"Mystically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... puzzled about A Bolt from the East (METHUEN). The publishers, who surely should know, call it "A modern and up-to-date romance, which deals mystically but boldly with the greatest and most pertinent of all questions—'Is Life Worth Living?'" But for my own part the greatest and most pertinent question suggested by Mr. G.F. TURNER'S up-to-date romance was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... had come together from every quarter to keep this Festival, the first four Brothers of our House were invested by that reverend and devout man, John Wale, Prior of the Regulars in the state of Zwolle, for he had been summoned for this very purpose. This number four did mystically signify the number of the four Evangelists, and the names of these Brothers, which are worthy to be cherished by them that come after, are here set down. The first was Brother Egbert of Lingen, who had been chosen for the priesthood by the Brothers on the Mount three ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... there dropped from Heaven a day so tender, so mystically soft, so dreamily beautiful, so throbbing, and alive with the fluttering of invisible wings, so replete and bounteously overflowing with an awakening and joyous resurrection not taught by man or limited by creed, that they thought it fit ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... much of this kind. Dogmas are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning—an instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be consistent. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Michelangelo's crudity in his plastic treatment of the female form the more remarkable is that in his poetry he seems to feel the influence of women mystically. I shall have to discuss this topic in another place. It is enough here to say that, with very few exceptions, we remain in doubt whether he is addressing a woman at all. There are none of those spontaneous utterances by which ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... There was silence, save for the rushing of the rudder through the dark-blue foam. Again Claudius spoke, softly, and it seemed to her that the voice was not his, but rather that it came up mystically from ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... breaketh at his tables and is glad. I came out in the moonlight cleansed and strong, And gazed up at the lyric face to see All sweetness tasted of in earthen cups Ere it be dashed and spilled, all radiance flung Beyond experience, every benison dream, Treasured and mystically crescent there. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... Chapter; it mattered not that newspapers had ignobly misused the name and honour of art for their own advancement—the instant effect was overwhelmingly impressive. All that had been honest and sincere in the heart of England for a thousand years leapt mystically up and made it impossible that the effect should be other than overwhelmingly impressive. It was an effect beyond argument and reason; it was the magic flowering of centuries in a single moment, the silent awful sigh of a nation's ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact] and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience. Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his whole nature and environment, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... woods for a period of six months, cut off from all intercourse with the outside world, and in the meanwhile each receives separate instruction how to prepare his medicine-bag. Forever after, each one is mystically united with the fetich who presides over his life. Even their nearest relatives are not allowed to visit the boys in this retreat; and women are threatened with the severest punishment if they be only found in the neighbourhood ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... us lie? And with the tender gaze of love Climb not the everlasting stars on high? Do I not gaze upon thee, eye to eye? And all the world of sight and sense and sound, Bears it not in upon thy heart and brain, And mystically weave around Thy being influences ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... and not Knype that had suffered. The confusion and hubbub were in a high degree disturbing and puzzling. But one emotion emerged clear: pleasure. I felt it myself. I was aware of joy in that the two sides were now levelled to ten men apiece. I was mystically identified with the Five Towns, absorbed into their life. I could discern on every face the conviction that a divine providence was in this affair, that God could not be mocked. I too had this conviction. I could discern also on every face the fear lest ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone, a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us, seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a cloud of grey and amethyst, beneath the pear tree. They crooned together there, the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... my secret, and shall remain mine; and no fear but the occasion will come when I shall know what use to make of it." He felt that meanwhile it would give him power, security, wealth also if he should ever have occasion for it; and with a curious sentiment of pride he saw himself thus mystically designated as the true heir of Malmaison—the only one of his age and generation who had been permitted to stand on an equality with those historic and legendary ancestors, to whom the secret of this chamber had given the name and fame of wizards. Henceforth ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... the form of certain absurd psychological worries came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result was that I found that things when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of things, that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. The frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... inaccessible ledges that haunted her with their remote fastnesses. How wonderful would it be to get there, rest there, if that were possible! But only eagles could reach them. There were places, then, that the desecrating hands of man could not touch. The dark caves were mystically potent in their vacant staring out at the world beneath them. The crumbling crags, the toppling ledges, the leaning rocks all threatened to come thundering down at the breath of wind. How deep and soft the red color in contrast with the green! ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... people from enemies or monsters; but sometimes a Healer of the Sick, like Asclepius; sometimes, like Dionysus, a priest or hierophant with a thiasos, or band of worshippers; sometimes a King's Son who is sacrificed to save his people, and mystically identified with some sacrificial animal, a lamb, a young bull, a horse or a fawn, whose blood has supernatural power. Sometimes again he is a divine or miraculous Babe, for whose birth the whole ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... consulted a clairvoyant, who murmured mystically "What went by the ponies, will come by the ponies;" and with that ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... was quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense. He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of Dickens ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... correspond in length with the number of days in the year—a relation which, according to Prof. P. Smyth, is fulfilled in this manner, that the four sides contain one hundred times as many pyramid inches as there are days in the year. The pyramid inch, again, is itself mystically connected with astronomical relations, for its length is equal to the five hundred millionth part of the earth's diameter, to a degree of exactness corresponding well with what we might expect Chaldaean astronomers to attain. Prof. Smyth, indeed, believes that it was exactly ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't blind them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiosity for special facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come to a ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... without knowledge, that which is above words and knowledge; this I apprehend to be nothing but the mysterious silence and mystical quiet which destroys consciousness and dissolves forms. Seek, therefore, silently and mystically, that perfect and primitive union with ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... alternately with an effect of exchanging vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally, mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not grieve. It is always thus when one ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... like the memory of a period of charming ignorance. The thought of it wove a strand of melancholy into his present mature realization like the delicate scent of blossoming trees borne to him on the evening air, barely perceptible and then lost in the pungency of the opium. The latter became, mystically, all China, the irresistible fascination that had gradually possessed his imagination, dulling the associations of his heredity and birth, calling him further and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the 17th Century England was peculiarly rich, if not in great mystics, at any rate in mystically minded men. Mysticism, it seems, was in the air; broke out under many disguises and affected many forms ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... between deaconesses and widows was the obligation imposed on the former to accomplish certain outward works, whereas widows vowed to remain till death in a single life, in which, like nuns, they were regarded as mystically espoused to Christ. Unlike nuns, however, vowesses usually supported the burdens entailed by their previous marriage—superintending the affairs of the household and interesting themselves in the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... believed by all Christendom, that this holy thorn put forth its annual blossoms. And with respect to the aspen tree, which Mrs. Hemans very naturally mistook for a Welsh legend, having first heard it in Denbighshire, the popular faith is universal—that it shivers mystically in sympathy with the horror of that mother tree in Palestine which was compelled to furnish materials for the cross. Neither would it in this case be any objection, if a passage were produced from Solinus or Theophrastus, implying that the aspen tree had always shivered—for ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... descended a scale of beings, above whom were set three great lords, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer, collectively the Tri-murti, the Hindu trinity expressed in the mystically ineffable syllable Om. Between the trinity and man came other gods, a whole host, powers of light and powers of darkness, the divine and the demoniac fused in a hierarchy surprising but not everlasting. Eventually the dream shall ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr. Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of age as a damaging indictment ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful figure, associated with a series of sayings and incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and rounded-off and complete effect of personality. After we have cleared off all the definitions of theology, He remains, mystically suffering for humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain and sacrifice in service are the necessary substance of Salvation. Whether he actually existed as a finite individual person in the opening of the Christian era ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... like no one he had ever read. And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it. His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love between Oscar's father and mother. Here was love again, mystically beautiful, so that it brought a new light into the faces of those it touched. And Keith's heart grew lonely and wistful within him. But strangely enough, he never thought of connecting Arnold's love for Gurlie with what he had read in the book found in his father's ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt. Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.) And dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that young man is to whom Peter Ivanovitch has taken such a fancy. He must be one of us, or he would not be admitted here when the others come. You know what I mean by the others. But I must say that he is not at all mystically inclined. I don't know that I have made him out yet. Naturally I am never for very long in the drawing-room. There is always something to do for me, though the establishment here is not so extensive as the villa on the Riviera. But still there are plenty of opportunities ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... having done, his contention must be considered as a splendid prophecy, but as little more than a prophecy. He continues, "Birth is expansion from the one centre of Life; life is its continuance, and death is the necessary return of the ray to the centre of light." This begins finely, but ends mystically. I have not, however, compared the English translation with the original, and must reserve a fuller examination of Giordano ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler |
