"Absorption" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to him that only by such an analysis of the different components of the body can the varied and complicated phenomena of life-activity be understood. One kind of tissue is wanted for support, another for movement, another for secretion, another for absorption, and so on; and if each kind does not have its own distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must result, and physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... density and more ethereal in nature; AND THE ORBIT OF THE EARTH GROWS LESS. Nearer and nearer shines the mighty Sun; first Vulcan, then the swift messenger of the gods are indrawn within the solar vortex, each absorption producing a cataclysmic change upon our Earth. Then comes the turn of Venus, while slowly and surely the orbit of the Earth contracts, and nearer shines the Sun. And, finally, the beautiful Earth, her mission over, the last atom of life beyond her rule, inward she sweeps, and is lost in the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... and on the running path, both as a boy and as a young man. Walking tours were for long my favorite recreation, even after the bicycle became an increasing attraction. My health, however, suffered in other ways from too constant absorption in lustful thoughts, which found vent in erotic verses and tales, generally destroyed soon after they were written. I have been subject since I was a boy to more or less prolonged fits of mental depression. How far I have inherited this tendency (my father and his father both married first ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... knowledge is forever moving. It can never rest. The tide of thought sweeps onward towards the infinite—God following it to its final absorption into the I Am, simple being,—while finite man, because of his finiteness, can only reach those universals which are infinite only to human thought. Like men on a journey we leave the train when we have reached our journey's end, but the ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... Colbert regretted the absorption of his sovereign in Versailles, "to the neglect of the Louvre—assuredly the most superb palace in the world." Louis tolerantly gave ear and inspected the Louvre, but to the building of Versailles he ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... appeared doubtful whether she even condescended so far as to regard herself as one of the audience; she had provided herself with a book, and had curled herself up comfortably in the corner most distant from the piano, and was reading with an air of absorption and interest so pronounced as really to be almost offensive to the performers. In almost anyone else the manifestation of so profound an indifference to the efforts of others to please would have been regarded as an indication of ill-breeding; but in her ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... wished to excuse his imprudence, she cried out, "Oh, don't say a wo'd! It's just like my own fatha," and she told him some things of her home which apparently did not interest him very much. He had a kind of dull, cold self-absorption in which he was indeed so little like her father that only her kindness for the lonely man could have justified her in thinking there was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... let us take them for granted—let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches—a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. Man was, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... and thought of it for days, thought of it until she dreaded to quit the tenement, lest a power distinct from will should seize and hurl her to destruction. She knew that that must not happen here; for all her self-absorption, she could not visit with such cruelty the one heart that loved her. And thinking of him, she understood that her father's tenderness was not wholly the idle thing that it had been to her at first; her love could never equal his, had never done so in her childhood, but she grew conscious ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... protected from the soul-destroying conclusions of pure monism, inevitable if its logical implications are pressed home: that is, the identity of substance between God and the soul, with its corollary of the total absorption of that soul in the Being of God as the goal of the spiritual life. For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it is real, is substantially identical with God; and the true object of existence is the making patent of this latent identity, the realization ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the first place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in the second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the former found a reconciliation of the two spheres to consist in the absorption of the secular by the ecclesiastical. The one community into which, by the admission of all, united mankind was gathered, must needs be the Church of God. Of this Christ is the Head. But in order to realise this unity on earth Christ has appointed a ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... Government. But what one senses in China from the first moment is the feeling of the all-pervading power of Japan which is working as surely as fate to its unhesitating conclusion—the domination of Chinese politics and industry by Japan with a view to its final absorption. It is not my object to analyze the realities of the situation or to inquire whether the universal feeling in China is a collective hallucination or is grounded in fact. The phenomenon is worthy of record on its own account. Even if it ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... philosopher, however, though he considers all souls as emanations from God, does not believe that all of them will return into God at death. Those only who have obtained a knowledge of God are rewarded by absorption, but the rest continue to migrate from body to body so long as they remain unqualified for the same. "The knower of God becomes God." This union with the Deity is the total loss of personal identity, and is the attainment of the highest bliss, in which are no grades ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and rich in pasturage like that of the corral, which bordered on the west on the Falls River valley, and on the east on the Red Creek valley. These two streams, which lower down became rivers by the absorption of several tributaries, were formed by all the springs of the mountain and thus caused the fertility of its southern part. As to the Mercy, it was more directly fed from ample springs concealed ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... Sundays were almost always a time of complete absorption. Everyone had company to entertain, everyone had plans. Nancy and Bert would come gaily into their home, on a Saturday afternoon, flushed from a luncheon party, and would entertain the noisy crowd in the dining room. After ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... the Bamberg possessions, and of many other principalities and small domains at that time existent; namely, absorption under the Napoleonic regime into the neighbouring States. This went to Bavaria; see the ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... young Harold Singelsby; his face was very white and drawn, and in the absorption of his own suppressed agitation he did not even look at Sandy. "Doctor," said he, in a hoarse, constrained voice, "for God's sake, come home with me as quickly as you can: ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... furrowed like a corrugated roof with the mental effort as he figured in the dust with a pointed stick while Wallie's face wore a look of absorption as he watched the progress, although he was already as familiar with it as with his ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... coming from Ronda and hastening in the direction of Bobadilla or perhaps to the Casa Barenna. He wore his flat-brimmed hat well forward over the eyes, and kept his gaze fixed upon the road in front. There was a faint suggestion of assumed absorption in his attitude, as if he knew that the priest was usually at the church door at this hour, and had no desire to meet his eye. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... and the soul has purified itself. Every fault must have its expiation and every higher faculty its development; pain and misery being signs of the ordeals in the trial, which is to end in the happy re-absorption of the ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... despair, and consulted her eldest daughter in private whether there could have been any misunderstanding with Colonel Keith to lead Rachel to avoid him in a manner that was becoming pointed. Grace deemed it nothing but absorption into the F. U. E. E., and poor Mrs. Curtis sighed over this fleeting away of her sole chance of seeing Rachel like other people. Of Mr. Mauleverer personally she had no fears, he was in her eyes like a drawing or music-master, and ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... James—the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called these brothers—like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the heavy German guns, was still fighting desperately and had no mind to withdraw from the conflict. Possibly Belgium had more at stake than any other country in the war. She was fighting for life and freedom—from possible absorption ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... from the effects of haschich, from the effects of opium and morphia, and they cease as soon as the absorption of the drug is interrupted, while the other generators of day dreams ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... feminist problem depends is twofold, being due not only to the increased unmarriedness of women through the disproportion of the sexes and the rise in the age of marriage, but also to the decreased absorption of married women in domestic duties. A woman, from the point of view of this discussion, is not "married and done for," as she used to be. She is not so extensively and completely married. Her large and increasing leisure remains ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... me!!! (His fists clinch; his neck thickens; his face reddens; the fleshy purses under his eyes become injected with hot blood; the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war. Still, she does not come out of her absorption to look at him: her eyes are steadfast with a mechanical ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... night and morning, and rinsing out the mouth after each meal. The brush should not be very hard, as it will not only be more difficult to clean the interstices between the teeth, the part in which the tartar[FN24] is most likely to be deposited, but by its friction, will occasion the gradual absorption of the gum and the exposure of the neck of the teeth. The hair of the brush should be firm and elastic, and not ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... foxglove, in an ounce of water, began to operate, by wrinkling some of the leaves of the bean in a few moments, which it completely killed in twenty-four hours. Oxalic acid or salt of sorrel, though found in common and wood sorrel, and a great many plants, proved a very fatal poison to others. The absorption of one-tenth of a grain, killed a rose branch and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... existing room divided into a combined hot room and washing room, and a cooling room. Three of the walls being ordinary external walls, the hot room is lined with lath and plaster on quartering, leaving an air-space between to prevent loss of heat by absorption and radiation. One or two of the spaces between the quarters should be formed into lath and plaster flues, for the withdrawal of the vitiated air, being connected below with the hot room, and above lead into the open air. A pugged partition and double-doored ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... be a complete bar to the digestion of food, as the pepsine would be precipitated from the solution as quickly as it was formed by the stomach.' Spirit, in any quantity, as a dietary adjunct, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities, which resist the digestion of food by the absorption of water from its particles, in direct antagonism to ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... looked directly at Mr. Seabright, and said, "I have broken through all rules of propriety in order to get to you. I wish to say to you, Mr. Seabright, that this plea of absorption in your business is all humbug. You have other and secret reasons for not desiring to appear in our ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... hills held, though it was close enough to truth to have satisfied any eye save one of uncompromising sincerity. Samson, even though he was hopelessly daubing, and knew it, was sincere, and the painter at his elbow caught his breath, and looked on with the absorption of a prophet, who, listening to childish prattle, yet recognizes the gift of prophecy. The boy dabbled for a perplexed moment among the pigments, then lightened up his color with a trace of ultramarine. Unconsciously, the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... each of these organs, the performance of each of these various duties, involve in their operation a continual absorption of the matters necessary for their support, from the blood, and a constant formation of waste products, which are returned to the blood, and conveyed by it to the lungs and the kidneys, which are organs that have allotted to them the office of extracting, separating, and getting rid of ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... in the midst of the vast circle which the rays of the moon lit up, the agitation of the water which had accompanied the absorption of the two men, was renewed, and there appeared, first a quantity of fair hair, then a pallid human face, with eyes wide open, but fixed and glazed, then a body, which, after raising its bust out of the water, fell softly backwards, and floated upon the surface ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... been more abundantly possessed, more profoundly applied, by others, we believe that it would be difficult to cite an instance in which they have been so entirely combined or so continuously exercised. M. Sainte-Beuve is pre-eminently an artist in criticism. He has exhibited that self-absorption which it is easy to imagine, easy to find examples of, in poetry, in painting, and in music, but which in criticism had hitherto been hardly conceivable. "There is in him," wrote Gustave Planche in 1834,—and the force of the eulogy is in no degree impaired by subsequent censures from the same quarter,—"a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... is quite sufficient to saturate the whole family with the substance of all the fish and sheepskins in the vicinity; and the marvel of it is that they don't come out next day wagging their fins or bleating like sheep. I wonder they ever have any occasion to eat. Absorption must supply them with a large amount of nutriment; but I suppose what is gained in that way is lost in the fattening of certain other members of the household. Warmth seems to be the principal object, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... She made little tentative overtures of friendship and affection. But he scarcely seemed to hear them, wrapped as he was in the selfish absorption of his disappointment. When she heard the postman outside and went to the door for the mail, she thought he had not noticed her going. But when she returned he was watching her with ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... investment remains a strong element in China's remarkable economic growth. Shortages of electric power and raw materials may affect industrial output in 2005. More power generating capacity is scheduled to come on line in 2006. In its rivalry with India as an economic power, China has a lead in the absorption of technology, the rising prominence in world trade, and the alleviation of poverty; India has one important advantage in its relative mastery of the English language, but the number of competent ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... him to like her. She even wanted to sympathise. It was such a mixture of feelings she had—some good, some mischievous and deliberate. All her vanities were involved. Her nerves were taut with the strain of such a show of absorption, while her mind ran on at top speed. She asked pseudo-timid questions, just to show her interest and her cleverness, and to encourage Toby to keep on telling her things that threw light upon himself and his likes and dislikes. She walked delicately, stifled yawns, interjected "fancy" and "there" ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... did not know whether she was waking or sleeping; she did not know whether she was in the body or out of the body. It was all a dream, but it was a delightful dream; there was no bitterness of reflection now, no anxiety, no regard for past or future, only utter absorption in the present moment. 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... people in Freekirk Head, Nellie had heard some of the rumors concerning Code's possible part in the sinking of the May Schofield. Nat, for reasons of his own, had carefully refrained from enlarging on these to her, and in the absorption of her wooing by him she had let them go by unnoticed. Now, for the first time, the consequences they might have in Code's life were made clear ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... the formation of brownish-red crusts on rocks of limestone, sandstone, many slate structures, serpentine, granite, etc., by the decomposition of iton pyrites, or magnetic iron, finely disseminated in the mass of the rock; the conversion of anhydrite into gypsum, in consequence of the absorption of water; the crumbling of many granites and porphyries into gravel, occasioned by the decomposition of the mica and feldspar. In its more limited sense, the term metamorphic is confined to those changes of the rock which are produced, not by the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... and subsequent to shipment, and circumstances existing during transportation, are not to be disregarded as factors contributory to the final quality of the coffee. The sweating of mules carrying bags of poorly packed coffee, and the absorption of strong foreign aromas and flavors from odoriferous substances stored in too close proximity to the coffee beans, are classic examples of damage that bear iterative mention. Damage by sea water, due more to the excessive moisture than to the salt, is not so common an occurrence now as heretofore. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... little that she knew about the matter. Mildred waited until they had asked all the questions they could think of and then, leaning forward in her absorption and gazing intently at one of the group, she said: "Now tell us all that you know about this Hugh Gordon. I want to know all you can tell me, because I have ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... giant, his brown skin mottled by the brilliant equatorial sunlight which percolated through the leafy canopy of green above him, his clean-limbed body relaxed in graceful ease, his shapely head partly turned in contemplative absorption and his intelligent, gray eyes dreamily devouring the object of their devotion, you would have thought him the reincarnation of some demigod ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in this one-act piece as if it had been a five-act drama. His absorption in it helped to divert his mind from the pain that had sadly reduced ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... conspicuous political part, by all means let him do so; but verily I do not envy him; for the satisfaction which is derived from the most successful and fruitful political activity is not, to my taste, to be compared with that pure and disinterested satisfaction of the mind which results from absorption in serious and difficult scientific labours. In the turmoil of the political and social struggle, even the most splendid civic crown will be dulled by the stifling dust of practical life, which never ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Even Johnny's absorption in his treasure-trove could not altogether blind him to the fact that Tomaso's brother was perturbed. He wondered a little. But after all, there was only one thing now that really interested him, and he straightway returned to it, leaving ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... before you, too," answered her husband gravely, putting his hand upon her arm to prevent her flying under the wheels of a carriage which in her absorption she had not noticed. "Look here, Helen; it wouldn't be any better if Arthur wanted to marry you. You are too melancholy alone without having him to push you deeper into the slough ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... bride. One may speculate as to Jenny's estimate of her husband. Since his boyhood, she had not seen him very much. At that time he was a merry, light-hearted youth, a jovial comrade, and one of whom any girl would be proud. But since his long stay in Berlin, and his absorption in the theories of men like Engels and Bauer, he had become a very different sort of man, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... this might occur. The theory is that the conquest of space may prove to be the moral equivalent of war by substituting for certain material and psychological needs usually supplied through war; that the absorption of energies, resources, imagination, and aggressiveness in pursuit of the space adventure may become an effective way of ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... opposition, and the plans of Leon, and the absorption of Lady Dudleigh's sympathies in the interests of her son, all destroyed Dalton's chances. He could only watch, and hear from his faithful Hugo accounts of what was going on. Thus he was led into worse and worse acts, and by misunderstanding Edith at the outset, opened the way for both himself ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... at a banker's in Fleet Street, the two friends entered at the moment when a countryman with a most rueful expression of countenance, stood transfixed to the floor, like the statue of Despair, incapable either of speech or motion. After an absorption of mental faculty of several minutes duration, he burst out into the incoherent ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... more or less distinctive way all the leading phases in the evolution of the national thought and sentiment. The subtle influence of the deeply-grounded religious feeling which, implanted by the Puritan pioneers, has survived generations of intense absorption in material progress and the distractions that modern life offers to the possessors of newly-acquired wealth; the pride of the people in their independence, and their natural tendency to overrate it in comparison; with the conditions of other countries; the contrasts furnished ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... this the more readily, because I now reproached myself with having treated her former letter rather lightly. It had set me thinking a good deal at the time, as I have mentioned in its place; but my absorption in my own affairs, my experience of the family, and my hearing nothing more, had gradually ended in my dismissing the subject. I had often thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what 'pecuniary liabilities' they were establishing in Canterbury, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... presence itself of divine impulses, knew yet that over the whole sinful city the Spirit was brooding with mighty eagerness, waiting for the disciples to arise to the call of sacrifice and suffering, touching hearts long dull and cold, making business men and money-makers uneasy in their absorption by the one great struggle for more wealth, and stirring through the church as never in all the city's history the church had been moved. The Bishop and Dr. Bruce had already seen some wonderful things ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... soul (I felt too dull for that), but in response to the shuddering pines which pressed up close to the house at this point and soughed and tapped at the walls and muttered among themselves with an insistence which I could not ignore, notwithstanding my many reasons for self-absorption. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... affection, and it is even possible that the second love may be more satisfying than the first, the third or fourth more typical of exaltation than its predecessors. But love, whether early or late, in the perfect absorption of the faculties comes only once; as compared with this remarkable mental state all other ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... was compounded of a variety of elements. The shyness and reserve characteristic of many cultivated Englishmen, was accentuated in his case by a natural austerity and an absorption in serious thought. But though his temper was puritanic and inclined to moroseness, there was no sourness or cynicism in it. "If," he wrote to Miss Symonds, "I am rather a melancholy bird, given to physical fatigue and depression, yet I have ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... spectrum of the sun. We find that when the sodium vapour is heated, it gives out light of a very particular type, which, viewed through the prism, is concentrated in two lines. But the sodium vapour possesses also this property, that light from the sun can pass through it without any perceptible absorption, except of those particular rays which are of the same characters as the two lines in question. In other words, we say that if the heated vapour of a substance gives a spectrum of bright lines, corresponding to lights of various kinds, this same vapour will act as an opaque screen ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... though they are, give evidence of a more primitive condition, when a far greater number were spoken. When there are two or more languages of the same stock, it appears that this differentiation into diverse tongues is due mainly to the absorption of other material, and that thus the multiplication of dialects and languages of the same group furnishes evidence that at some prior time there existed other languages which are now lost except as they are partially preserved in the divergent elements ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... men in opposition to our Lord. It is not the actual sin of gluttony that we shall find in operation here but certain inevitable effects of it, What is the effect of gluttony on the soul of man? Absorption in the pursuit of the pleasures that spring from material things; the indulgence of the appetite, and the natural result of such indulgence which is to render the soul insensitive to the spiritual. The man whose motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," puts himself out of touch with ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the abbe and the chevalier were ushered in, and the meal was served. Neither one nor the other would share it; the abbe indeed sat down to table, but the chevalier remained leaning on the foot of the bed. The abbe appeared anxious, and only roused himself with a start from his absorption; then he seemed to drive away some dominant idea, but soon the idea, stronger than his will, plunged him again into a reverie, a state which struck everyone the more particularly because it was far from his usual temper. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... inch my ideal of a woman—every fibre in you is utterly feminine. I adore your acquired courage, I worship your heavenly inconsistencies. The mental pleasure I experienced with you was measured and limited only by my own perversity and morbid self-absorption; the splendour of the passion I divine in you, unawakened, awes me, leaves me in wonder. The spiritual tonic, even against my own sickly will has freshened me by mere contact with the world you live in; the touch of your lips and hands—ah, Ailsa—has ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... been written upon the characteristics of Lyly's prose are numberless, and far outweigh the attention given to his power as a novelist, to say nothing of his dramas[14]. Indeed the absorption of the critics in the analysis of euphuism seems to have been, up to a few years ago, definitely injurious to a true appreciation of our author's position, by blocking the path to a recognition of his importance in ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... wan, deeply wrinkled cheeks, when he first showed himself on rising from his chair. The changeless influence of one monotonous pursuit and one monotonous habit of thought was next expressed in the dull, dreamy self-absorption of his manner and his look while his daughter was speaking to him. The moment after, when he had roused himself to welcome his guest, was the moment which made the self-revelation complete. Then there flickered in the major's weary ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... intelligence on the part of our royal pets, we could fill half a column of the Spectator. In fact, their lives are so full they have no time for thought, the highest energy of man. Now, it was to thought that my life should be dedicated. Action, apart from its absorption of time, would war otherwise against the pleasures of intellect, which, for me, meant mainly the pleasures of imagination. It is only (this is a platitude) the things one has not done, the faces or places one has not seen, or seen but darkly, that have charm. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... had trailed their elders with the experience of youth, aided by the absorption and anxiety of their fathers. Their view of the final object of the search was somewhat obscured by the underbrush ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... galvanometer. The quantity absorbed by the oxygen under those circumstances was too feeble to affect the galvanometer; the gas, in fact, proved perfectly transparent to the rays of heat. It had but a feeble power of radiation: it had an equally feeble power of absorption. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... our Lord. What beauty it gives to His gentleness, to the leisureliness of heart with which He was ready to make everybody's sorrow His own, and to lay a healing and a loving finger upon every wound! With this certainty before Him, there was yet no strain manifest upon His spirit, no self-absorption, no shutting Himself out from other people's burdens because He had so heavy ones of His own to carry; but He was ready for every joy, ready for all sympathy, ready for every help; and if we cannot say that, 'in cheerful godliness,' as I think we may, at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... soldiers his comrades-in-arms. To him, indeed, it was that Britain owed her Indian allies in the War of 1812. Canadians and Indians stood side by side in face of a common peril and were inspired by a common purpose. To Canada defeat meant absorption in the United States and the loss of national life; to the red men it meant expulsion from their homes and hunting-grounds and the ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... present illuminants contain their hues. It is assumed that the reader knows that a red object, for example, appears red because it reflects (or transmits) red rays and absorbs the other rays in the illuminant. In other words, color is due to selective absorption reflection, or transmission. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... for in 1940 treaty regarding trade and navigation between Soviet Union and Iran Disputes: violent and longstanding dispute with Armenia over status of Nagorno-Karabakh, lesser dispute concerns Nakhichevan'; some Azeris desire absorption of and/or unification with the ethnically Azeri portion of Iran; minor irredentist disputes along Georgia border Climate: dry, semiarid steppe; subject to drought Terrain: large, flat Kura Lowland (much of it below sea level) with Great Caucasus Mountains to the north, Karabakh ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... hereafter what his knowledge has prepared him to be. Not every spirit is fitted for immortality, but only the spirit of them that have wisely desired it, or, rather, not desired it; for every desire must have been extinguished before one is fitted for this end. Hence, with advancing belief in absorption and pantheism, there still lingers, and not as a mere superfluity, the use of sacrifice and penance. Rites and the paraphernalia of religion are essential till one learns that they are unessential. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... of nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty. With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life, moving with such great effort, seemed from moment ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... The absorption of odors is the most baffling of all causes of bad eggs. Here the candler, so expert in other points, is usually helpless. Eggs, by storage in old musty cellars, or in rooms, with lemons, onions and cheese, may become so badly flavored as to ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... weather of India, Carleton found this the land of punkas, tatties, and odors both sweet and otherwise. He was impressed with the amount of jewelry seen, not in the bazaars, but on the persons of the women. "Through all ages India has swallowed up silver, and the absorption is as great as ever to-day." He was amused at the little men's big heads, covered with a hundred and fifty feet, or more, of turban material, which made so many of them look like exaggerated tulips. He noticed ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... tell you the truth, Adele, I am a different man now from what I was half an hour ago. I had forgotten that I was still a live being, and that the world was, after all, a beautiful place. I think I had forgotten that there was such a person as Hardross Courage. The absorption of these days, when one has to remember, even with every tick of the clock, that the slightest carelessness, the slightest slip, means certain death—well, it lays hold of you. No wonder the lines ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 1785.] All these traders naturally felt the Spanish control of the navigation, and the intermittent but always possible hostility of the Spanish officials, to be peculiarly irksome. They were, as a rule, too shortsighted to see that the only permanent remedy for their troubles was their own absorption into a solid and powerful Union. Therefore they were always ready either to join a movement against Spain, or else to join one which seemed to promise the acquisition of special ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the rightly rounded Christian life has two sides; the out-side, and the inner side. To most of us the outer side seems the greater. The living, the serving, the giving, the doing, the absorption in life's work, the contact with men, with the great majority the sheer struggle for existence—these take the greater thought and time of us all. They seem to be the great business of life even to those of us who thoroughly ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... would at once conventionally subscribe, and these I venture to call Hindu doctrines. In theological conversations with Hindus, three doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background. These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e. Delusion, or the Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness. I find a recent pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection. In the ninth century, she writes, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... witnesses the absorption of the nation in questions of domestic policy. The crude and rough domination of Andrew Jackson opened a new order of things. Men's minds were busied with affairs at home, at first more especially with the tariff, then more and more exclusively with slavery. This group, besides Jackson, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... claiming it. The position of all Rose's kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had the least knowledge of Rose's mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had she lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Islands of Torres Straits were formerly inhabited by aborigines of the Australian family, and that at a later time they were occupied by immigrants from New Guinea, who adopted the language of the aboriginal inhabitants, but gradually extinguished the aboriginal type and character either by peaceful absorption or by conquest and extermination.[274] Hence the Western Islanders of Torres Straits form a transition both geographically and ethnographically between the aborigines of Australia on the one side and the aborigines of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... time the letter from home lay overlooked on the pillow. If it could have spoken it would have reproached the daughter for her absorption in its companion, but it bided its time. Presently Margaret turned with a start, saw it, felt a remorseful stab, and tore it open, without ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... low a temperature that the bare hand can no more touch it than it can iron at a white heat, and this, although it is a very poor conductor of heat; so great is the difference of temperature between it and the stomach that its absorption produces real suffocation. The Esquimaux prefer severe thirst to quenching it with this snow, which does not replace water, and only augments the thirst instead of appeasing it. The only way the travellers could make use of it was by melting ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of the man. An artist's nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal to its own highest faculties ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... camel's feet approached upon the road without his hearing them. He was not roused from his absorption until the camel stopped its tread so near him that he started and looked up. It was necessary that he should look up a long way. He was a deformed little child, and the camel was a tall and splendid one, with rich trappings and golden bells. ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... daughters, who apparently existed without any more substantial sustenance than the pleasure of pouring out cups of coffee and tea and glasses of milk, and cutting slices of pie, of which they possibly partook through some process of absorption. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... solar system we discover the essential differences between certain planets. In the spectrum of Jupiter, for instance, we are aware of the action of an unknown substance that manifests itself by a marked absorption of certain red rays. This gas, which does not exist upon the Earth, is seen still more obviously in the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus. Indeed, upon this last planet the atmosphere appears, apart from its water vapor, to have no sort of analogy with our own. And in the solar spectrum ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... agreeable sentiments. Just what the deacon might have said or done after the impulse had been set going must remain unknown, for at the crucial moment a sound of militant bells, bells of defiance, jangled up behind them, disturbing their personal absorption, and they looked around simultaneously. Behind the bells was the squire in his sleigh drawn by his fastest stepper, and he was alone, as the deacon was not. The widow weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, net—which is weighting ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Socialist more plainly states: "At the present hour it is calculated that the wealth of the United Kingdom exceeds 2,000 millions per year. This divided among forty millions gives 250l. per family. It is said that the abolition of waste labour and the absorption of the idle classes would quadruple the production. One thousand pounds per year per family is a very good standard of comfort under a co-operative ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... monster, sounded all around. George steadied his glasses on the rail. Blue with white stripes was leading, the Ambler lying last. Thus they came round the further bend. And Providence, as though determined that someone should benefit by his absorption, sent a hand sliding under George's elbows, to remove the pin from his tie and slide away. Round Tattenham Corner George saw his horse take the lead. So, with straw closing up, they came into the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Shint[o], as a state religion or union of politics and piety, with its system of shrines and festivals, and in short the whole Kami no Michi, or Shint[o] as we know it, from the sixth to the eighth century, was in itself (in part at least), a case of the absorption of one ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... reign of Charles V the Protestant Reformation spread through the Netherlands, whose peoples shared in all the disputes and turbulences of that religious revolution. Often in great peril, the liberties of the Netherlands were more than ever endangered by the absorption of the provinces into the vast empire of Charles. The Emperor issued persecuting edicts against the Protestant inhabitants, introduced the Inquisition with its terrible auto dafe, which spared neither ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... religions—Italic and Teutonic, as well as those brought into direct conflict with the Jewish system; and also that the more important of the Teutonic deities are not to be traced in the subsequent hierarchy of fiends, on account probably of their temporary or permanent absorption into the proselytizing system, or the refusal of the new converts to believe them to be so black as their teachers painted them. The gradual growth of the superstructure it would be well-nigh impossible ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... consoling truth in this one little sentence, which my self-absorption was too great, at the time, to suffer me to see. Perhaps even she herself was not fully conscious of the glorious and pregnant truth which lay at the bottom of what she said. Love is, indeed, not merely a ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... in his endeavors to render it acceptable to the Scotch members to whom it was proposed. The most apparently substantial of these was the unprecedented character of the measure. No past "experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser state, at least where the government partook so much of the republican form, in one of superior power and ancient rivalry." But, in the case of the present measure, what had thus been a difficulty in ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... age he gave still more astonishing evidence of his precocious scientific capacities. His father, perceiving his strong scientific bent, and desirous that he should first of all acquaint himself with languages before the absorption of the severer, but more engrossing, study seized him, had withdrawn from his sight all mathematical books, and carefully avoided the subject in the presence of his son when his friends were present. This, as might be expected, only quickened ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... will simply take possession of its own, will "lock the employers out for good as owners and parasites, and give them a chance to become useful toilers." The resistance that will assuredly be made to this process of absorption is to be met by direct action, the general strike, and sabotage—a trinity of phrases imported from Europe, each ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... Sanskrit word for musician is BHAGAVATHAR, "he who sings the praises of God." The SANKIRTANS or musical gatherings are an effective form of yoga or spiritual discipline, necessitating deep concentration, intense absorption in the seed thought and sound. Because man himself is an expression of the Creative Word, sound has the most potent and immediate effect on him, offering a way to remembrance of his ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... in the younger and less critical members of the establishment, by sending Alfred, the hall-boy, up to the vicarage with a note and instructions to wait for an answer, at the very moment when every domestic ordinance demanded his absorption in the cleaning of knives and of boots. Being but human, Alfred naturally embraced the heaven-sent chance of dawdling, passing the time of day with various cronies, and rapturously assisting to hound a couple of wild, sweating and snorting steers along ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... not surpass the sublime absorption in which the gaunt old man, with arm uplifted, described this stage of affairs, till he ended in a shrewd chuckle, worthy of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Even in the Hickson family something of this feeling soon sprang up; Grace being a vehement partisan of the elder pastor's more gloomy doctrines, while Faith was a passionate, if a powerless, advocate of Mr. Nolan. Manasseh's growing absorption in his own fancies, and imagined gift of prophecy, making him comparatively indifferent to all outward events, did not tend to either the fulfilment of his visions, or the elucidation of the dark mysterious doctrines over which ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... pass judgment upon them, without getting some ideas which belong to many provinces of human intelligence? The air we breathe is made up of four elements, at least: oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas, and knowledge. There is something quite delightful to witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine specialist. There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying scholar ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... prejudice," he would say, "but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The one does n't want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step. 'With malice towards none, with charity for all,' we must do the best we can for ourselves ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the last proof of their want of breeding. Miss Grace after all then was not such an improvement on her mother, for she easily might have taken the initiative of departure, in spite of Mrs. Mavis's evident "game" of making her own absorption of refreshment last as long as possible. I watched the girl with increasing interest; I couldn't help asking myself a question or two about her and even perceiving already (in a dim and general way) that rather marked embarrassment, or at least anxiety attended her. Wasn't it complicating ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... active member of the Polish Revolutionary Committee, till, in 1835, he published La Verite sur la Russie, in which work he maintained that the interests of Poland and of all the other Slavic countries would be promoted by absorption into the Russian Empire and union under the Russian Czar. This book drew upon him the indignant denunciation of his countrymen, who regarded it as a betrayal of their cause, and led to the revocation of his sentence of death, and to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... away from that view for the tourists, and walked on slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. One or two persons had to get out of his way, and then turned round to give a surprised stare to his profound absorption. The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write! A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to do that day. He had ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... and have the carving done out of her sight. Most children are naturally sympathetic when they have experienced or can imagine the feelings of others. The cruelty of children, is usually due to their absorption in their own feelings without a realization of the pain ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... mentation as an iceberg, we might depict nonsapient mentation as the sunlight reflected from its surface. This is a considerably less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals, consciously, with nothing but present sense data, there is a considerable absorption and re-emission of subconscious memories. Also, there are occasional flashes of what must be conscious mental activity, in dealing with some novel situation. Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested in the evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... religion, I am content to point out that such an objection was much more effective in Spinoza's time than it is to-day. For the whole trend of philosophy during the nineteenth century was towards a view of Extension itself as a mode of Thought, and therefore toward the absorption of one of Spinoza's theoretical divine attributes ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... to them; for instance, towards and more rarely from the light—in opposition to, and more rarely in the direction of, the attraction of gravity. When the nerves and muscles of an animal are excited by galvanism or by the absorption of strychnine, the consequent movements may be called an incidental result, for the nerves and muscles have not been rendered specially sensitive to these stimuli. So with plants it appears that, from having the power of movement in obedience to certain stimuli, they are ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... men, how few carry athletic habits into manhood! The great hindrance, no doubt, is absorption in business; and we observe that this winter's hard times and consequent leisure have given a great stimulus to outdoor sports. But in most places there is the further obstacle, that a certain stigma of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... households, in all moods, in all discordances between the world without us and the frames within, in all states of health, of solicitude, of preoccupation, and show no signs of impatience, ungentleness, or unobservant self-absorption,—with only kindly feeling finding expression, and ungenial feeling at least inwardly imprisoned;—we shall be ready to acknowledge that the man who has thus attained is master of himself, and in the graciousness of his power is fashioned ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... swiftly up behind them and turned to see—of all persons—Mary Brooks, who hated driving, and Dr. Hinsdale. Mary was talking gaily and looked quite reconciled to her fate, and Dr. Hinsdale was leaving the horses very much to themselves in the pleasant absorption of watching Mary's face. Indeed so interested were the pair in each other that they almost passed the two astonished girls standing by the roadside, without recognizing them at all. But just as she whirled past, Mary saw them, and leaned back to wave her hand and smile ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... sympathy with the beautiful day, she had taken off her hat (which she carried on one arm), disclosing a spray of fresh lilacs in her hair. She was very simply, though not poorly, dressed. All this, and more, I was able to observe without disturbing her absorption in her book; but just as I was trying to decide whether the firm, compressed corners of her mouth only meant interest in the reading, or indicated some peculiar hardness of character, she glanced up and saw ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... speech, but in words too profound in their meaning for Dante to comprehend. They seemed to be returning thanks to God. This rapturous absorption being ended, the speaker expressed in more human terms his gratitude to Beatrice; and then, after inciting Dante to ask his name, declared ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... in themselves nutritive, but only contain masses of food here and there, must have appliances by which these masses of food may be utilized. Evidently mere external contact of a solid organism with a solid portion of nutriment, could not result in the absorption of it in any moderate time, if at all. To effect absorption, there must be both a solvent or macerating action, and an extended surface fit for containing and imbibing the dissolved products: there must be a digestive cavity. Thus, given the ordinary conditions ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a telling of it! My own uncle, Edward, was the principal narrator, but was occasionally helped out by my newer uncle, Edmund. I had the story already, my reader will remember, in my uncle's writing, at home: when we returned I read it—not with the same absorption as if it had come first, but with as much interest, and certainly with the more thorough comprehension that I had listened to it before. That same written story I shall presently give, supplemented by what, necessarily, my uncle Edmund had to supply, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... trampling hoof, the lake was reached; and to that the whole vast body of enemies rushed, and together continued to rush, forgetful of all things at that moment but of one almighty instinct. This absorption of the thoughts in one maddening appetite lasted for a single minute; but in the next arose the final scene of parting vengeance. Far and wide the waters of the solitary lake were instantly dyed red with blood and gore; here rode a party of savage Bashkirs, hewing off heads as fast as the swathes ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the white men in this market, and deep was the absorption of Ebony, for that amiable negro had a faculty of totally forgetting himself and absolutely projecting himself into the shoes of other people, thus identifying himself with their interests—a faculty which cost him many anxious, ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the result, Justice Frankfurter concentrated on the problem suggested by the proposed absorption of the Bill of Rights by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and restated his previously disclosed position as follows: "Not until recently was it suggested that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was merely a compendious reference to the Bill of Rights whereby ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Handsome and his councillors did not misconceive the tendency of such language, however involved and full of specious reservations it might be. The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the religious, and the abolition of the State's independence, not in favor of the national Church, but to the advantage of the foreign head of the universal Church. The defenders ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot |
