"Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... garlands twain, and to the innermost E'en thus th' external answered. When the footing, And other great festivity, of song, And radiance, light with light accordant, each Jocund and blythe, had at their pleasure still'd (E'en as the eyes by quick volition mov'd, Are shut and rais'd together), from the heart Of one amongst the new lights mov'd a voice, That made me seem like needle to the star, In turning to its whereabout, and thus Began: "The love, that makes me beautiful, Prompts me to tell of th' other guide, for whom Such good of mine ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... every side brought him to the necessity of the moment. Men were pressing close upon him, jostling, abusing him, shaking fists in his face. Another crowd of men, as though fearing the car would escape of its own volition, were clinging to ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... the truth, Lady Lufton had been trying hard to know and love Griselda, but hitherto she had scarcely succeeded to the full extent of her wishes. That she loved Griselda was certain,—with that sort of love which springs from a person's volition and not from the judgement. She had said all along to herself and others that she did love Griselda Grantly. She had admired the young lady's face, liked her manner, approved of her fortune and family, and had selected her for a daughter-in-law in a somewhat impetuous ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... much. There is the danger, in the zeal of preserving the holy ark, of defiling it by unholy contact. The Negro needs more thought in his religion, but religion is not all thought. To have a proper balance in religion as in every-day life, the faculties of thought, feeling, and volition must be present, distributed in fair proportions. When reason is overfed in the exercise of religion, the result is a dry and barren rationalism. When the emotions are overfed the result is a wild and sickly ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... moments he did not move. Then he rose slowly and went across the hearth. It required an almost deathly effort of volition, or of acquiescence. He stood before her and looked down at her. Her face was shining again, her eyes were shining again like terrible laughter. It was to him terrible, how she could be transfigured. He could not look at her, it ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... also and examined the face of the man. Then he took the head in both his hands and raised it. "What are you doing?" screamed Emma, hoarsely, shrinking back at the sight of the head that seemed to be rising of its own volition. ...
— The Dead Are Silent - 1907 • Arthur Schnitzler
... spread—reserving the heavier canvas for the storms—and it opened like the folds of a balloon, even before these gentle impulses; occasionally collapsing, it is true, as the ground-swell swung the yards to and fro, but, on the whole, standing out and receiving the air as if guided more by volition than any mechanical power. The effect on the hull was almost magical; for, notwithstanding the nearly imperceptible force of the propelling power, owing to the lightness and exquisite mould of the craft, it ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which ended in the outbreak of war, one sees the nations at first swaying backward and forward like a throng so vast as to be helpless, but afterward falling slowly into warlike array. And when one begins to search for the man or the men whose volition was governing the crowd, the eye falls upon the towering form of the Emperor Nicholas. He was not single-minded, and therefore his will was unstable, but it had a huge force; and, since he was armed with the whole authority ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode of force—but, then to an artist, the form or mode is the gist ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fact, she is now lying at the foot of my bed thinking matters out, and bids me tell you that after various attempts to escape Home Rule, not being (like her mistress) one of those natures made perfect through suffering, she is only 'kept alive by the force of her own volition,' in this house that is full of old maids and has nothing better in it than one old cat, and he isn't worth hunting, being destitute of a tail. Naturally she is doing her best (like somebody else) to keep herself ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... impressed with the fact that in the present Book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. It is not simply sensuous gratification ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... indeed, at any moment be expelled and ruined. But if he served the Order well, he belonged to a vast incalculably-potent organism, of which he might naturally, after such training as he had received, be proud. The sacrifice of his personal volition and intelligence made him part of an indestructible corporation, which seemed capable of breaking all resistance by its continuity of will and effecting all purposes by its condensed sagacity. Nor was he in the hands of rigid ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... each of them reacted to the command of some controlling volition beyond themselves. The man's arms closed about her slender body and pressed it close to his breast. His lips met her upturned ones, and held them in a long kiss that was returned. Each felt the stir of the other's breath. To each came the fluttering tumult of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... seats and most of the standing-places occupied. But I can no longer recognize any one. Friend and foe are confounded in an undistinguishable mass; or, rather, they are but parts and members of one hideous monster, moving itself by one volition, winking its thousand eyes all at once, and ready to swallow me with a single deglutition. However, the plunge is made. The worst is over. I rallied from the shock, and in a clear, but unnecessarily loud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Seventy years had passed, and the love-story was presently enacting itself, as all past and all future must for ever be enacting to beings for whom time is not. Then, too, where was he who, by some means, whether of his own volition or not, had become so much a part of the pulsing life of a young girl that, when all else of life passed from her with the weight of years, her heart still remained obedient to him? Where was he? Had his life gone out like the flame of a candle when it is blown? Or, if he was anywhere in the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... still. Fifi had been steadily reported "not so well" for a long time and, for two days, very ill. Queed sitting before the table, his gas ablaze and his shade up, tilted back his chair and thought of her now. All at once, with no conscious volition on his part, he found himself saying over the startling little credo that Fifi had suggested for his taking, on the day he ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... be named that more potently challenge our admiration than a full-sized ship under way; her myriad of ropes, sails and appointments, all so complete and well-controlled, the power of her volition, the promptness with which she obeys the slightest movement of the helm, the majestic grace of her inclination to the power of the winds, and the foaming prow and long glistening wake, all go to make up the charm and peculiarity of a nautical ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... existence of personality and will,(569) and uses this idea for the purpose of exploring the outer world; arguing that matter is inert and not self-active, he regards matter in motion as indicating force, and therefore volition; uniformity in its motion as proving a law, and therefore an intelligent will,(570) in which wisdom, power, and goodness combine.(571) This being is God, to whom man is subject. The universe is universal order. The physical evil ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... perplexed man who takes up every argument on one side and then on the other, and weighs them until the two sides hang in equipoise, with no prepondering motive to enable him to decide. He is in stable equilibrium, and so does not move at all of his own volition, but moves very easily at ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... one. Whenever we have to decide any important matter, such as when to get our hair cut and whether to pay a bill or not, and whether to call for the check or let the other fellow do so, we don't attempt to harass our conscious volition with these decisions. We rely on our subconscious and instinctive person, and for better or worse we have to trust to its righteousness and good sense. We just find ourself doing something and we carry on and hope ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... are the most powerful stimulus to exertion, and the best means of attaching the people to the institutions under which they live. It is apparent that this political effect upon the character of society cannot have any action upon slaves. Having no choice or volition, there is nothing for stimulus to act upon; they are in fact no part of society. So that, in the language of political economy, they are, like machinery, merely capital; and the productions of their ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... master's coat, was a girl of some undeterminable age,—perhaps of ten or twelve years. She wore a shapeless stout gingham garment, her shoes were many sizes too large for her, and the laces were dangling. Her nerveless hands and long arms sprawled in her lap as if they had no volition in them. She sat with her head slightly drooping, her knees apart, and her feet aimlessly turned in. Her lower lip hung a little, but only a little, loosely. She looked neither at earth nor at sky, but straight ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... power, even when it is exercised over oneself. When Victoria meekly obeyed the abrupt commands of her henchman to get off her pony or put on her shawl, was she not displaying, and in the highest degree, the force of her volition? People might wonder; she could not help that; this was the manner in which it pleased her to act, and there was an end of it. To have submitted her judgment to a son or a Minister might have seemed wiser or more natural; but if she had done so, she instinctively felt, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at this, for some ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his volition, he spoke aloud. ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... only a particular mode of thinking, like intellect; therefore (by Prop. xxviii.) no volition can exist, nor be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned by some cause other than itself, which cause is conditioned by a third cause, and so on to infinity. But if will be supposed infinite, it must also be conditioned to exist and act by God, not by virtue ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... had numbered their fortunes in the tens of thousands camped on the ruins of their homes, eating as primitive men ate—gnawing; thinking as primitive men thought. Ashes and the dull pain of despair were their portions. They did not have the volition to help themselves, childlike as the men of the stone age, they awaited quiescent what the next ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... an active verb, signifying "to exercise volition," in the past tense of the indicative. Have, a verb, in the infinitive, to understood. Been, a perfect part. of to be, referring to Johnson, Blair, and Lowth. Laughed at, perf. part, of to laugh at, referring to the same as been. Had, active verb, in the past tense of the indicative, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... various confusions which have obscured the true nature of this belief. He insists especially that we can no more discover power in mental than in physical sequences. The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions. The hypothesis of 'power' has been really the source of 'illusion.' The tendency to personify leads us to convert metaphor ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... from comparative strangers; unexpected social privileges were granted him; his way was made easier in a hundred particulars. From every quarter delicately gratifying distinctions came to him. Without his volition he found that he had risen to an entirely different position from that which he had formerly occupied; the mere coupling of his name with Mildred Wayland's had lifted him into a calcium glare. It affected him not at all, he only knew that he was ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Master.—-I had an idea that a poem wrote itself, as it were, very often; that it came by influx, without voluntary effort; indeed, you have spoken of it as an inspiration rather than a result of volition. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Almost without volition he half arose to his feet. The girl followed his action, still clinging to his shoulder. Dan inclined his head to speak to her, when with a shriek the wind came again. There was a dull crash forward, a splintering ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... another and another, while as silently spirits from the Hill of the Phosphori would enter and take their seat and bathe in the almost unbroken surges of music that come from the field outside, from the multitude beneath the almond blossom laden trees. Movement is without volition in the spirit stage; attraction that follows a hidden impulse, that seems indescribable at first, directs them. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... shifted along down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... affairs exists," he went on smoothly, "when its chief magistrate can be abducted and kept hidden, without—or with?—her own volition for a whole week. Only in the extravaganzas of modern romance could we look for similar happenings. Just what is our duty in the premises, gentlemen, is a serious question. The citizens' committee ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive: the investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief,—that belief is an act of volition,—in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature, it is incapable: it is equally incapable ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... remember how you pursued me, and vamped me, and took away my volition, so I was helpless as ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... on this memorable occasion have brought upon the Pope himself an amount of hatred greater than he deserved. Gregory XIII. appears as a pale figure between the two strongest of the modern Popes, without the intense zeal of the one and the ruthless volition of the other. He was not prone to large conceptions or violent resolutions. He had been converted late in life to the spirit of the Tridentine Reformation; and when he showed rigour it was thought to be not in his character, but ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... housekeeping and of his own volition turned over the farm to his daughter and son-in-law. With them he lived to enjoy many years of good health. Never again did he take his daily walk out to the haystack to feel the hay. But he was able to take his sip of brandy to his dying day and ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... suspicious and unexplainable conduct of the prisoner in various respects, furnishes, in connection with other circumstances of this case, the strongest presumptive evidence of her guilt. These circumstances, far beyond the realm of human volition, smelted and shaped in the rolling mills of destiny, form the tramway along which already the car of doom thunders; and when they shall have been fully proved to you, by unassailable testimony, no ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Wallace speaks of "a readiness to accept the most marvellous conclusions or interpretations of physiologists on what seem very insufficient grounds," and he goes on to assert that the frog experiment is either incorrectly recorded or else that it "demonstrates volition, and not reflex action.") If, indeed, any one knows a frog's habits so well as to say that it never rubs off a bit of leaf or other object which may stick to its thigh, in the same manner as it did the acid, your objection would be valid. Some of Flourens' ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it and destroy its volition. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... eye, and stamped on his instep with an iron-shod heel. But he was a dissolute brute, and for all his strength Yerkes' cleaner living very soon told. Presently Will spared a hand to wrench at the ambitious thumb, and Coutlass screamed with agony. Then he began to sway this way and that without volition of his own, yielding his balance, and losing it again and again. In another minute Yerkes had him off his ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... monomania with him. It had become an obsession. He had given his whole mentality to it and it had absorbed all his faculties. He was now the victim of it. He had grown powerless in the grip of the idea; he had lost volition in the matter. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, New ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... ammunition on misses. At each shot a Wieroo dropped; and then the remaining two sought escape by flight, screaming and wailing after the manner of their kind. When a Wieroo runs, his wings spread almost without any volition upon his part, since from time immemorial he has always used them to balance himself and accelerate his running speed so that in the open they appear to skim the surface of the ground when in the act of running. But here in the woods, among the ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hung high and gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out their peacock colors; then came the fog again, driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in masses northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight; then drifted across the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the office into the yellow glare of the sun, her feet moving steadily forward, with no volition of hers, along the dusty road. And as steadily, with as little volition of hers, march, march, came . . . first what Eugenia had said, the advance from that to Mrs. Powers' words, from that to the stenographer's, to the name on the envelope ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... been that her eyes were called to the passer-by just as his had been, without warning or volition. In any event their eyes met full, leisurely in that stirring silence before the consciousness of self, time, place and convention rushes in. ... Though she seemed very poor, there was something about her beyond reach in nobility. He was left with ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... evening, as I had been in the habit of doing since childhood; because prayer seemed inconsistent with my view of God's nature; saying to myself: either God himself, being omnipresent, is the cause of everything—even of every thought and volition of mine—and so in a sense offers prayers to himself through me, or, if my will is independent of God's will, it implies arrogance and a doubt as to the inflexibility as well as the perfection of the divine determination to believe that it can be influenced by human appeals. When ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... songs prepared for him, when Ramponneau, worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the Church has pronounced upon these individuals, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral alpacas, all of us,—something between a sheep and a goat. But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... there was a flash of lightning. It showed her his upturned face, appealing, tender, passion-wrought. A wild, exultant thrill swept through her. Without thinking, without speaking, her tingling arm reached out, of its own volition as it were, and closed about his neck, and she ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... asked himself, that the accident of noble blood should paralyze a man's volition, and that the bearing of a noble name should render his life inertly ignoble? He recognized that, in the seeming curse which condemned man to "work," God had hidden the richest blessing, even as he buried golden veins ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... literature should break loose from its traditional past, and aim at the cultivation of an exclusively national spirit. The other party declared such a course to be folly, contending that literature must be a product of gradual development rather than of set volition, and that, despite the shifting of the political kaleidoscope, the national literature was so firmly rooted in its Danish past that its natural evolution must be an outgrowth from all that had ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... rising into the air like clouds, enlarging into a dusky canopy, and then discharged against the fruitful plain. At length the huge innumerous mass was put into motion, and began its career, darkening the face of day. As became an instrument of divine power, it seemed to have no volition of its own; it was set off, it drifted, with the wind, and thus made northwards, straight for Sicca. Thus they advanced, host after host, for a time wafted on the air, and gradually declining to the earth, while fresh ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... ran backwards for half a dozen paces, and then tumbled, rolling over and over like a shot rabbit. I saw him five minutes later when his body was brought to the dressing-station; he had been shot through the heart. Poor fellow! He ran not of his own conscious volition; he was killed while bravely advancing; he died while retreating. The Welsh Regiment was losing badly all this time, and the ground was becoming dotted with writhing and motionless bodies; it was a ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... or the other; nay, the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous, which is now esteemed the perfection of justice, will seem the most flagrant injustice, since men are determined either way not by their own proper volition, but by the necessity of what must surely be. And therefore neither virtue nor vice is anything, but rather good and ill desert are confounded together without distinction. Moreover, seeing that the whole course of events is deduced from providence, and nothing is left free to ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... of its utility, then agreement between real and ideal division is the one thing needful, the one essential change without which all other changes are vain, the only change that will yield the greatest good to the greatest number,—a change, which, as volition is with the ideal, and inertia with the real, can be attained only by adaptation of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... observed that the routine of daily life, that arbitrary system of trifles, is a great moral support. But my toilet was finished, I had nothing more to do of those things consecrated by usage and which leave you no option. The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by "that sort of thing" cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself. I wasn't capable of it. It was then that I discovered that ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... horse's elbow, and the subtle, numbing poison speeds through the arteries and paralyzes the nerves; a beautiful creature that comes out full of fire and courage is converted in a very few minutes into a dull helpless mass that has no more conscious volition than a machine. The animal remains on its feet, but exertion is impossible, and neither rein, whip, nor spur serves to stimulate the cunning poisoner's victim. About the facts there can now be no dispute: and this last wretched story supplies a copestone to a pile of similar ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of the lost sheep there are certain notable differences, though the lesson in each is in general the same. The sheep had strayed by its own volition; the coin[963] had been dropped, and so was lost as a result of inattention or culpable carelessness on the part of its owner. The woman, discovering her loss institutes a diligent search; she sweeps the house, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... tapped the floor impatiently until, presently, the music stopped and they came to us. Then Ned's parted lips said something, and then—as the music recommenced, I was in his arms and, almost without my own knowledge or volition, was ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... "that we admit the fact that the eye of a certain individual can transfuse, by the force of strong volition, an evil influence into the being or bodily system of another—why should it happen that an eye or touch charged with beneficence, instead of evil, should fail to affect with a sanative contagion those who labor under ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... as a power flowing from the hypnotist, is nothing more than his mental action or control which prevents the subject from exercising his own volition." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the instinct of rhythm that a strong volition is required to repress its physical expression. The universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some shape in many countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who compels king, cook, peasant, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Miss Adair, with the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but—but—" the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the flame ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tended the gates, Werper, grasping Jane Clayton by the arm, walked boldly across the clearing. Those who opened the gates to him permitted their surprise to show clearly in their expressions. That the discredited and hunted lieutenant should be thus returning fearlessly of his own volition, seemed to disarm them quite as effectually as his manner toward Lady Greystoke had ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... touches, moves, and handles her at his pleasure. She makes no resistance. What will this primitive Apollo do next? He will cure the fit, and bring the woman back to consciousness, satisfy her emotions, and restore her volition—not by delicate touches that might be 'agonizing' to her hyperesthetic skin, but by vigorous massage, passive motions, and succussion that would be painless. The emotional process on the part of the woman would end, perhaps, with mingled laughter, tears, and shame; and when accused afterward ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... himself without much volition lifted and helped into the carriage, where Cecil Evelyn scrambled up beside him, and put ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... regarding the filigree basket of gold and gems. Still, he would pursue them, if only for the mere sport of it. If he failed to catch them all he had to do was to sit down and wait for them to return of their own volition. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... night Miss Bergyn knew the whole truth as to what had happened at Dr. Pitts's house. The superintendent nurse had followed Lloyd to her room almost immediately, and would not be denied. She knew very well that Lloyd Searight had never left a dying patient of her own volition. Intuitively she guessed at ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... of his mature years combined with, and no doubt were aided by, an apparent lack of robustness and forcefulness of character and temperament, and thus conspired to keep him from attaining that victorious self-assertion, that sovereign balance between volition and power, without which true greatness in the full sense of the word is impossible. But among the leading names of second rank, his will always occupy a place of distinction. If his was not the work of a Messiah, it was that of a John the Baptist. Having been nurtured in the traditions of the romanticism ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... breaths were too long drawn. He got to his feet and the flapper was unaccountably standing beside him. It was too dark to see her face, but he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was bent. And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge, he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing her with a simple directness that "Napoleon, Man and Lover," could never ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... sits all day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth, watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that seem to have a resilient volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs. Barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the Garden Suburb. And then they went over a Training College for elementary teachers and visited the Post Office and then came back to more unobtrusive contemplation, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Boston, came to our house alone, gratuitously, on her own volition, sat within a few feet of our entire family and two of our neighbors, having no cabinet or any paraphernalia which are always required by those charlatans who have associated the fair name of spiritualism with fraud and chicanery. In about one hour there appeared in our ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... efforts of the professor (professor of divinity, though he was) were totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long, sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man,—the harsh and dissonant voice. and the screech-owl notes to which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly,— all added fresh subject for ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... of this secret relationship, in which the ties of sympathy and understanding grew stronger instead of weaker, came the storm. It burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual. It was nothing more than a fire, a distant one—the great Chicago fire, October 7th, 1871, which burned that city—its vast commercial section—to the ground, and instantly and incidentally produced a financial panic, vicious ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... into the faces of the soldiers now close upon us. It darted at their throats, striking, coiling, and striking again; coiling and uncoiling with incredible rapidity and flying from leverage points of throats, of faces, of breasts like a spring endowed with consciousness, volition and hatred—and those it struck stood rigid as stone with faces masks of inhuman fear and anguish; and ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the name given by students of psychical research to writing performed without the volition of the agent. The writing may also take place without any consciousness of the words written; but some automatists are aware of the word which they are actually writing, and perhaps of two or three words on either side, though there is rarely any clear perception of the meaning of the whole. Automatic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... our own creation or choice, but are brought to bear upon us independently of our own action. There has been, from the creation until now, an unbroken series of causes and effects, and we can trace every human volition to some anterior cause or causes belonging to this inevitable series, so that, in order for the volition to have been other than it was, some member of this series must ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... character: even while I availed myself of the ancient illustration that an inspired writer is like an instrument in the harper's hand[403]. I did not, of course, "intend thereby to affirm that the Writers of Holy Scripture were constrained to write, without any volition or consciousness on their part.... ALMIGHTY GOD, while He inspired the Writers of Scripture, did not impair their moral and intellectual faculties, nor destroy their personal identity[404]." Let me not be told therefore that ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of history whom Fate permitted to live out their lives, three stages. First, the personality of the man develops, powerfully influenced by the restricting environment. It tries to reconcile incompatibilities, while in the depth of his soul ideas and convictions are gradually translated into volition. At last they burst forth in a definite action, and the solitary individual enters upon the contest with the world. Then follows a period of greater activity, more rapid growth, and larger victories. The influence of the one man upon the masses ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... sexual impulse is the most complete expression of the will to live, in other words, it is the concentration of all volition." And in another passage: "The affirmation of the will to live concentrates itself in the act of procreation, which is its most positive expression." Mainlaender gives utterance to the opinion when he says: "The sexual impulse is the centre of gravity for human ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... of the war, there seems to be good evidence, large quantities of all kinds of munitions and war supplies were rushed from Germany to Constantinople by way of Rumania and Bulgaria, but it was not long before the Rumanian Government, either of its own volition or in the face of threats by the allied powers, refused to permit these supplies to pass ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... over the rail, was looking far beyond the man-made town deep into the God-made jungle. A little shiver of anticipation tingled his spine, and then, quite without volition, he found himself gazing into the loving eyes of his mother and the strong face of the father which mirrored, beneath its masculine strength, a love no less than the mother's eyes proclaimed. He felt himself weakening in his resolve. Nearby one of the ship's officers was shouting orders to ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with the familiar curly ringlets skipped past on the opposite side of the street. When she had gone perhaps fifty yards, John walked down the steps and followed not too rapidly. He must catch up quite as if by accident, for it would never do to have the meeting occur seemingly of his own volition. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... to the eyes of the crowd the "Good Mzimu." M'Rua and all the warriors fell on their faces so that their bodies formed a long, living deck. Not one of them dared to move, and fear prevailed in all hearts all the more when the King, either at Stas' order or of his own volition, raised his trunk and began to trumpet strongly; and after his example Saba emitted the deepest bass of which he was capable. Then from all breasts issued, resembling entreating groans, "Aka! Aka! Aka!" and this continued until ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... with death and disorder, and it was necessary that the pieces should be kept cool in order to be in efficient condition to grapple with and suppress this attack. Sometimes a regiment, stung to a frenzy of courage by bullets and the death of comrades, will rise from its trench without the volition of its officers, and go frantically forward against overwhelming odds. A different effect of an almost identical psychological process is patience. Men will sometimes lie as quietly under a rain of bullets, in order to get in one effective shot at an enemy, as cattle in the hot months ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... He appeared a tall, upright form, that was far from being destitute of natural grace and proportions, but which had been so exquisitely drilled into simultaneous movement, that the several members had so far lost the power of volition, as to render it impossible for one to stir, without producing some thing like a correspondent demonstration in all its fellows. This rigid and well-regulated personage, after making a formal military bow to his superior, helped himself to a chair, in which, after some little time lost ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... which I can hold commune. Idle thought! But still the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all its own delights, Its own volition, sometimes with deep faith And sometimes with fantastic playfulness. Ah me! amus'd by no such curious toys Of the self-watching subtilizing mind, How often in my early school-boy days With most believing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... has made too slight an account of the testimony of Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood, and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... instinct, which acts without our volition, took such sudden possession of Hiram, that he raised his eyes from his papers and turned them upon the questioner, as if ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... volition I found myself back at college. I floated into my own room, which was empty. I went to the room of my two warmest friends, whose friendship I was and am yet assured of. As usual, half a dozen of our set were lounging there. A game of whist was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at the end of her third year in America, wrote to the police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of her own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It is easy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down a girl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantly used ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... ownership, and she had consequently felt herself to be debarred from all right over her own words and actions. She had become his slave; she felt herself in very truth to be a poor creature whose only duty it was in the world to obey his volition. She had told herself during the night that, with all her motives for loving him, she was learning to regard him with absolute hatred. And she hated herself because it was so. Oh, what a tedious affair was this ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... breathless and wide-eyed in that strange passive and receptive state peculiar to imaginative natures, they seemed alive. And the SPRITE, too, appeared to be, not a fabric and a mechanism controlled by men, but a sentient creature struggling gallantly on her own volition. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... is something more than this, more than a mere human reaction, I believe. I have not the power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my hand—a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... volition, the girl snatched the telephone, and murmured a number. Thought and senses seemed suspended ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... the special organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their functional ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... w, which now first appears often, as well as in the smacking first heard in the sixty-fifth week (in contented mood). The tongue is, when the child is awake, more than other muscles that in the adult are subject to cerebral volition, almost always in motion even when the child is silent. It is in various ways partly contracted, extended, bent. The lateral bending of the edges of the tongue downward and the turning back of the tip of the tongue (from left to right) so that the lower surface lies upward, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... the forces of his being down to the last shred of vitality. At once the indomitable spirit of the woods-runner answered the call. Regis Brugiere concentrated his will on a pinpoint. Like a sprinter his volition was fixed on a goal, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... evidently wished to draw as broad a distinction as possible between man and the lower animals; and he consequently asserts that with "the lower creatures there is no expression but what may be referred, more or less plainly, to their acts of volition or necessary instincts." He further maintains that their faces "seem chiefly capable of expressing rage and fear."[14] But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... She was with the man who had possessed her thoughts for a month past; he had come back to her. She had not to consider whether she should ever see him again; he was with her now. She had not to think whether he was there for good or evil, she had lost all volition in the will of the man who stood before her; she was the slave of his ring, rejoicing in her slavery, and ready to do his bidding as all the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... these elements in the parties, the union ipso facto ceases. If the Government is the result of a union of States, then these States must be separate, sovereign, and distinct, to be able to form a union, which is entirely an act of their own volition. Such a government as ours had no power to maintain its existence any longer than the contracting parties pleased to cohere, because it was founded on the great principle of voluntary federation, and organized "to establish ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis |
