"Supernatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria. She with a supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw itself in despairing force against the cabin. He could see the lithe undulations of her form as she alternately yielded to its power, and again ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... friend, right you are; and your revenge will be terrible. Her supernatural and high-bred nonchalance will be lost forever should she see her portrait;" and with mutual chaffing, spiced with good- natured satire, as good-naturedly received, the little party in a ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... ban sith, "woman of the fairies"), a supernatural being in Irish and general Celtic folklore, whose mournful screaming, or "keening," at night is held to foretell the death of some member of the household visited. In Ireland legends of the banshee belong more particularly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Genius can find ways and means for persuading Faith to any belief. These simple children of nature have implicit faith in the supernatural. As for genius—well, some persons possess it, while others do not, and modesty forbids my making invidious comparisons. Seeing by their incredulous smiles that the several members of my crew were ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... sixth century before Christ, an Aryan tribe named Sakya dwelt in Kapilavastu, 120 miles north of Benares. The king of the country had a son, Siddharta, gifted with supernatural powers both of body and mind. When the prince had reached his eighteenth year he was allowed to choose his bride, and his choice fell on the beautiful Yasodara; but in order to obtain her hand he had to vanquish in ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... if she were disgraced, stained with shame. Yet it was through no fault of her own, and overwhelmed by the terrible conviction that mysterious, supernatural powers, against which resistance was hopeless, were playing a cruel game with her, she had felt as if the stormy sea were tossing her in a rudderless boat on its ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so many observers to witness it. The star was doubtless Venus, which, in certain circumstances, is often bright enough to be seen when the sun is above the horizon. The populace of London, however, who were not in those days very profound astronomers, regarded the shining of the star as a supernatural occurrence altogether, and as portending the future greatness and glory of the prince whose natal day ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... many philosophers think themselves obliged by reason to have recourse, on all occasions, to the same principle, which the vulgar never appeal to but in cases that appear miraculous and supernatural. They acknowledge mind and intelligence to be, not only the ultimate and original cause of all things, but the immediate and sole cause of every event which appears in nature. They pretend that those objects which are commonly denominated causes, are in reality nothing but occasions; and ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... creature's throat came forth the strangely-solemn whisper, "touching that little account." For this once, indignation got the better of affright. "Go where I will," I exclaimed, passionately interrupting him, "I find I cannot avoid you, you have a supernatural gift of omnipresence, but be you fiend or mortal I will now grapple with you;" and accordingly snatching at that obnoxious feature which, like the tail of the rattle-snake, had twice warned me of its master's fatal presence, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... first lesson in suppressing my natural feelings. As the years went by I had more lessons in it than in anything else. And I reckon it is not such a bad thing to do, for if one's natural feelings are suppressed long enough one develops supernatural feelings and feels surer of having ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... all men, but the history of one of those exceptional beings selected by God to perform the highest missions and to teach great lessons. The student, upon leaving the subject, feels the same reverence experienced upon leaving a sacred place, where the spirit has been under the influence of the supernatural. Bolivar's ambition was the legitimate desire for glory, but he never wanted that power which consists in the oppression of fellowmen ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... separate. They were no sooner returned to their respective camps, than the face of the heavens grew calm and serene. The same incident happened frequently afterwards; insomuch that Hannibal, believing that there was something supernatural in the event, said, according to Livy, that sometimes(788) his own will, and sometimes fortune, would not suffer ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... to-day in the older churches. Its period of criticism, controversy, and agitation is being reproduced in many another religious body of the present time. The debates about miracles, the theory of the supernatural, the authenticity of Scripture, the nature of Christ, and other problems that are now agitating most of the progressive Protestant denominations, are almost precisely those that exercised Unitarians years ago. The only final solution of these problems, that will give peace and harmony, is that ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the young blood of her school-children by telling them at the end of the year how many inches of cambric frilling they had hemmed, and how many times they had missed afternoon service. To them she appeared a supernatural creature—a kind of prophetess, sent upon earth for their correction ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the story depends upon occurrences in some measure within the bounds of probability, and in which the heroes and heroines are neither invested with superhuman qualities, nor extricated from their difficulties by supernatural means, must be ascribed to a more European state of society than that which produced those tales of wonder, which are commonly considered as characteristic of the climes of the East. Even the authors enumerated by the learned bishop of Avranches himself, in the passage above quoted, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... had moved out of sight. Julia was abstracted, following them with her eyes. With almost supernatural keenness she seemed to catch their voices ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... this is journeyman's work for the journeyman, for Borrow it was of great value because it familiarised him with the marvellous and the supernatural and so helped him towards the expression of his own material and spiritual adventures. The wild and often other- worldly air of much of his work is doubtless due to his wild and other- worldly mind, but owes a considerable if uncertain ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... are the two plays! and how immeasurably superior the later one! It may seem, on a superficial view, that in John Gabriel Borkman Ibsen has returned to prose and the common earth after his excursion into poetry and the possibly supernatural, if I may so call it, in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. But this is a very superficial view indeed. We have only to compare the whole invention of John Gabriel Borkman with the invention of Pillars of Society, to realise the difference between ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... and sweetness, filled the old hall and overflowed it, throbbing in scarcely weakened vibrations through court-yard and castle. The melody was a prayer—the cry of a tortured heart for pardon and repose; and she sang it with almost supernatural expression. Every sound in the castle was hushed: the serfs outside knelt and ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... ark moved at the commandment of the leader Joshua, for he was the mouthpiece of the divine will in the matter. And so when the ark moved at the bidding of the leader, and became the guide of the people, there was a kind of a drop down from the pure supernatural of the guiding pillar. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... another door. Again silence when this was thrown open. But, stepping outside, as he afterward told the story, Mompesson became aware of "a strange and hollow sound in the air." Forthwith the suspicion entered his mind that the noises he had heard might be of supernatural origin. To him, true son of the seventeenth century, a suspicion of this sort was tantamount to certainty, and an unreasoning alarm filled his soul; an alarm that grew into deadly fear when, safe in the bed he had hurriedly sought, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... a morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... them a great globe of fire, of unknown dimensions, at an unknown distance. The Moon was a mass of softer light; the stars and planets lucent bodies, armed with unknown and supernatural influences. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... all her feminine being, loving and jealous; had grown attached to him with body, feeling, thoughts. The prince was funny and entertaining to her, and the expansive Soloviev interestingly amusing; toward the crushing authoritativeness of Simanovsky she felt a supernatural terror; but Lichonin was for her at the same time a sovereign, and a divinity; and, which is the most horrible of all, her property ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... waters so sacred arose from a notion, that they were gifted with supernatural powers. Jamblichus takes notice of many ways, by which the gift of divination was to be obtained. [621]Some, says he, procure a prophetic spirit by drinking the sacred water, as is the practice of Apollo's priest at Colophon. Some ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... could not want occasions for promoting his aim; when, after having soothed her sense of hearing, even to a degree of ravishment, so as to extort from her an exclamation, importing, that he was surely something supernatural! he never failed to whisper some insidious compliment or tale of love, exquisitely suited to the emotions of her soul. Thus was her heart insensibly subdued; though more than half his work was still undone; for, at all times, she disclosed such purity of sentiment, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... was greatly interested in the performances of the spiritualists, trance mediums, and other persons pretending to supernatural powers. How far he believed in this occult science can now only be conjectured, but he was not a man to be easily played upon. He thought at least that there was more in it than was dreamed of by philosophers. When the Longfellow party was ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... continued, and the excitement on shore grew intense, for no one thought it possible that he could reach the land alive. But, after a terrible fight which would have exhausted anyone not endowed with supernatural powers, his bravery was rewarded, and with one tremendous leap he landed safely on the shore, well beyond the deadly clutch of ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Barnaby's sight coming back to him again in the darkness, he beheld that dark and motionless figure still standing exactly where it had stood before, and so knew either that he had missed it or else that it was of so supernatural a sort that a leaden bullet might do it no harm. Though if it was indeed an apparition that Barnaby beheld in that moment, there is this to say, that he saw it as plain as ever he saw a living man in ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency, "supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... windows strange lights were glittering, that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired. Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the celestial mountains in the visions of the saints. Perhaps the long chain of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... natural law is broken. On earth one man can learn a handicraft better in a few days than another in a month, while some can solve with ease a mathematical problem that others could never grasp. So it is here. Perhaps I was in a favourable frame of mind on dying, for the so-called supernatural always interested me on earth, or I had a natural aptitude for these things; for soon after death I was able to affect the senses of the friends I had left." "Are we to understand, then," asked Cortlandt, "that the reason more of our departed do ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... glad to turn attention from herself, "usually folks talk a lot of nonsense when they attribute supernatural things to certain places. But for once they're right, mother Hephzy; I shall never disbelieve in ghosts again. Oh, the horror of it—it was awful," and the girl gave a shudder of ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... seemed to pass over the crowd in a breathless whisper, soundless, supernatural, like the flight of a ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry will ever ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... papal decision that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute of that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate functions, the promise of her Founder authorized her ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... familiar voice rose above the whisperings of the jungle. A voice familiar, yet unreal; supernatural; a calm, commanding one that did not sound but echoed ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... had the Daimon {Greek Letters}, a family which separated, like the Jinn and the Genius, into two categories, the good (Agatho-daemons) and the bad (Kako-daemons). We know nothing concerning the status of the Jinn amongst the pre-Moslemitic or pagan Arabs: the Moslems made him a supernatural anthropoid being, created of subtile fire (Koran chapts. xv. 27; lv. 14), not of earth like man, propagating his kind, ruled by mighty kings, the last being Jan bin Jan, missionarised by Prophets and subject to death and Judgment. From the same root are "Junun" madness (i.e., possession ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... groan, and for a moment was silent. During the brief period, I heard, with awful distinctness, the sound of the pickaxe, as it was struck against the rocks upon the island, worked, I had no doubt, by supernatural hands. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... of my design to combat the belief which I know you to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking as a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you to be wrong. Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go further, and to admit that you possess ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... humbly; for like all savages he was very superstitious, and, moreover, a sincere believer in Hokosa's supernatural capacities. "This wizard is too strong for us; he is invulnerable, and as I know well he can read the secret thoughts of men and can suck wisdom from the dead, while to his eyes the darkness ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Bunyan's time the universally received opinion that Satan appeared in the shape of animals to allure poor wretches into sin—Shakespeare, Judge Hale, Cotton Mather, Baxter, with all our eminent men, believed in these supernatural appearances.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dwarfs had received a shock; she was much more inclined to take things prosaically. But it was very difficult to explain matters. I think the dwarf at the first moment was more inclined to take her for something supernatural than she was now to imagine him a brownie or a gnome. For she was a pretty little girl, with a mass of golden fair hair and English blue eyes; and with her hat half fallen off, and her cheeks flushed, she might have sat for a picture of a fairy ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... existence of man may be due to natural causes? In deciding this question, just as in deciding any other question of a purely scientific character, we must be guided in our examination by the Law of Parcimony; we must not assume the agency of supernatural causes if we can discover the agency of natural causes; neither must we merge the supposed mystery directly into the highest mystery, until we are quite sure that it does not admit of being proximately explained by ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... The strongest objection he has to violate his sacred trust arises from the fear that such a revelation would break the heart of an exemplary old Goody Two-Shoes, for whom he has all his life long cherished a youthful love, the thought of which, and not his supernatural vocation, has sustained him, so I understood him to say, throughout his priestly career. All very pretty and "pale young Curatey," and theatrically sentimental, but don't put this man forward as the self-sacrificing hero of a Melodrama. No; the subject is best let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... about it myself," says he. "He'll not, though, so I must make you understand in order that you may give him the facts. I want him to know. Of course, I can't pretend to explain the thing. It was psychic, that's all; supernatural, if you please. Must have been. For there I was, a confirmed duffer, playing that course exactly as Alexander McQuade would have played it had he been in my shoes. And he was, for the time being. At least, I claim that I was being controlled, or whatever you want to call ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... speculators, he was much given to dreaming. Never did anything extraordinary happen at Communipaw but he declared that he had previously dreamt it, being one of those infallible prophets who predict events after they have come to pass. This supernatural gift was as highly valued among the burghers of Pavonia as among the enlightened nations of antiquity. The wise Ulysses was more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements, and seldom undertook ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... It recalls the Homeric poetry. The constant epithets, the military enumerations, the discourses of the heroes before combat, and the idea of God, are simple, childlike, and superstition has no place. The supernatural exists in plenty, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... formed the personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England; but, among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive. No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from the anguish and conflict of these two years, when, with no one to help or ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... verdict of posterity will probably be that The Golden Bough has influenced the attitude of the human mind towards supernatural beliefs and symbolical rituals more profoundly than any other books published in the nineteenth century except those of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... old hag was one of those whose hearts adversity turns to very stone, and obstinately kept her door shut, impelled more probably by general hatred to the human race, than by the superstitious fears which seized her; although she perversely argued that she was startled at the supernatural melody and sweetness of tone, with which the benighted wanderer made her supplication. She admitted, that when she heard the poor petitioner turn from the door, her heart was softened, and she did intend to open with the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... feel the presence of supernatural assistance! circled in the embrace of my elbowchair, my breast labours, like the bloated Sybil on her three-footed stool, and like her, too, labours with Nonsense.—Nonsense, suspicious name! Tutor, friend, and finger-post in the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... ineffaceable characters on men and things from Cadiz to Moscow. It overrides all natural barriers and transcends all ordinary limits. "The French soldier," writes a Prussian officer after Jena,[3353] "are small and puny. One of our Germans could whip any four of them. But, under fire, they become supernatural beings. They are swept along by an indescribable ardor of which there is not a trace among our soldiers.... What can you do with peasants whom nobles lead into battle, but whose danger they share without any interest in their passions or recompenses!"—Coupled ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... news of Ramy; and as she folded this letter and laid it between the leaves of her Bible, Ann Eliza felt that her last hope was gone. Miss Mellins, of course, had long since suggested the mediation of the police, and cited from her favourite literature convincing instances of the supernatural ability of the Pinkerton detective; but Mr. Hawkins, when called in council, dashed this project by remarking that detectives cost something like twenty dollars a day; and a vague fear of the law, some half-formed vision of Evelina in the clutch of a blue-coated ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... the nymph who skipt up and down stairs with the kettle grew sleepy at last; and Mrs. Irons rebelled in her bed, and refused peremptorily to get up again, to furnish the musical topers with rum and lemons, and Puddock, having studied his watch—I'm bound to say with a slight hiccough and supernatural solemnity—for about five minutes, satisfied himself it was nearly one o'clock, and took an affecting, though soldier-like leave of his comrade, who, however, lent him his arm down the stairs, which were ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of man is a strange thing. It may be a godlike instrument, the powers of which are yet but little known. John did not believe in the least in anything supernatural, but he did believe in the immense and unfathomed power of the natural. Alone, and in the early dawn with silence all about him it seemed that he heard Julie calling to him. Her voice traveled like the wireless on the pulsating air. She needed him and she turned to him alone ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... shivering, like an ocean liner, under the impulse of its engines, and the sudden silence, succeeding the ceaseless roar of the downpour, which had never been out of their ears from the start of the voyage, seemed supernatural. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... his apathetic attitude in their presence, but his utter and complete unlikeness to the white frontiersmen of their knowledge and tradition—creatures of fire and sword and malevolent activity—as well as his manifest dissimilarity to themselves, settled their conviction of his supernatural origin. His gentle, submissive voice, his yielding will, his lazy helplessness, the absence of strange weapons and fierce explosives in his possession, his unwonted sobriety—all proved him an exception to his apparent race that was in ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... speaking on a sudden occasion; and if we believe Eratosthenes, Demetrius the Phalerean, and the comic poets, there was a greater spirit and boldness in his unpremeditated orations than in those he had committed to writing. Eratosthenes says that in his extemporaneous harangues he often spoke as from a supernatural impulse; and Demetrius tells us that in an address to the people, like a man inspired, he once uttered ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... surging breast, so that it was carried up and down on its wave. And she looked, as she stood before me, like a faultless feminine incarnation of the essence of a bosom friend, turned into an instrument of supernatural seduction by the infusion of the intoxication of the other sex, and seeming as it were to say: How much dearer is a dear friend, that looks at thee ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... boots." The cook, craning his neck to hear better, was scandalised. "Keep your mouth shut when your elders speak, you impudent young heathen—you." "All right, old Hallelujah, I'm done," answered Charley, soothingly. At some opinion of dirty Knowles, delivered with an air of supernatural cunning, a ripple of laughter ran along, rose like a wave, burst with a startling roar. They stamped with both feet; they turned their shouting faces to the sky; many, spluttering, slapped their thighs; while one or two, bent double, gasped, hugging themselves with both arms like men in pain. The ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the nearness of the supernatural took possession of me, for Elsie's voice was not the voice of fevered fancy; the fast ebbing tide of life seemed to flow back again, her strength visibly increased, as if she must remain till her ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... free-agency; the passive side was beheld by Augustine, and hence he became a one-sided and exclusive advocate of divine grace. If we would possess the truth, and the whole truth, we must view it on all sides, and give a better interpretation of the natural consciousness of the one, as well as the supernatural consciousness of the other, than they themselves were enabled to give. Then shall we not instinctively turn to one-sided views of revelation. Then shall we not always repeat with Pelagius, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," nor always exclaim with Augustine, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... in this Arch too, leading, as we humbly presume, far otherwards than that grand primeval one, the materials are to be fished up from the weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another, and cunningly cemented, while the elements boil beneath: nor is there any supernatural force to do it with; but simply the Diligence and feeble thinking Faculty of an English Editor, endeavoring to evolve printed Creation out of a German printed and written Chaos, wherein, as he shoots ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dramatic instant on the threshold and then disappeared into the corridor which led up into the Temple. When he had gone the startled actress retained a picture of a face, fearless, beatified, mystic to the very edge of the supernatural. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... to give religious significance to their pictures, artists have tried in many ways to suggest the supernatural. They have introduced halos about the heads of Mary and Jesus, and have made the light seem to shine mysteriously from the child's body. Now our painter Millet, representing only an ordinary mother and babe, has not used any such methods. Nevertheless, without going beyond strict reality, ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... band of mountebanks and jugglers, who stretched out her legs in such an extraordinary manner, and raised up her feet to her head, before and behind, with as much suppleness as if she had neither nerves nor joints. There was nothing supernatural in all that; she had exercised herself from extreme youth in these movements, and had contracted the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure longer, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Up creeps ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... to the library. It seems natural that he should move softly, cautiously. A supernatural stillness pervades the lower floor. Frank Lamotte shudders and keeps his eyes turned away from the closed-up drawing room with ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... by God' has occasioned much speculation of the critics. We may simply draw the conclusion that the poet meant to have his readers believe with him that the conception of his hero was supernatural. We saw in the third of the Sacrificial Odes of Shang that there was also a legend assigning a prternatural birth to the father of the House ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... but only when they should reach their country; and that this box contained something that would do them great good, and their people! The foolish people believed really there was something in the box supernatural, that would do them great good. Accordingly, after they reached home they opened the box; but behold there was another tin box inside, smaller. They took it cut and opened the second box, and behold, still there was another box inside of the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... of the fifth act of Hamlet set off by the comedy of the first scene. Sometimes all the natural qualifications of eminence are united in a single work: in old paintings, for example, the Christ Child, spiritually the most significant element of the whole, will be of supernatural size, will occupy the center of the picture, will have the light concentrated upon him, and will be dressed ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... too astonished for speech. We had come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's imaginations coming ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... a dream, which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... Tobias, doubting as Paul; have mercy on me, O master! for in this hour the divine light of belief and knowledge banishes doubt from my sinful heart. I acknowledge thy supernatural power and heavenly wisdom! My whole being bows in humility before you and your sublimity, and henceforth I will only be your humble scholar and servant, the tool of your will. Forgive me, all-knowing one, if my heart doubted. Breathe upon me the breath of knowledge, and lay thy august ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... pollution and devoted to eternal destruction, according to the arbitrary will of the Framer, without any liberty of choice in himself, or any power of expediting his own faith or final justification. They spoke of the saving call as discernibly supernatural, preceded by bodily as well as mental torture, and instantaneously followed by a perceptible assurance that they could never more sin, that the righteousness of their Redeemer was imputed to them, and that, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was observed approaching, seemingly by supernatural means, for no driver could be seen. The barrow was piled to a great height, and staggered drunkenly from side to side of the road; but the load, whatever it was, lay hidden beneath a ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and terror. In the minds of the vulgar, any species of the wonderful is received with avidity; and the servants did not hesitate in believing the southern division of the castle to be inhabited by a supernatural power. Too much agitated to sleep, they agreed to watch for the remainder of the night. For this purpose they arranged themselves in the east gallery, where they had a view of the south tower from which the light had issued. The ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... in spite of ourselves. Never shall I forget the horrid sight which presented itself: stretched in a row on the deck of the vessel lay the fifteen bloody corpses of my shipmates who had been murdered. We stood aghast; the hair rose straight up from our heads, as we viewed the supernatural reappearances. After a pause of about five minutes, during which we never spoke or even moved, one of the corpses cried out in a sepulchral voice, "Come, every man his bird!" and held up its ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... about it, without so infuriating the relations that they will have nothing more to do with us. Naturally their view-point is entirely different from ours, and they cannot appreciate our reasons. At such a time we lean upon the Invisible, and count upon that supernatural help which alone is sufficient for us; we count also upon the prayers of those who know what it is to pray through all opposing forces, till the battle is won by faith which ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... was, on his own showing, practically insufficient to prove the truth of the alleged facts, and, much more, to base upon them the claim of the infallible Church. It is precisely the insufficiency of this view that gives force to the demand for a supernatural authority. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the considerations of supernatural agency which are suggested by the inspired narrative, a candid man will nevertheless feel himself compelled to acknowledge that the course of events which constitutes the history of ancient Palestine has no parallel in any other part of the world. Fixing his eyes on the small district ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said, was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that arose in her—man's inheritance from the wild and howling ages when his hairy, ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... of the universe. Classicism treats man as worthy and great, living his life among cold and neutral forces. This is the very opposite of the sinfulness, imperfection, and nothingness habitually imputed to man, and the hourly presence of a whole hierarchy of busy supernatural agents placed about man by the Middle Ages. Yet we cannot but see that Diderot was feeling for dramatic forms and subjects that would have been as little classic as romantic. He failed in the search. There is one play and only one of his epoch that is not classic, and is not romantic, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... fable includes whatever is supernatural, and especially the machines of the gods. If Homer was not the first who introduced the deities (as Herodotus imagines) into the religion of Greece, he seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry, and such a one as makes its greatest importance ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... age, and old for his years, when the Pope delegated to him the office of preaching the Second Crusade. Pale and attenuated to a degree which seemed almost supernatural, his contemporaries discovered something in the mere glance of his eyes which filled them with wonder and awe. When his words of love, aspiration and sublime self-sacrifice reached their ears, they were no longer masters ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... light or brilliance with your bodily eye, or in imagination, or if ye hear any wonderful supernatural sound with your ears, or if ye perceive a sudden sweet taste in your mouths or feel any warmth in your breasts, like fire, or any form of pleasure in any part of your body, or if ye see a spirit in a bodily form, as if he were an angel to fortify or instruct ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Jinks with supernatural activity, and making a leap, he lit, so to speak, behind Ralph, much after the fashion of a monkey falling on the bough ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... devotion or flattery, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns. His brother Bleda, who reigned over a considerable part of the nation, was compelled to resign his sceptre and his life. Yet even this cruel act was attributed to a supernatural impulse; and the vigor with which Attila wielded the sword of Mars convinced the world that it had been reserved alone for his invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the only remaining evidence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... under full sail is a beautiful, stately, thrilling thing! To these red men there was a perilous joy in the vision. If to us in the ships there hung in this voyage something mystic, hidden, full of possibility, inch by inch to unroll, throbbing all with the future which is the supernatural, be sure these, too, who were found and discovered, moved in a cloud of mystery torn ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... meaning half-revealed and half-concealed by Jasper's babblings under the influence of opium. He saw in his vision, "THAT, I never saw THAT before." We may be sure that he was to see "THAT" in real life. We must remember that, according to Forster, "such was Dickens's interest in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." His interest in such matters certainly peeps out in this novel—there are two specimens of the supernormal—and he may have gone to the limited extent which my hypothesis requires. ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... the sibyl-like grandeur of his head and outstretched arms as he uttered these strange words. His voice was hoarse with some surging emotion; and if so poor a creature could have been the recipient of a supernatural inspiration, he might have sat at that moment for the portrait of one of the deformed soothsayers in a tale ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... vast collection of anecdote, its developments of diablerie, its tidings from the spiritual world, and the many cases which it brings together of the curious and the wonderful in nature and art, which former ages, and ignorance and superstition, have concluded to consider supernatural. Where science and modern speculation furnish the solution to the mystery, Mr. Dendy couples it with the statements, and the book is thus equally ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... further, that the Jews were under strange apprehensions of supernatural powers: and as their own religion was founded on the belief of certain miracles said to be wrought by their lawgiver Moses; so were they ever running after wonders and miracles, and ready to take up with any stories of this kind. Now, as something extraordinary was necessary ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... of all superstitions that is the most imposing which makes the other world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... illumined the pitchy darkness of the night. I walked out into the grounds, where the wind was fiercely howling through the trees. A new flash illumined the hills, and I distinctly saw the naked rock of the Drachenfels, with the broken tower tottering on the half-ruined crag, looked fearful and supernatural. By watching a minute, another flash exposed Rolandseck, looking down upon me with melancholy solicitude. Big drops began to patter on the leaves, and, still bent on sensations, I entered ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... brought them to Ireland, and in the plains of Kildare, not far from the castle of Naas, miraculously set them up.... These stones (according to the British history) Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, procured Merlin by supernatural means to bring ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... midst of her invocation, and to avert the danger that menaced himself. And now he saw the very man draw nigh who had withdrawn the heart of his wife from him, and had made his home miserable; the man on behalf of whom Mehetabel had summoned supernatural aid to ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... ancients, the heroes in philosophy, as well as those in war and patriotism, have a grandeur and force of sentiment, which astonishes our narrow souls, and is rashly rejected as extravagant and supernatural. They, in their turn, I allow, would have had equal reason to consider as romantic and incredible, the degree of humanity, clemency, order, tranquillity, and other social virtues, to which, in the administration of government, we have attained in modern times, had any one been then ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... that all the rest of those present disbelieved in the existence of the condemned Dutchman. The state of the atmosphere, the strange, wild, awful look of the ocean, prepared our minds for the appearance of anything supernatural. The captain told me that I looked ill and tired from having been on deck so many hours, and insisted on my turning in, which I at length ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a movement for religious reform ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... supernatural was strong in this unhappy man, and he turned away as one might have done in the actual presence of an appalling miracle. He covered his eyes and bowed his head. Without looking again into the stream he took his coat and hat, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... seized upon Adam, who, stupefied by astonishment rather than fear, uttered no sound, and attempted no struggle. But it was in vain they sought to tear from him Sibyll's clinging and protecting arms. A supernatural strength, inspired by a kind of superstition that no harm could chance to him while she was by, animated her slight form; and fierce though the soldiers were, they shrunk from actual and brutal violence to one thus young ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the flowers; how some seemed only to flaunt themselves, and others had so much more character. As we passed a little opening in the woods, a great dark purple flower, that was a stranger to me, fixed its gaze upon me so that I felt the look, as we sometimes do from human eyes. Any thing supernatural is so in keeping with these solitary places, I felt as if some one had assumed that form to greet me. There were some beautiful new flowers; among them a snow-white iris, which was very lovely. It seemed like a miracle that this fair little ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I 'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I 've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome supernatural scenery. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron |
