"Fixity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tears in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in her ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... no sustenance existed for friend or for enemy; population in some parts was almost destroyed, and it was everywhere extensively displaced. [Footnote: Ibid., 398.] The conservatism, the settled rooting of the people in the soil, acquired and inherited property, moral and material fixity, were all ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... throwing back his head with an air of defiance in his countenance; there was as he looked at his guardian a quick, mutable succession of feelings, in striking contrast with the fixity of ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a lira to the gate-keeper's child. He went on, ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... The fixity of Swithin's eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped her hand, and said ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stood there with a long rubber slicker tight-buttoned from collar to hem. Below that Brent saw rubber boots. She stood with a lance-like straightness, very tall, very pliant, and as he stared with a fixity which would have amounted to impertinence had it not been disarmed by amazement she looked past him and through him as if he ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... character, admirable as it is for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones. He is of the type of Brutus or of Cato—a model of austere fixity of purpose, but ungracious, domineering, and not quite ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... it were an accepted fact. His face was handsome, with a strange, watchful alertness and a fundamental fixity of ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... motions of the lower jaw-bone on the skull, or by the larynx, in its own motions at the fore-part of the neck. It becomes as necessary, therefore, in the performance of surgical operations upon the subclavian artery, to fix the clavicle by depressing it, as in Plate 8, as it is to give fixity to the lower maxilla and larynx, in the position of Plate 7, when the carotid ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... I must omit many matters of which the explanation would not, I flatter myself, be without interest for my Readers: as for example, our method of propelling and stopping ourselves, although destitute of feet; the means by which we give fixity to structures of wood, stone, or brick, although of course we have no hands, nor can we lay foundations as you can, nor avail ourselves of the lateral pressure of the earth; the manner in which the rain originates in the intervals between our various ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... she knows the effect of that trick she has with them—the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... impression. His eyes were handsome, but, like the Vingtieme's tables, too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his mustache, waxed up behind his nostrils, gave a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of discomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest. This waistcoat wasn't ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... analyze the processes of a tree into their mechanical and chemical elements, but there is besides a kind of force there which we must call vital. The whole growth and development of the tree, its manner of branching and gripping the soil, its fixity of species, its individuality—all imply something that does not belong to the order of the inorganic, automatic forces. In the living animal how the psychic stands related to the physical or physiological and arises out of it, science cannot ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses, the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use the analytical rather than the synthetical form of expression, and a lack of fixity in the forms of words and in inflectional endings. To illustrate some of these traits in a single example, an early law reads "if [he] shall have committed a theft by night, if [he] shall have killed him, let ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... future; it is because, the moment he passes out of my influence, he passes under that other—the influence I have been fighting against every hour since he was born!—I don't mean, you know," she added, as Durham, with bent head, continued to offer the silent fixity of his attention, "I don't mean the special personal influence—except inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he belongs. That is what ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... mouth, heavy and damp as a rag; she could not utter a word. A blush suffused her cheeks, turning them red as apples; she shrugged her shoulders and bowed her head, pressing her chin against her naked breast. Then without moving, with the fixity of an idiot, she glanced at the wound, and said in ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... individual modes of being affected, then, will always furnish the colours of the portrait which man may paint to himself of the Divinity; it must therefore be obvious they can never be determinate—can have no fixity—can never be reduced to any graduated scale; the inductions which they may draw from them, can never be either constant or uniform; each will always judge after himself, will never see any thing but himself or his own peculiar situation in ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through the tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is a brief period of 3,000 years, when compared with the geologic ages? Or how could any such argument be founded on a basis ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... W.F. Denning in England. Mr. Denning's drawings corroborated the charts of Green, Schiaparelli, Knobel, Terby and Baeddicker. He found the surface of Mars one of extreme complexity, a multitude of bright spots in places, but with a general fixity of character which led him to believe that the appearances were not atmospheric. He indeed attributed to Mars an attenuated atmosphere and thought that some of the vagaries in its surface characters were ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... conclusions of both these investigators; and as the result of his own observations declares that algae, so far from being as polymorphic as they have been described, vary only within relatively narrow limits, and present on the whole as great fixity as the higher plants. It certainly supports his view to discover, on subjecting to a careful investigation Botrydium granulatum, a siphonaceous alga whose varied forms had been described by J. Rostafinski and M. Woronin, that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hint of hesitation. Rather, the fixity of her gaze and the intensity of her mental concentration threw into high relief the hardness of her personality. She was singularly devoid of that quality which is generally ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Testament rather as history. I think it will be felt that he has permitted his own style a freer play in regard to the latter than the former. The New Testament record had not yet acquired the same degree of fixity as the Old. The 'many' compositions of which St. Luke speaks in his preface were still in circulation, and were only gradually dying out. One important step had been taken in the regular reading of the 'Memoirs of the Apostles' at the Christian assemblies. We have not indeed proof that these ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... gaze upon a plump young maiden. Her victim tried to turn away, hiding her face in her hands and kneeling behind a woman; but the reptile, with unblinking eyes, stared on with such fixity that I could have sworn her vision penetrated the woman, and the girl's arms to reach at last the very center ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... place I would propound a certain view of the general question of habits. My own private observations in psychology incline me to believe that people vary very much in their power of acquiring habits and in the strength and fixity of the habits they acquire. My most immediate subject of psychological study, for example, is a man of untrustworthy memory who is nearly incapable of a really deep-rooted habit. Nothing is automatic with him. He crams and forgets languages with an equal ease, gives up smoking after fifteen ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the statues as this fact was made known, and each began to wonder how the elegant aristocrat would behave. To say that he stared, feebly expresses the fixity of his noble gaze, as it rested in turn upon the three faces opposite. When satisfied, he also produced a paper and began to read. But Matilda caught a big, black eye peering over the sheet more than once, as she peered over ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... rail and watched them come, still fatalistic, but gallant, bent on a dramatic finish, stooping and 'cutting' their horses. The first man was on her side of the course. She stared at him in amazed consternation as he came towards her. His strong blue eyes, caught by the fixity of her glance or by her bright hair, saw her, and became triumphant. He pulled the horse in sharply, and within a few yards of the winning-post wheeled and went back, amid the jeers and howls of the crowd, who thought he ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... executing vast designs—from the Romans to the English—have been governed by aristocratic institutions. Nor will this be a subject of wonder when we recollect that nothing in the world has so absolute a fixity of purpose as an aristocracy. The mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion; the mind of a king may be biased, and his perseverance in his designs may be shaken—besides which a king is not immortal—but an aristocratic ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... influence of the poet's contemplative mood. The interest of the action in the Philoctetes is more inward and psychological than in any other ancient drama. The change of mind in Neoptolemus, the stubborn fixity of will in Philoctetes, contrasted with the confiding tenderness of his nature, form the elements of a dramatic movement at once extremely simple and wonderfully sustained. No purer ideal of virtuous youth has been imagined ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... impident pups at times, miss," replied Stump, his red eyes no doubt meeting the man's stare with a fixity that might ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... anger of her soul,—a cold, deliberate anger. The obscure and hidden enemy of a man at the pinnacle of glory, she kept her gaze upon him from the depths of her valley and her forests, with relentless fixity; there were times when she thought of killing him in the roads about Malmaison or Saint-Cloud. Plans for the execution of this idea may have been the cause of many of her past actions, but having been ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... placed so far forwards as to be either on the same level with, or actually in front of, the normally anterior pair of limbs; and such fishes are from this circumstance called "thoracic," or "jugular" fishes respectively, as the weaver fishes and the cod. This is a wonderful contrast to the fixity of position of vertebrate limbs generally. If then such a change can have taken place in the comparatively short time occupied by the evolution of these special fish forms, we might certainly expect other and far more bizarre structures ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Union are looking to the Act (the Act providing for territorial separation) to relieve them in two particulars—the first is to give them more land for their stock, and the second is to secure to them fixity of tenure."[29] Regarding the Natives of Rhodesia I am able to say that all the elderly Native men with whom I have spoken about this subject—and I have conversed with a large number—agree that ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... to the remarkable rapidity of decision and fixity of purpose displayed by Curtis in squeezing the breath out of Hermione, and gazing into her eyes until her proud head bent and sought refuge for a glowing face by hiding it on his breast, it will be noted ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going even ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... enough, man did not like it. He was too lordly. For a long time, therefore, he pretended to be fighting for the Bible, when he was really fighting for his own dignity. This was rather hard on the Bible, which has nothing to do with the Aristotelian theory of the fixity of species; though it might seem possible to read back something of the kind into the primitive creation-stories preserved in Genesis. Now-a-days, however, we have mostly got over the first shock to our family pride. We are all Darwinians ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... from it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap. But, for all that, his eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with a thoughtful fixity of gaze. Desprez could not tell whether he was fascinating the boy, or the boy was fascinating him. He busied himself over the sick man, he put questions, he felt the pulse, he jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... generated errors of opposite sorts. Many writers of treatises on Equity, struck with the completeness of the system in its present state, commit themselves expressly or implicitly to the paradoxical assertion that the founders of the chancery jurisprudence contemplated its present fixity of form when they were settling its first bases. Others, again, complain—and this is a grievance frequently observed upon in forensic arguments—that the moral rules enforced by the Court of Chancery fall short of the ethical standard of the present day. They would have each ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... accuracy, and fixity of names, a lessening of procedures that would lead to confusion and error if adequately supported or widely adopted, and a provision for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... point is approached, the impulse to reconstruct the actual—as if the triumph of truth were staked on that venture—dies out. The elaborate contradiction loses interest, earliest where it is most elaborate and circumstantial, and latest where the image has least materiality and fixity, where it is only a reminder of what the actual is securely felt to be, in spite of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... (and yet she could dress herself admirably and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket. It covered her very feet. And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... futility, for nobody denies it. What they really have to do, if they would upset the necessarian argument, is to prove that they are free to associate any emotion whatever with any idea whatever; to like pain as much as pleasure; vice as much as virtue; in short, to prove, that, whatever may be the fixity of order of the universe of things, that of thought ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... such an affection is reasonable, is right and creditable to those who cherish it. Why I refer to this broad fact, which distinguishes the populations of all the four seaward Provinces, as much as it does Lower Canada herself, is, to show the fixity and stability of that population; to show that they are by birth British-Americans; that they can nearly all, of every origin, use that proud phrase when they look daily from their doors, 'This is my own, my native land.' Let but that population and ours come ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... followed the famous Mafia trial, detail by detail, perhaps no one did so with greater fixity of interest than Bernie Dreux. He reveled in it, he talked of nothing else, his waking hours were spent in the courtroom, his dreams were peopled with Sicilian figures. He hung upon Norvin, his hero, with a tenacity that was trying; he discussed ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... then slipped the weapon into her belt, beneath her scapulary. As she closed the panel, and turned back into the chamber, a light of high resolve was in her eyes. Her whole bearing betokened so fine a fearlessness, such noble fixity of purpose that, looking on her, Mary Antony felt her own ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... had to say seemed difficult to decide. She wrote a line, stared out of the window with fixity, and then wrote again—a flurry of quick, decisive strokes as if at determinate pressure. But a sigh struck across her mood, and almost against her will the puzzled crinkle returned to her brow. The curtain blew against her face, disarranging her hair, and as she lifted her hand to put back ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... be by law guaranteed against loss. He would thus no longer need to insure himself against the risk of non-renewal, for the State would have turned this annual license into a freehold property. Then for the first time this dangerous 'Trade' would have obtained that fixity of tenure which it has so long coveted, but which Parliament in its wisdom has always vigorously refused to grant; and the nation, which has already too long suffered under the oppression of the Liquor Traffic with its terrible licensed temptations, would then be permanently crushed under one ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... science of politics has no definite principles, and it can have no fixity; it is the spirit of the hour, the perpetual application of strength proportioned to the necessities of the moment. The man who should foresee two centuries ahead would die on the place of execution, loaded with the imprecations of the mob, or else—which ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... the thought suggested is strong enough to modify organic life and bring about hematic extravasion (stigmata), burnings, vomiting, etc.... In certain ecstatic cases, fixity of thought produces analogous effects. No one who has studied these questions can have the slightest doubt that mind ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... thrown in such a way as to injure any being), manogupti (to remove all false thoughts, to remain satisfied within oneself, and hold all people to be the same in mind), vaggupti (absolute silence), and kayagupti (absolute steadiness and fixity of the body). Five other kinds of caritra ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... he may have discovered nothing—perhaps he is but admiring the sublimity of the landscape. If permitted, he may turn and ride carelessly away in the direction whence he came. Surely it will be possible to judge at the instant of his withdrawing whether he knows. It may well be that his fixity of attention—Druse turned his head and looked through the deeps of air downward, as from the surface to the bottom of a translucent sea. He saw creeping across the green meadow a sinuous line of figures of men and horses—some ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... cargo of furs from Green Bay to Niagara, was a great blow to La Salle, who, from this time until his death, suffered many misfortunes which might well have discouraged one of less indomitable will and fixity of purpose. On the banks of the Illinois River, a little below the present city of Peoria, he built Fort Crevecoeur, probably as a memorial of a famous fort in the Netherlands, not long before captured by ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... unwary step might send him to certain destruction, he had not the slightest sense of possible danger in his position. Withdrawing his eyes from the Fall, he looked kindly down at Sigurd, who in turn was staring up at him with a wild fixity of regard. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... estimate or predict or control, he has sought to solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost mathematical exactness. The peoples ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... nothing in his whitening face to help me to a decision. The look in his eyes was both sad and savage—an expression I could not fathom. For all it said to me, he might be thinking wholly of his wound, or of nothing whatever. The speechless fixity of this gaze embarrassed me. For relief I turned to Enoch, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... volumes of the "irrepressible conflict" between his schemes and the establishment of a peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It is more than this. It is a distinct warning served upon the smallest tenants as well as upon the greatest landlords in the United Kingdom that fixity of any form of individual tenure is irreconcilable with ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the different proofs bear a reference, by which the fixity and durability of the colour with which a stuff has been dyed may be tried. Of these, some may be called natural, other artificial. The natural proof consists in exposing the dyed stuff to the air, sun, and rain. If the colour is not changed by this exposure in twelve or fourteen ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... his bedroom, shut in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read "Don Juan." He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... had arisen since that Visit of George I., discordant procedures, chiefly about Friedrich Wilhelm's recruiting operations in the Hanover territory, as shall be noted by and by: but these the ever-wakeful enthusiasm of Queen Sophie, who had set her whole heart with a female fixity on this Double-Marriage Project, had smoothed down again: and now, Papa and Husband being so blessedly united in their World Politics, why not sign the Marriage-Treaty? Honored Majesty-Papa, why not!—"Tush, child, you ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of a thrashing, however, the student must cultivate as best he can an intense fixity of perception upon every fact or word or date that he wishes to make permanently his own. It is easy. It is a matter of habit. If you will, you can photograph an idea upon your cerebral gelatine so that neither years nor events will blot it out or overlay it. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... She was at once helpless before his mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and gloated, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the Aquarium, seeing the flat heads of the swimming animals near the glass, would scream and wave their arms as though they could be seen by the fishy eyes of stupid fixity. Then they would experience a certain dismay upon perceiving that the fish ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... This delicately painted surface acts as a register of the minutest differences of organization—a shade of colour, an additional streak or spot, a slight modification of outline continually recurring with the greatest regularity and fixity, while the body and all its other members exhibit no appreciable change. The wings of Butterflies, as Mr. Bates has well put it, "serve as a tablet on which Nature writes the story of the modifications of species;" they enable us to perceive changes that would otherwise be uncertain and difficult ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... could almost have accomplished prodigies and removed mountains. It is impossible to study the life of General Jackson without being convinced that this is the most remarkable feature of his character. His will had, as it were, the force and the fixity of fate; that will carried him triumphantly through his military and civil career, and through the difficulties of private life. So intense and incessantly active this peculiar faculty was in him, that one would suppose that his mind was nothing but will—a will so lofty that it towered into ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... been ignorant. Perhaps it was the unspeakable anguish of it that struck through Kimberlin's sympathies. The young man came to an uncertain halt and stared at the stranger. At first he was unseen, for the stranger looked straight out into the street with singular fixity, and the death-like pallor of his face added a weirdness to the immobility of his gaze. Then he took ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... to see the world. She was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and in a wheedling undertone, with a continual snaky writhing of her whole body, except her eye, which seemed, in the intense fixity of its glare, to act as a fulcrum for all her limbs; and from that eye, as long as it kept its mysterious ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... habit-forming experiences of stimulus and response. The very process of adaptation, therefore, tends toward fixity and to destroy adaptability. It is thus the task of education, as it is of life, to replace the native, inexperienced and physiological plasticity of youth with some product of experience which shall be able to revise habits in the interest of new situations. The adaptability ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the desired result. The Protestants enjoyed the faculty of self-government, and their great writers and scholars were free to influence opinion by their writings. While the stubborn fixity of German Lutherans and Swiss Calvinists lifted them out of the stream of actual history, French Protestantism, like English, was full of growth and originality. The law of the new government was to ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... was less than ten paces off, the old man did not turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism, more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing at the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... machinery. The constitutions, strict as they appeared, imposed no barriers upon his will; for almost unlimited power was surrendered to him of dispensing with formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening or lengthening the periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career. Ideal fixity of type, qualified by the utmost elasticity in practice, formed the essence of the system. And we shall see that this principle pervaded the Jesuit treatment of morality. The General resided at Rome, consecrated solely to the government of the Society, holding the threads of all its ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... face of an old woman staring down at me from a semicircular opening in the gable of the adjoining house. An ordinary circumstance in itself, but made extraordinary by the fixity of her gaze, which was leveled straight on mine, and the uncommon expression of breathless eagerness which gave force to her otherwise commonplace features. So remarkable was this expression and so apparently was it directed against myself, that ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... he gave preference to the latter. Now the essence of his nature was to take strong views; not hastily—if he could help it—nor through narrow aspect of prejudice, but with power of insight (right or wrong), and stern fixity thereafter. He had kept his opinion about Sir Duncan Yordas much longer than usual pending, being struck with the fame of the man, and his manner, and generous impulsive nature. All these he still admired, but felt that the mind was far too hasty, and, to put it in his own strong ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... thought constitutes Samadhi or meditation. These theses may perhaps be interpreted as indicative of an aversion to metaphysics and the supernatural. A saint has not undergone any supernatural transformation but has merely reached a level from which he can fall: meditation is simply fixity of attention, not a mystic trance. In virtue of the first doctrine European writers often speak of the Sarvastivadins as realists but their peculiar view concerned not so much the question of objective reality as ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... took out Stevenson's New Arabian Nights; but he found he could not read: the words meant nothing to him, and he continued to brood over his helplessness. He kept on thinking the same things all the time, and the fixity of his thoughts made his head ache. At last, craving for fresh air, he went into the Green Park and lay down on the grass. He thought miserably of his deformity, which made it impossible for him to go to the war. He went to sleep and dreamt that he was suddenly sound of foot and out at the Cape in ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... alone, after inquiring into the girl's parentage, had just begun to suspect a simple state of auto-suggestion, in which she had obstinately remained ever since the first violent shock of pain; and among the reasons which he gave for this belief were the contraction of her visual field, the fixity of her eyes, the absorbed, inattentive expression of her face, and above all the nature of the pain she felt, which, leaving the organ, had borne to the left, where it continued in the form of a crushing, intolerable ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Lawson's career—a most unwelcome task—the writer has detected a continuity of purpose, a fixity of design, a uniformity of method pervading his every public act. What he is doing now, i.e., exposing somebody or something, he has repeatedly done on a lesser scale in the past; not from worthy motives, but for the sole purpose of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... have come before the law courts relating to sextons and their election and appointment. He does not usually hold the same fixity of tenure as the parish clerk, he being a servant of the parish rather than an officer or one that has a freehold in his place; but in some cases a sexton has determined his right to hold the office for life, and gained a mandamus from the court to be restored to his position ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... to all the agents in which the general have been found. They depend on the degree of fixity of the substance. A number of the anesthetics are irritating for the skin; chloroform in particular. According to Dr. Aran, the best agent for topical use is ether chlorhydique chlore. This is efficacious in a few minutes. Monsieur Recamier has submitted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... toward the drawing-room and as we did so we passed the library. It held but one occupant, the Englishman. He was seated before a table, and his appearance was such as precluded any attempt at intrusion, even if one had been so disposed. There was a fixity in his gaze and a frown on his powerful forehead which bespoke a mind greatly agitated. It was not for me to read that mind, much as it interested me, and I passed on, chatting, as if I had not the ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... stars. Stars are allowed to drift across the field of vision, and as each star crosses a small group of parallel wires in the eye-piece its precise time of passage is recorded. Owing to their relative fixity of position these instruments can be constructed to record the positions of stars with much greater accuracy than is possible to the more general and flexible mounting of equatorials. The recording of transit ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... can spare a minute from more important matters, slip beyond the hurrying white city, climb the golf links, and gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds disturbs you by the fixity of its outline. It is the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good day, it is said, they are visible twice as far, so clear and serene is this air. Five hundred miles west is the coast of British Columbia, a region ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... to search outside the world in which he dwells for beings who may procure him a happiness that nature refuses to grant; let him study that nature, let him learn her laws, and contemplate the energy and the unchanging fixity with which she acts; let him apply his discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from which nothing can withdraw him; let him consent to ignore the causes, surrounded as they are for him by an impenetrable veil; let him undergo ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... me in that WOMAN, as I will call her, was her extreme height and the breadth of her bony shoulders. Then, the roundness and fixity of her dry, owl-eyes, the enormous size of her protruding nose, and the great dark cavern of her mouth. Finally, her dress, like that of a young woman of Avapies—the new little cotton handkerchief which she wore on her head, tied under her ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... ripple of the river among its stones. Insomnia had him in his fierce jaws, gnawing him with interminable agony. He turned on the light several times, but was not able to read. His eyes looked with stupid fixity at the patterns of the wall paper and the pious pictures around the room which had evidently served as the lodging place of some rich traveller. He remained motionless and as abstracted as an Oriental who thinks himself into an absolute lack of thought. One idea only was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Maria Vittoria did not change her attitude, nor for a while did she answer, but the tears gathered in her eyes and welled over. They ran down her cheeks; she did not wipe them away, she did not sob, nor did her face alter from its fixity. She did not even close her eyes. Only the tears rained down so silently that the Prince was not aware of them. He had even a thought as he sat with his head averted that she might have shown a trifle more of distress, and it was almost with a reproach upon his lips that he turned to her. Never ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married Bothwell?" asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating fixity. "You have it all—all there. Marie got tired of the smooth people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk, and peril, and the grand emotions ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... seemed ready to devour every syllable the comte was about to pronounce. They coughed, drew closer together, looked curiously at some of the maids of honor, who, in order to support with greater propriety, or with more steadiness, the fixity of the inquisitorial looks bent upon them, adjusted their fans accordingly, and assumed the bearing of a duelist about to be exposed to his adversary's fire. At this epoch, the fashion of ingeniously constructed conversations, and hazardously dangerous recitals, so ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... character among Semitic nations have been summed up by one writer under five heads:—1. Pliability combined with iron fixity of purpose; 2. Depth and force; 3. A yearning for dreamy ease; 4. Capacity for the hardest work; and 5. Love of abstract thought.[33] Another has thought to find them in the following list:—1. An intuitive monotheism; 2. Intolerance; 3. Prophetism; 4. Want of the philisophic and scientific faculties; ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... forth from under a brow wide and high, with soft brown hair brushed loosely back; with lips often parted in a radiant smile, discovering small white teeth and regular, but lips which were at times firmly closed with a fixity of purpose such as would warn off unwarrantable opposition or objections from less bold workers. Those clear eyes had a peculiar power of withdrawing on rare occasions, as it were, behind a curtain when their owner desired ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... recognise that he and she were very differently constituted. Of course, she knew that he was infinitely her superior, and indeed that of most people. Like everybody else she admired his uprightness, his fixity of purpose and his devouring energy and believed him to be destined to great things. Still, to tell the truth, which she often confessed with penitence upon her knees, on the whole she felt happier, or at any rate more comfortable, during his occasional absences to ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... affected him curiously, and leaning back in his chair he glanced round the room. Like the rest of the great building in which he had his quarters, it was sumptuously furnished, but everything was aggressively new. There was, he felt, little that suggested fixity of tenure and continuity in the West; the times changed too rapidly, people came and went, alert, feverishly bustling, optimistic. In the old land, his friends among the favored few dwelt with marked English calm in homes that had apparently been built to ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... similar position to his own brother. As Crown Prince, he had desired and had won popularity; he had been even too sensitive to public opinion. His, however, was a character that required only responsibility to strengthen it; with the burden of sovereignty he would, we may suppose, have shewn a fixity of purpose which many of his admirers would hardly have expected of him, nor would he have been deficient in those qualities of a ruler which are the traditions of his family. He was not a man to surrender any of the prerogatives ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the existing tribes have exhibited such a fixity and peculiarity of character, as to have rendered them at once a paradox and a bye-word. The Turk has not been more inflexible; nor the Jew shown more individuality. We have hardly begun systematically to examine this subject. If the ancient builders were nomads—mere hunters of the bear, ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... evolution, so far as the present physical cosmos is concerned, postulates the fixity of the rules of operation of the causes of motion in the material universe. If all kinds of matter are modifications of one kind, and if all modes of motion are derived from the same energy, the orderly evolution of physical nature out of one substratum and one energy implies ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... dozen men in civilian dress-the members of the Provisional Government. First came Kishkin, his face drawn and pale, then Rutenberg, looking sullenly at the floor; Terestchenko was next, glancing sharply around; he stared at us with cold fixity.... They passed in silence; the victorious insurrectionists crowded to see, but there were only a few angry mutterings. It was only later that we learned how the people in the street wanted to lynch them, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... soft calm, now passing by in mild breezes. The alternation of summer and winter is to us generally an agreeable relief from the monotony of a uniform climate. The variation from sunlight to cloud, from dry weather to rainfall, is equally viewed as a pleasant escape from the weariness of too great fixity of natural conditions. The change from day to night, from hours of activity to hours of slumber, are other agreeable variations in the events of our daily life. In short, a great pendulum seems to be swinging above us, held in Nature's ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... essential difference between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transitu. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... a heavy shadow of something more than thought—for it was, in truth, deep, real, heartfelt melancholy, which lent an added gloom to the cold fixity of eye and lip, which had obliterated all the gay and gleeful flashes which used, from moment to moment, to light up the countenance so speaking and so frank ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... might compare these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed, to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty; their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did them honor. The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of faithfulness. The distance that they set between themselves and the bourgeoisie, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation, and enhanced their value. Each noble ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that subtle, scornful change in other women, and reviled herself for heeding it. But in some way this girl's manner hurt her worst of all. She betrayed no sign, however, save a widening of the eyes and a certain fixity of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... them what they will not support, our conclusion may be erroneous. But a case, perhaps even more frequent, is that in which the error arises from not conceiving our premises with due clearness, that is (as shown in the preceding Book(229)), with due fixity: forming one conception of our evidence when we collect or receive it, and another when we make use of it; or unadvisedly, and in general unconsciously, substituting, as we proceed, different premises in the place of those with which we set out, or a different conclusion for ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... asked her to leave him alone. In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself. He would have liked to sleep—not to die; he held death in horror—but to sleep and never to wake again. Yet, before him, as desirable as formerly, despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more mysterious than ever, he saw her. His hatred was vivified ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... factors, the leaders of the respective association and the leaders of the classes. The personnel of the student body is also a factor. It is among the things natural that from time to time changes in the personnel of the student body bring changes of interest and there is no guarantee of fixity so far as numbers are concerned. It is the ideal of the Central Associations to have the classes sustained each year with an increased efficiency, but all of the institutions testify to the fluctuation ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... down my glass upon the table, and rising slowly from the chair in which I had been seated, stared fixedly at my companion, who was staring with equal fixity at me. I could see that I had not been deluded; Nayland Smith had heard ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... twofold activity with the box of fondants and the pocket-portfolio of secret papers, and held a letter long and steadily before her eyes. Again the old gentleman opposite turned to the landscape of fields on his right, and his loose lips worked ominously. The fixity of those keen eyes with their tell-tale slight inward squint, as she studied the letter, proved too much for him, particularly when she began to smile; and his glance wandered desperately to the country he was traversing, in the cool, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... had an idea she might not come so badly off on trial. But even if the King's Majesty had been of clement disposition, which he never was, or if her judges had been likely to be moved by her youth and beauty, there was evidence of such premeditation, such fixity of purpose, as would no doubt harden the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... out round the circle. All the eyes were trained on him, some with a wide, expectant fixity, others bright with combative fire. Even Glen sat up, scratching his head, and remarking sotto voce to ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... rest; stillness &c. adj.; quiescence; stagnation, stagnancy; fixity, immobility, catalepsy; indisturbance[obs3]; quietism. quiet, tranquility, calm; repose &c. 687; peace; dead calm, anticyclone|!; statue-like repose; silence &c. 203; not a breath of air, not a mouse stirring; sleep ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
