must still reassure himself with the tones of his own voice; he must play his part to ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of Archangel state, as much as possible. These people of the northern state were indeed jealous of their rights of local government. And the work of the Red agents in levying on the property and the man-power of the North was passively resisted by these intelligent ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... accrue to myself from it, I shall never regret doing as I have done—never, if I starve or beg in consequence. What is a little poverty or suffering, to the disgrace of the basest and most inhuman cowardice! I tell you, if I had stood by, tamely and passively, I should have hated myself, and merited the contempt of every man in existence. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the poor boy; but he yielded passively when Jean passed his arm through his, and led him away towards the Chateau. Supported thus by the old man's arm, he crossed the courtyard, and ascended the staircase; but at his father's door he withdrew his hand, and struggled to ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... certainly issue from the divine authority. The obedience due to that power is by divine command; and subjects are bound, both as men and as Christians, to obey the magistrate actively in all things where their duty to God intercedes not, and however passively, that is, either by leaving their countrey, or if they cannot do that (the magistrate, or the reason of their own occasions hindring them), then by suffering patiently at home, without giving the least publick disturbance. But the dispute concerning ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... club, only tea and twaddle! Or am I wrong? There is more in these men and women than appears. They stand for the West, for the energy of the world, for all, in this vast Nature, that is determinate and purposive, not passively repetitionary. And if they do not know it, if they never hear the strain that transposes them and their work into a tragic dream, if tennis is tennis to them, and a valse a valse, and an Indian a native, none the less they are what a poet would see them to be, an oasis in the desert, a liner on ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... he must have, if he holds his grief fast tied to his heartstrings. But as grief must be fed with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that ravening passion. To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all the mental machinery ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shielded by the apology that he has only conformed to the bad age on which he was so unfortunate as to fall. Prejudice may, indeed, put in such a plea in his defence; but the inevitable eye of common sense, distinguishing between necessity and choice, between coarseness and corruption, between a man's passively yielding to and actively inviting and encouraging the currents of false taste and immorality which he must encounter, will find that plea nugatory, and bring in against the author ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the ribs expands, the dome of the diaphragm, naturally, and as if voluntarily, descends and, at first, the walls of the abdomen extend or are pushed outward. The clavicle is slightly, one might say passively, raised and, finally, the lower part of the anterior abdominal wall is slightly drawn in, thus forming a support or foundation for the lungs and at the same time putting the abdominal muscles in position for participation in the work ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... of these experiments are very interesting, and form a valuable contribution to this subject. In this class of experiments, the sender concentrates fixedly upon the thought—word for word—and wills that the recipient write down the word so transmitted; the receiver sit passively at the time agreed upon, and allows his arm and hand to be moved by means of the psychic currents beating upon him, and which are then unconsciously transformed into muscular action—the process being similar to that of ordinary writing, except that instead of the activity of the brain of the writer ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... standard of normal health), in whom the sexual instinct has never been aroused, and who not only do not masturbate, but do not show any desire for normal gratification; while in a large proportion of other cases the impulse is gratified passively in ways I have already referred to. The auto-erotic phenomena which take place in this way, spontaneously, by yielding to revery, with little or no active interference, certainly occur much more frequently in women than in men. On the other hand, contrary to what one ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... discontented people a goodly lesson. The man has been ground in the mill for a year; his modest life has left him no time for enjoyment, and his ideas of all pleasure are crude. Watch him as he remains passively in an ecstasy of rest. The cries of children, the confused jargon of the crowd, fall but faintly on his nerves; he likes the sensation of being in company; he has a dim notion of the beauty of the vast sky with its shining snowy-bosomed clouds, and he lets the light breeze blow ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... that the vessel had. The slant or "list" grew more pronounced, for the cargo had shifted; and the steamer was now like a boxer whose left hand is tied behind his back. She seemed to take the blows passively, only lungeing doggedly up when the wild welter had flowed over her, and still keeping her nose to the sea. All night long the captain hung on the bridge. It was his second night, and in that time he had only ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... bent her brows portentously, and Mrs. Orton Beg was sure that she heard no note of the mellow chime which sounded once while she was so engaged, and seemed to her aunt to plead with her solemnly to cast her care on the great Power watching, and continue passively in the old worn grooves, as Mrs. Orton ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... who were not in some way connected with the army. Nearly every branch of business is at a standstill. The shelves in stores are almost everywhere empty; the shop of the artisan is abandoned and in ruins. The people who are to be seen passively submit to all that emanates from Richmond without a murmur; they are for the most part simple minded, and ignorant of all that is transpiring in the great theatre about them. An intelligent-looking man in Columbia laughed heartily when told that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have refused to share in the profits of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... proposition, with that completeness in which he accepts it as a fact, not speaking itself unavoidably results. The motor ideas with which the speech movement has to start are cut off and the subject yields passively to the fate that he cannot intonate his voice. Thus a special influence on the will is in no way involved. If the idea is accepted, and that means, if the preparatory setting for the action has been completed, the ideas of opposite activity must remain ineffective; the suggested idea must discharge ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... foolish thing, a spiteful thing; pique that, and, prodigious! the watch went! He had a rooted pique against his marchioness. Apparently he had conceived this pique from the very first. He showed it passively by supreme neglect; he showed it actively by removing her from all the spheres of power which naturally fall to the wife when the husband shuns the details of business. Evidently he had a dread lest any one should say, "Lady Montfort influences my lord." Accordingly, not only ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fully made up his mind to go through with it. Just as the pirates gained the foot of the rocks, which hid us for a moment from their view, we bent over the sea and plunged down together, head foremost. Peterkin behaved like a hero. He floated passively between us like a log of wood, and we passed the tunnel and rose into the cave in a shorter space of time than I ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... time by seeing a ragged tramp, who a few seconds before was stretched at his feet in a drunken slumber, now erect, perfectly sober, and having the drop on him, Moriarity became more bewildered, and passively ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... Moreover, the word "pleasures" commonly connotes the minor goods of life in contrast with the great joys, such as the accomplishment of some worthy task or the service of those we love. Again, it commonly connotes things passively enjoyed, rather than the active joys of life, which are practically more important. So that to condemn "pleasure" as an end arouses our instinctive sympathy. A "pleasure" is any bit of immediate good, however involved with ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... banishment (a presidio) for the malefactors of the mother country. Agriculture did not emerge from primitive simplicity. The inhabitants led a pastoral life, cultivating food barely sufficient for their support, because there was no stimulus to exertion. They looked passively upon the riches centered in their soil, and rocked themselves to sleep in their hammocks. The commerce carried on scarcely deserved that name. The few wants of the people were supplied by a contraband trade with St. Thomas and Santa Cruz. In the island's finances a system of fraud and ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... nothing sees—no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate! And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, Still picturing that look askance With forced unconscious sympathy Full before her father's view— As far as such a look could be In eyes so ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... concerned, he was helpless as an infant There was, however, one point in Leicester's favour; and it was this. Walford still knew him, and appeared to recognise, in spite of the mists which obscured his intellect, the fact that George was keenly interested in him; and he was always passively obedient to any injunction which the latter laid ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... the entire band for an opening, but could find none. The enemy had apparently retired into a tightly closed shell of energy. The small vessel no longer struggled, nor even moved, but was merely resisting passively. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... conspicuous part we have played among its believers, the honesty and the fearlessness with which we have defended the subject, will weigh anything in our favor, we desire that our opinions may be received, and those who are moving passively down the rushing rapids to destruction should pause, ere it be too late, and save themselves from the blasting influence which those ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... part from them forever, and in the mean time why should he not try to please and be pleased? There might, to be sure, have been many reasons why he should not do this; but however the balance stood he now yielded himself passively to his fate. He was polite to Mrs. Ellison, he was attentive to Kitty, and as far as he could he entered into the fantastic spirit of her talk with the colonel. He was not a dull man; he had quite an apt wit of his own, and a neat way of saying ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Between times, however, in politics, where there are no great moral or practical differences between parties, the purpose of speeches is almost wholly persuasive. Success one way or another is a question of getting out the voters who more or less passively and as a matter of habit hold to the party. Party speakers, accordingly, use every device to wake up their voters, and to make them believe that there is a real crisis at hand. Every attempt is made to attach moral issues to the party platforms, and to show ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... fearful, that was constantly proceeding in a quiet and religious parsonage—the bare possibility that sufferings so durable in their effects should be sweeping with their eternal storms a heart so capacious and so passively unresisting—are calculated to startle and to oppress us with the sense of a fate long prepared, vested in the very seeds of constitution and character; temperament and the effects of early experience combining to thwart all ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... there was some truth in the statement and at any rate it gave him something to think about. He stood passively but as if momentarily expecting Birnier, magic or no, to melt before his eyes. Bending over the fence Birnier saw the slender form of Bakuma crouched against ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... pleasure, his affections may interrupt his ambitions. What is his renunciation to be? It obviously will not be an abnegation of everything. He will not feel himself bound to crush all enjoyment, to refuse to love and be loved, to enter tamely and passively into life. He will inevitably choose what is dearest to his heart, whatever that may be, and he will no doubt instinctively eliminate from his life the joys which are most clouded by dissatisfaction. If he sets affection aside for the sake of ambition, and then finds that the thought of ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It might make less frequent the recurrence of wage demands, originating in particular industries because of high profits in these industries, and spreading over a large part of the field of industry. For, as has been emphasized, organized groups of wage earners will not accept passively a change for the worse in their position in the economic scale. Finally, there is a safeguard in the fact that no wage increase need occur in any industry except upon the demand of the wage earners in that industry. Joint ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... one, for instance, has given more forcible or decisive expression than Mr. Spencer has done to the duty of not passively accepting the current theology. See his First Principles, pt. i. ch. vi, Sec. 34; paragraph beginning,—'Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... room a sudden revelation startled me. Everyone knows what it is to have details come under the eye which the mind first interprets long after the eye ceases to rest upon them. The impressions are received passively; but they are registered, and can be calmly read whenever the mind is in activity. It was so now. I suddenly, as if now for the first time, saw that the addresses on Bourgonef's letters were written in a fluent, masterly hand, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Therefore it is advisable that the two offices be not merged in one person; and that the said protector be authorized to prosecute, even to the deprivation of encomiendas or other penalties, pecuniary or personal; that he have a voice and vote in the cabildo, both actively and passively; that he take precedence of the regidors and alguazil-mayor, and sit with the advocates and not with the prosecutors; that he be not an encomendero, and that the alcaiceria [i.e., silk-market], and the care of the Chinese residing in Manila, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... painful remedy that could be adopted by a heart fascinated with his accomplishments, and soothed by his professions of inviolable attachment. She was aware that, in the eye of the world, the reputation of the wife is supposed unsullied, while the husband, enduring passively his dishonour, gives to her the sanction of his protection. The circles of fashion afforded more than one instance of this obliging acquiescence in matrimonial turpitude. Could Mrs. Robinson have reconciled it to her own feelings to remain under the roof of her husband, ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... word "love" signifies something more Godlike than "dilection," was because love denotes a passion, especially in so far as it is in the sensitive appetite; whereas dilection presupposes the judgment of reason. But it is possible for man to tend to God by love, being as it were passively drawn by Him, more than he can possibly be drawn thereto by his reason, which pertains to the nature of dilection, as stated above. And consequently love is more Godlike than ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... down his broom passively, and saying, "What an impatient little miss you are!" clappered off to the dining-room, and brought forth the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... on, however, sitting passively in the saddle while Rabbit headed straight for the spring. The bit of white curtain at the one small, square window facing that way troubled Starr, though it could not turn him ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... altogether assured, so long as there was within the limits of Egypt a large subject population, suffering oppression and bitterly discontented with its lot. But this population was quite unwarlike, and had hitherto passively submitted itself to the will of its rulers, without giving any indication that it might become actively hostile. Menephthah, who was perhaps not more than five and twenty, may have been justified in looking forward to a long, quiet, and uneventful ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... her in his arms, crushing her to him in his strength, in one ineffable brief moment finding her lips, inhaling the faint perfume of her smooth akin. Her lithe figure lay passively against him, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a man of mark, had been that of one of the poorest and meanest, even among the Christians. Any lawless act, any breach of constituted order was odious and intolerable to the Roman; he would not have been the man he was if he had looked on passively at an attack by the mob, in times of peace, on the life and property of a quiet and estimable citizen. This licentious man of pleasure, devoted to every enervating enjoyment, in battle, or whenever the need arose, was as prudent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tricing up and securing of the boarding netting our preparations for the defence of the schooner were completed to the best of our ability; and now all that remained was for us to sit down and passively await events, which, in the present case, meant an attack by the savages at any moment after darkness had fallen sufficiently to conceal their movements. But, that we might be as fully prepared as possible, I gave instructions for the advancement of the supper hour, so that we might ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... intelligence amounts to prudence and common sense. At a distance we may appear self- luminous; in reality we are only passivity and reflected light. Solferino gave us Lombardy, Sadowa gave us Venice, Sedan gave us Rome. We were just active enough to take advantage of fortunate circumstances, and passively clever enough not to wreck our advantage by stupidity. In foreign novels we are scoundrels of the deepest dye, concocters of poisons and wholesale swindlers. In reality we are indifferent and indolent. Dolce far niente, these words, which, to our shame, are repeated in every ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... The ecstasy lasted five hours, at the end of which she found herself still kneeling exactly in the spot of the church where it had commenced. She describes herself during that time as absolutely lost in those unfathomable splendours; capable only of passively receiving the impression of the purely intellectual vision unfolded to her with indescribable clearness and singleness of view. Writing of this great favour towards the end of life, she says that it was then as vividly ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... sister, a helpless cripple, we found out that the mathematical machine was a man, with a soft, beating heart. He was called upon to lift me from the carriage, and he did it as tenderly as a woman. He took me up as a mother lifts her child from the cradle, and I reposed passively in his strong arms, with a feeling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. So it went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled. She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, a young girl I had known ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy |
