"Actuating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with her. Strange this; but stranger still, that, while overjoyed with the thought of his sister being delivered from captivity, his joy should have a tinge of sadness in it, like a mingling of shadow and sun. This due to his suspicion of the motives actuating her who has promised to be his sister's deliverer. Nacena is not their friend for mere friendship's sake; nor his, because of the former fellowship between him and her own brother. Instead, jealousy is her incentive, and what she is doing, though it be to their ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... constrains me to acknowledge the reverse. Most persons in this miserable world of ours, have some prevailing, predominating characteristic, which usually gives the tone and colour to all their thoughts and actions, forming what we denominate temperament; this we see actuating them, now more, now less; but rarely, however, is this great spring of action without its moments of repose. Not so with her of whom I have been speaking. She had but one passion —but, like Aaron's rod, it had a most consuming tendency—and that was ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... that was in them because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness." The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct, actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition. As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign of the Georges. There ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... rebellion, and rebellion is only possible in servants. It is the part of a slave resenting the lash. He was an unscrupulous, unmoral man, not lacking in courage of a sort; and upon the conquest of Mahara, the visible mouthpiece of Mr. King, he had entered in much the same spirit as that actuating a Kanaka who dives for pearls in a shark-infested lagoon. He had sought a slave, and lo! the slave was become the master! Otherwise whence this spirit of rebellion... ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... which it was arrived at. A girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as Giotto's, and no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small revolving table called a whirler. Forty-eight hours a week Mary Beechinor sat before her whirler. Actuating the treadle, she placed a piece of ware on the flying disc, and with a single unerring flip of the finger pushed it precisely to the centre; then she held the full brush firmly against the ware, and in three seconds the band encircled it truly; another brush taken up, and the line below the band ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... motives other than those stated by the incarcerated member of Parliament actuating his desire to get ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Britain, Austria, and Russia. Bonaparte soon succeeded by flattery and diplomacy not only in securing the withdrawal of Russia but in actuating the half-insane Tsar Paul to revive against Great Britain an Armed Neutrality of the North, which included Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark. Meanwhile the First Consul prepared a second Italian campaign against Austria. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... speculation. Knowledge of the real motives actuating him rests upon the evidence of a letter which Samoval was to write that same evening to La Fleche—afterwards to be discovered—wherein he related what had passed, how deliberately he had steered the matter, and what he meant to do. His object was no longer the punishing of an affront. That ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... the representation to the mind of an object as an effect possible to be produced through freedom. The only objects of practical reason are good and evil. For by "good" we understand an object necessarily abhorred, the principle of reason actuating the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... face broken away to show the internal mechanism. T is a flattened metal tube soldered at one end into a hollow casting, into which screws a tap connected with the boiler. The other end (closed) is attached to a link, L, which works an arm of a quadrant rack, R, engaging with a small pinion, P, actuating the pointer. As the steam pressure rises, the tube T moves its free end outwards towards the position shown by the dotted lines, and traverses the arm of the rack, so shifting the pointer round the scale. As the pressure falls, the tube gradually ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... somewhat fantastic theory; but I will leave that and confine myself to asking the grounds on which the chairman bases his confidence; in fact, what it is which is actuating the Board in pressing on us at such a time what I have no hesitation in stigmatising as a rash proposal. In a word, I want light as well as leading ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... building tumbles upon his head. Other people look well to their ground, choose their position, and watch whether they are likely to be surprised there; but he, as if in the ostentation of his heart, builds upon a precipice, and encamps upon a mine, from choice. He seems to have no one actuating principle, but a steady, persevering resolution not to speak the truth or ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... every thing else, been blinded by the fact that he, also, was grown to be of altogether too much importance to her. She never for a moment imagined that any thing but an abstract and ideal scheme for benefiting Bressant was actuating her in her intercourse with him. She proposed to educate him in pure beliefs and true aspirations; to show him that there was more in life than can be mathematically proved. But that she could derive other than an immaterial ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... these visitors to rummage aboard the schooner. They would meet his daughter, and he was afraid, and he was bitterly ashamed of himself because he was afraid. Dimly he was aware that this everlasting fear on her account constituted an insult to her. The finer impulse to protect her privacy was not actuating him; he knew that, too. He was merely foolishly afraid to trust her in the company of young men, and the combination of his emotions produced the simplest product of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... short. They have no preliminary measures, but at once voice the actuating emotion; that done, they come to a close. Although they are so short, they have form and in their structure follow in simple lines the rules of phrasing and motivization taught in our schools. These songs, speaking in general terms, partake more of the character ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... or that she could already be repenting what she had done. And now, when she was weeping at his feet and deploring the sin of the dinner-party,—which, after all, was a trifling sin,—he could not comprehend the feelings which were actuating her. "I suppose your aunt Harriet made up the ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... this time the actuating spirit of the party—as he must have been of any party to which he attached himself. Keeping, as he did, the double engines of his genius and his industry incessantly in play over the minds of his more indolent colleagues, with an intentness of purpose that nothing could divert, and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore |
