"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was disturbed only by the turning of Miss Gallifer's pages. It might have been three o'clock. Once more Barbara was lost in the unaccustomed hush, her eyes fixed on the white face on the pillow, in almost hypnotic restfulness. The pushing open of the door behind was so soft that she didn't notice. Miss Gallifer ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... suggestion! And she had followed it blindly—unawares, leading Hugh Renwick into this deadly trap which Goritz had laid. She read the plan now in all its insidious perfection. There was something malign—hypnotic—in an influence which could so easily compel compliance. And Hugh? She had written him to come here—to the door in the court below, where men would be waiting—perhaps to take his life. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States. Those papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse, can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their attention to any particular ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a person who had rights over her—a tone which before he had been more willing ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Martian's tone made the Professor desist, and after watching his visitor sway up the stairs with an almost hypnotic softly jogging movement, he rejoined his wife in the study, saying wonderingly, "Who'd have thought it, by George! Function taboos as strict ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually exist is a question we need not determine. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... you or your boasts," remarked Alixe, in her most conventionally amused manner. "You are trying to scare me, and with this hypnotic joke about Richard you have only hypnotized yourself. I mean to tell Mr. Van Kuyp every bit of our conversation. I'm not frightened by your vampire tales. You critics are only shadows ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... observe men of genius when they had scarce reached the age of puberty; they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noticed among all a strange apathy for everything which does not concern them; as though, plunged in the hypnotic condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed them, they grew tender, at once hastening to attend them; but it was a fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave place to indifference ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... psychology: it has proved that special precautionary measures must be taken in planning psychological experiments. The training of hypnotics has thrown light on this source of error. A hypnotizer may, often without knowing it, by the tone of his voice or by some slight movement cause the hypnotic to exhibit phenomena that at first could only be produced by explicit verbal suggestion, and that altogether the signs used by the hypnotizer to cause suggestions may go on increasing in delicacy. A ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some night creature—at once the yellow ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... rapid rotation had brought the earth almost to the zenith, the little point shining with the unmistakably steady ray of a planet. Huge bats fluttered about him, and the great cloud-masses swept across the sky, being part of Saturn's ceaseless whirl. He found he was in a hypnotic or spiritualistic state, for it was not necessary for him to have his eyes open to know where he was. In passing one of the pools they had noticed, he observed that the upper and previously invisible liquid had the bright ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... more than I could bear. My senses swam, but I still tore at the hand and forced it out from my chin. Looking up I saw a frightful face with cold inexorable light blue eyes looking down into mine. There was something hypnotic in those terrible eyes. I could struggle no longer. As the creature felt me grow limp in his grasp, two white canines gleamed for a moment at each side of the vile mouth, and the grip tightened still more upon my chin, forcing it always upwards ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stakes—wins dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning. Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some "wily Vivien" even now, and laying foolish ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... door, as much to get his eyes away from the hypnotic swaying of Hippolyte as to resume his watch for his father. The negro's reference to "queer things" had added to the ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... hypnotic influence must have stolen up from her ladyship's room on the floor below, and along the corridor to mine, for I found myself thinking: "She rather likes me, and can be useful, if she dominates the two girls in this way. I must do my best to ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Gallery was admitted, on the third day, the gaping Spectators observed that the Youngun had an open Countenance, somewhat like a Channel Cat, a full head of Hair bushing at the nape of the neck, and a hypnotic Eye; so they knew he was destined for the Service ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... painted to resemble marble. Crouched upon a rug in one corner was a life-size figure of what seemed to be a tiger, perfectly colored and made of porcelain. It had tremendous glass eyes, larger even than the cousin's from Guatemala, and they shone with a hypnotic intensity that was disturbing. Kirk wanted to kick it and cry "Scat!" Hidden in other desolate quarters of the room were similar studies in animal life. These anomalous surroundings by turns depressed him and provoked an insane ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... poor Gilmartin said: "I've changed my mind about Newport. I guess I'll spend the summer on my own Hotel de Roof!" And he grinned; but he grinned alone. Wilson, the dry goods man, who laughed so joyously at everybody's jokes, was now watching, as if under a hypnotic spell, the lips of the man who sat on the high stool beside the ticker and called out the prices to the quotation boy. Now and again Wilson's own lips made curious grimaces, as if speaking to himself. ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... chance coincidence) forecast the future. All these things, except the last, are familiar to everybody who dreams. It is also certain that similar, but yet more vivid, false experiences may be produced, at the word of the hypnotiser, in persons under the hypnotic sleep. A hypnotised man will take water for wine, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... same time another friend and political booster; for Phil was quick to appreciate the kindliness of this sturdy, pioneering type of man and he felt drawn to him by that strange, attractive sub-conscious essence which flows from all who are born to lead, an hypnotic current which is one of the first essentials of all men who can ever hope successfully to carry out any good or big undertaking for, or with, their fellow men; the ability with the triple qualities—to interest, to attract, to hold,—making one feel that it is good ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... few references to the originals of the characters in the novel, and to the hypnotic experiments in which Du Maurier was interested in his youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about the nothings that make up the joy of living to madcap ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... break down under me. My baton will beat avay all dese faces and fancies. Out with your violin! [He taps his umbrella imperiously on the table.] Keinen Mut verlieren! [DAVID takes out his violin from its case and puts it to his shoulder, PAPPELMEISTER keeping up a hypnotic torrent of encouraging German cries.] Also! Fertig! Anfangen! [He raises and waves his umbrella like a baton.] Von, dwo, ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... could be elected to a seat in the Legislature from Lowndes County as a Democrat, must be endowed with some strange and hidden power through the exercise of which he could direct the movements and control the actions of those who might be brought in contact with him or subjected to his hypnotic influence; hence the anxiety and curiosity to hear the maiden speech of this strange and remarkable man. The voice in the House of a Democrat from the county of Lowndes was of so strange, so sudden, so unexpected and ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... had become the victim of the hypnotic power of Tushegoun Lama; but I preferred this to seeing an innocent Mongolian die, for I had not believed that Tushegoun Lama, after slashing open the bodies of his victims, could repair them again ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... by the grasshoppers and looked like the top of an old rusty stove. But Stephen was a broadminded man, wise enough to know that the pest of grasshoppers could not last forever. He was greatly impressed with the ultimate possibilities of the soil and, under the hypnotic influence of Hill's eloquence, became quite enthusiastic over the scheme for getting hold of the railroad; but, as it would evidently involve millions, he didn't see how ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... ideal future? Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great! Each of the three content in that station of life into which—! What more could a country want? Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great! The phrase had a certain hypnotic value. Why trouble? Why fuss? Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great! A perfect land! A land dedicate to the week-end! Gardeners, goose—! And suddenly he saw that he was not alone. Half hidden by the angle of the wall, on a stone of the foundations, carefully preserved ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... laugh"—she did not laugh—"that some day, somewhere else, if not here, I'd have to make that beginning, to be something myself. Remember that old Hindu fellow with a red turban who sat on your front lawn, beneath the palms, and had the women gathered around him in a kind of hypnotic state? He said something like that—I thought him an old fakir at the time. He used a lot of flowery language, but I guess, boiled down, it meant start at the bottom of the ladder. Build yourself up, the way my father did," with a certain ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... me was almost hypnotic, that it was you I really cared for, as I realized as soon as Sara was hurt. If only you had had the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... horrible fascination about a ship's concert, something hypnotic that draws you, very much against your ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... six victims in all stages of induced catalepsy, one man with head flung back, one with his hands pointing, fixed in furious appeal. Another with bowed head was being worked upon by a brother of hypnotic appeal. He struck with downward, positive gestures on either side ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... few minutes the stranger had put several startling facts into my possession. Of these the most important were that on at least four occasions Connie Stapleton had deliberately exercised a hypnotic control over Dulcie, and thus obtained even greater influence over her than she already possessed; that Jack Osborne, whom I had always believed to be wholly unsusceptible to female influence, was fast falling in love, or, if not ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... it—to come closer to our theme—that the round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of the flying ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... into her big, soft-blue eyes with his dark, vigorous brown ones. A flash that was hypnotic, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... it assumes the reality of certain religious experiences and treats them as the substance and occupation of the highest life. We are disposed to describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally mean something morbid or hypnotic. But in India their validity is unquestioned and they are not considered morbid. The sensual scheming life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is the true and healthy life of the soul. More than that it is the type and foretaste of a higher existence compared ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Francis, Jeanne rose and started forward; she was a poor creature torn by passions, to whom the images of celestial peace, grown rigid on the sacred walls, called in vain. All before her was silence and void. She was following paths unknown to her, swiftly, securely, as one in an hypnotic trance. She passed through dark and narrow places, through light and broad places, never hesitating, never looking to right or left, all her senses sharpened and concentrated in her hearing, following little sounds of distant whisperings, the faint complaining of one door, the breath ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... fever," and devised a scheme of Japanese decorations for the doors of the chalet which her husband thought might be made to produce a lot of money if they were nearer London. One of the panels had a woman yawning over a fire in the early morning, and the hypnotic effect of it kept the family and their guests yawning their heads off, so that Mrs. Stevenson decided the sleepy lady would be better ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... on her capital of experience, no longer renewing her life, and her renderings had lost that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion no longer the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... me to decide whether I should write in one verse "a flimsy shift" or "a filmy shift" or other versions, and her opinion on "flimsy" decided me. She is the only person that ever had anything to do with it—as far as I know! What hypnotic influences were at work or what astral minds may have intervened, I know not. But I have always thought I did it all. It was not much to do, except for a certain 17th Century ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... the after-play had been allowed to run its course, Farrel told the Pornsens to go into the next room and shower. They came back soon, looking refreshed. Farrel ordered them to get back into their clothes. Under the power of the hypnotic drug which their chairs had injected into them at the touch of the button, they did so. Then he told them to sit down in ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... meditations, symbols, ceremonies, and formulas, to awaken this force and produce false "Illumination" for the purpose of obtaining "Spiritual Seership," which is at most clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc. The ceremonies of the Order are hypnotic, and by suggestion create the necessary mental and astral atmosphere, hypnotize and prepare the members to be the willing tools in the hands of the controlling adepts. The same initiate has communicated to me the following conclusions ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Clairvoyant Reverie may be safely and effectively induced by mental concentration alone. Artificial methods dangerous, and not advised by best authorities. Abnormal conditions not desirable. The "one pointed" mind. The Clairvoyant "day dream" or "brown study." False "psychic development." Use of hypnotic drugs strongly condemned. Scientific psychological methods stated and taught. The laws of attention and concentration of the mind. How Clairvoyance develops by this method. The true occult ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... measured beat of his footfall had not ceased. There was something hypnotic in the regular tread. Nature at last exacted its toll from the boy. ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... was still at his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . . There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . . The father's sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable depression, without his ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... this hypnotic influence may be, it is not the chief nor the most pernicious activity of the Church. The chief and most pernicious work of the Church is that which is directed to the deception of children—these very children of whom Christ said: "Woe to him ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... perplexed. Should she allow him to go out in this hypnotic state? Could she exercise her art in Alderson's presence? While she debated, Mr. Brassfield airily bowed himself out, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... her half-hypnotic gaze, in time to see Colonel Von Ritz bending over her hand. With recognition, Benton started up, then his jaw dropped and, doubting his own sanity, he fell back into his chair and sat gazing with ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... foreign accent, for how much I would sell Mephisto. The artist protested, but she turned on him and gave him a tongue lashing of which I could guess the meaning, although the words were unintelligible to me. I couldn't quite grasp the situation, but the strange hypnotic power which the bear apparently exercised over cats had excited my curiosity, and I wished to investigate it at my leisure, so I politely but positively refused to name a price, and told her the animal was not for sale. The artist seemed relieved ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called Umslopogaas ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... authority than Professor Sznuysko that the Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public, writing between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. Smith's devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held by some critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to his undying honor that his Employers never suffered from such carelessness, for it was the custom of ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... now too busy with the clock to take heed of her, paused for a moment or so, as if undecided what to do next, and then slowly began to veer round. But the faint echo of a voice below, calling her by name, broke the hypnotic spell that bound Diana to the floor, and with a frantic spring she cleared the threshold of the room. She then tore madly downstairs, never halting till she reached the dining-room, where she sank on a sofa, and, more dead than alive, panted out to her amazed sisters a full ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... is that of Madame B., a peasant woman near Cherbourg. She has her common work-a-day personality, called, for convenience, 'Leonie.' There is also her hypnotic personality, 'Leontine.' Now Leontine (that is, Madame B. in a somnambulistic state) was one day hysterical and troublesome. Suddenly she exclaimed in terror that she heard A VOICE ON THE LEFT, crying, 'Enough, be quiet, you are a nuisance.' She hunted in vain ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... the evil one sneaked on to the happy hearth-rug—they took the strangers into their arms. They were all young; and, moreover, human. What could they do when the failings of their ancestors of a million years took them in an iron grip and led them in a hypnotic spell toward the brink of ruin? They were as helpless as the Liberals in B.C. politics in the year 1912. We have often quoted that every one must love one of the opposite sex at least once in a lifetime, and our hero and heroine were not immune from this stern gravitation law, because ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... comparison. Just so: the Germans are heated too, and they no longer see clearly. And we must never forget that they have had long training in obedience to government. There are not wanting English politicians who would like to see similar training introduced here. It leads however to the hypnotic response of which Colonel Maude has written interestingly in his "War and the World's Life." The Government in Germany called for the defence of the Fatherland, the Government declared the invasion of Belgium as unavoidable. The hypnotic response followed, but at least twenty-four members ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd surges toward ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... of the God of the Christians," said Koda Bux, very slowly, and approaching him with an almost hypnotic stare in his eyes, "in that book it is written that the chief God of the Christians will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. This woman bore you a daughter; your lawful wife bore you a son. The ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... the Havre Lycee, and Monsieur Gibert, a physician, selected as a subject for their observation a certain woman, a native of Brittany. She was fifty years old, robust, and moderately sensitive to hypnotic influences. On October 10, 1885, they agreed ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... eyes to rest, as if absently, upon him. I may say now that a curious chill seized me, bringing with it a sudden psychic warning that all was not going to be as it should be. Some calamity impended. The man was quite apparently fascinated, staring with a fixed, hypnotic intensity that had already been noted by his ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... above was low and sloping. From the straggling yellow hair it slanted down to brows that overhung deep-sunk and cavernous eyes.... And when Danny O'Rourke's own curious eyes met those of the stranger, they were held in a grip that was almost hypnotic. ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... circus-poster. If you had taken up a certain play, you considered it the greatest play that had ever made its bow to Broadway; and you actually persuaded yourself to believe it—at least those who made the real successes were men who possessed that hypnotic power. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... some hypnotic influence stronger than his will, Henry Nelson took up the pen and signed his name waveringly. The next moment Gray smote the door to Briskow's office a heavy blow and, as it flew open, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... incessantly, apparently prevented the snake from darting at me, as it was, no doubt, under the hypnotic influence of its master. But I knew that the moment the music ceased it ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... Kammacher!" she cried in slight alarm, and fixed her shimmering sea-green eyes upon the man standing there with eyes almost closed, breathing heavily, incapable of uttering a word. As by hypnotic influence, a helpless look of self-abandonment, of complete melting away ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the latest authority on hypnotism that no person even in hypnotic sleep could be influenced by another to do what was ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... the point of a cambric needle for half an hour might indicate a very laudable power of concentration; but the process, instead of enlightening us concerning the point of the needle, would result in our passing into a hypnotic state. Voluntary attention to any one object can be sustained for but a brief time—a few seconds at best. It is essential that the object change, that we turn it over and over incessantly, and consider its various aspects and relations. Sustained voluntary attention ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its instrument of expression—a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought and will of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... expedients. Instead of years of study, candidates had substituted a few weeks of trances, and during the trances expert coaches had simply to repeat all the points necessary for adequate answering, adding a suggestion of the post hypnotic recollection of these points. In process mathematics particularly, this aid had been of singular service, and it was now invariably invoked by such players of chess and games of manual dexterity as were ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and infinite tact could know. But she never had dreamed that he could be enmeshed by the wiles of the wife of his friend. The crux of the whole matter lay in the possibility of saving him, not only from Eva's hypnotic charm, but from the less intricate and more thinly concealed machinations of Mr. Moore. Winifred felt her first smart of anger revive toward Mrs. Latimer as she recalled how ingenuously Charlie had been led to the juggernaut of ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... brought the pinchers deliberately together and sawed one across the other, producing a rasping sound which was almost a vibration in the air. Back and forth, back and forth, moved the claws. Watching them produced almost a hypnotic effect, and the reason for such a maneuver was totally ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... done that. There could be no question at all upon the point. For me hypnotic suggestion was finally established. It took its place from now onward as one of the facts of life. That Agatha, who of all women of my acquaintance has the best balanced mind, had been reduced to a condition of automatism appeared to be certain. A person at a distance ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in his veins was creeping a molten fire, and the fire was beginning to glow dully in his eye. Her whole being called him. His heart leaped, his breath came fast, his eyes swam. With almost hypnotic fascination the idea obsessed him—to kiss her lips, to press the soft body of the young girl, to tumble her hair down about her flower face. He had not come for this. He tried to steady himself, and by an effort that left him weak he succeeded. Then a new flood ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... would do no good. All witnesses in Brotherhood court actions were examined under psychoprobe, and a hypnotic was of no value against a lie detector that could extract the deepest buried truth. And he would be examined too. The truth would out—and nothing would be gained. In fact—everything would be lost. The attempt at trickery would prejudice any court ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... a heavy table, and Derby stood near her with his hands in his pockets and his attention engrossed on the floor. Both seemed incapable of speaking or moving, as though a hypnotic spell had fallen upon them. Twice, while her aunt and uncle were in the room, Derby had looked at her with an expression that set Nina's heart beating, but now they were alone it had entirely vanished and he kept his head persistently turned away. She wondered how she could ever have failed ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... few minutes he was absorbed, as only Dumas has power to absorb his readers. The man of action in that great romancer exercised a sort of hypnotic power over Flint. The robust virility passed into the sinew of his soul. The romance possessed him utterly, and left him without even the power to criticise. It was he himself who stood in Queen Catherine's box, and watched the spouting ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the hypnotic to-and-fro of those swaying, poised, alert human figures, he encountered Marise, coming on her suddenly, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... he must cure, and as there are many remedies for insomnia, he tried those which, it seemed to him, were suitable to his case; but bromide of potassium, in spite of its hypnotic properties, produced no more effect than the over-working of the brain and body. When he realized this he replaced it with chloral; but chloral, which should create a desire to sleep, after several days had no more effect than the bromide. Then ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... into a ghostly night that laid pale hands upon the island, holding it closely, softly, in a hypnotic grasp, bidding it surely rest, it and those who dwelled there with all the dreaming hours. A mist hung over the sea, and the heat did not go with day, but stayed to greet the darkness and the strange, enormous ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... as yet about those psychological methods which themselves introduce abnormal mental states like hypnotism, and which also not seldom are only means for diagnostic purposes. The hypnotic state may bring to memory forgotten experiences of which the physiological effects may have lasted in the brain and which may have brought injury to the psychophysical system. Hypnotic inquiry can thus lead to the recognition of the first causes in ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... impressions. It was true that the PREMIER did not physically resemble an Arab sheikh, and his knowledge of medicine, science or philosophy, to say nothing of geography, was decidedly jejune, but the sad case of President WILSON made it all too clear that he was capable of exerting a hypnotic influence on his colleagues. Mr. KEYNES did not think Mr. LLOYD GEORGE was an Aristotelian; he preferred to consider him an unconscious Pragmatist. This view he proposed to develop in his forthcoming volume on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... consciousness with the bewildered air of people who come out of an hypnotic sleep. They opened their eyes and looked about them in astonishment. Ganimard ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... from the first floor parlour window, nor even the contemplation of the remarkable sacred pictures that adorned its walls, had the interest they might have held earlier in the day, and the dirty cruet-stand on the dirtier tablecloth was endued with an almost hypnotic fascination in its suggestion of coming sustenance. At the end of the first hour a stupor verging on indifference had set in; it was far on in the second when the dish of fried mutton chops, the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... him, the sound of his voice and the mention of the Red Lodge had been sufficient to penetrate that stupor. She was sitting bolt upright, a ghastly, trembling specter. Slowly a smile seemed to creep over the cruel face of the mystic. Was it not a recognition of his hypnotic power? ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... her husband was still more terrible. Notwithstanding his zeal, and the fact that he had given evidence against his own wife, he was arrested, charged with a similar offense. Whether hypnotic influences were exerted, or whether the examining justices merely imagined things against the prisoner, cannot be known at this time. The court records, however, state that while the witnesses were on the stand, they were so badly afflicted with fits and hurts, that the prisoner's hands ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... by the strange, hypnotic power of the mystical Father Gapon, who was clad in the robes of his office, tens of thousands of working-people marched that day to the Winter Palace, confident that the Czar would see them, receive their ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... anything in this hypothesis, the growing-pains of that late-blooming conscience were soon enough numbed by the hypnotic spell of clattering chips, an ivory ball singing in an ebony race, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... with a subject concerning which his knowledge is superficial, I shall not undertake to pronounce upon the validity of the theory which is here advanced. The play is an inquiry into the significance and authenticity of miracles. Incidentally the theme is faith-healing, the hypnotic effect of prayer, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... he sings. Mark the almost hypnotic hold he has over them; not only over pit and gallery but over stalls as well, and the well-groomed loungers who have just dropped in. I defy any sane person to listen to "Watcher, me Old Brown Son!" without chortles ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... voice of a woman; but in this place, under these exciting circumstances, it seemed the voice of a supernatural being. It almost sang the words; it was like a silver bugle calling across a battle-field—glorious, thrilling, hypnotic. "Make way-y-y-y for the Grand Imperial Kle-e-e-agle of the Ku-u Klux Klan!" Every one was startled; but I think I was startled more that the rest, for I knew the voice! Mary Magna had taken ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... intrusion and went out. Officially there was no basement-room, nor, from the restaurant itself, any sign of stairs which led down to an underground chamber. He made a further reconnaissance, and found the back door which Sophia Kensky had described in her hypnotic sleep, and the location of which the old man had endeavoured to convey to ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr. Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I will open ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... "Hypnotic business! Wonder if it will work," whispered Bickley. Then he lifted the syringe and looked inquiringly at the man, who shook his head, and went ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... helpful and half obstructive, and he will find still other movements and developments which set quite in the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and death ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all the strength ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... his brown eyes, and his iron-gray beard sparkled with it. His presence in a sick-room seemed to fill it with waves of life, and his influence over the patients to whom he ministered was little short of hypnotic. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... at his men for the answer, but their eyes were still fastened on the wreck with almost hypnotic fascination. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... expectant. They loved each other dearly, yet here was one moment where self-interest must prevail. Charles fixed the doorkeeper with his hypnotic smile, and he was chosen. Almost without hearing the injunction to report at seven o'clock, Charles ran back to the store, well-nigh breathless with expectancy over the coming event. With that family feeling which has marked the Frohmans throughout their whole life, Gustave ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... nobody could understand it. The doctor treated him for water on the brain, hypnotic irresponsibility and hereditary lunacy. Meanwhile his business suffered, and his health grew worse. He seemed to be living upside down. His days seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but to be all middle. There was no time for exercise or recreation. When ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... mild, mellow; cool, sober, temperate, reasonable, measured; tempered &c v.; calm, unruffled, quiet, tranquil, still; slow, smooth, untroubled; tame; peaceful, peaceable; pacific, halcyon. unexciting, unirritating^; soft, bland, oily, demulcent, lenitive, anodyne; hypnotic &c 683; sedative; antiorgastic^, anaphrodisiac^. mild as mother's milk; milk and water. Adv. moderately &c adj.; gingerly; piano; under easy sail, at half speed; within bounds, within compass; in reason. Phr. est modue in rebus^; pour ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... think it's only thought-reading. Still, it's thought-reading carried very far. The kind of power Bubbles showed the night before last seems to me partly hypnotic, and that's why I ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... case of familiar external impressions, such as the sound of the striking of a clock, there appears to be wanting that simple process of reaction by which, in a waking condition of the attention, a sense-impression is instantly discriminated and classed. In sleep, as in the artificially induced hypnotic condition, the slighter differences of quality among sensations are not clearly recognized. The activity of the higher centres, which are concerned in the finer processes of discrimination and ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... seeds of the huilca a powder is prepared, sometimes called cohoba. This powder, says Mr. Safford, is a narcotic snuff "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... a new method of raising blisters by hypnotic suggestion. This is said to be an improvement on the old East End system of developing black eyes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... said Mallow, smiling; "he loved Miss Loach, but Emilia exercised a kind of hypnotic influence over him. However, she is dead, and I can see no connection between her ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... answer was a renewed succession of yells. Suddenly he stopped short where he stood, and for a space of minutes he regarded his companion with a pair of glassy eyes under whose hypnotic spell the ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... existence, once a week, From the Pacific Mail dock to the Heads, Warning the people you're about to wreak Upon the human ear your Sunday freak?— Whereat the most betake them to their bed Though some prefer to slumber in the pews And nod assent to your hypnotic views. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together—that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... hard with the emotion his vibrant voice called up, but she could not speak. He put his hand gently upon her shoulder, and she sank down again. And he went on with his appeal. There was something hypnotic, dominating in his ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... great degree the same plans are still carried on. In Protestant churches we have the professional Debt-Raiser, and the Evangelist who recruits by hypnotic Tetzel methods. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... expansion of the idea. The Army is held together by both the man and the idea, and we need not turn away from its own history to get examples of this disintegration in both ways. Take the first bond of union, the man of striking, hypnotic personality. Since the very inception of the movement, time after time, men who have gained influence in the Army, have separated from its ranks and started a movement of their own of more or less formidable dimensions. The instance ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... used by physicians in minor operations as a sort of psychical chloroform for persons who might be endangered by an anesthetic. But a hypnotic state is harmful to those often subjected to it; a negative psychological effect ensues which in time deranges the brain cells. Hypnotism is trespass into the territory of another's consciousness. Its temporary phenomena have nothing in common with the miracles performed by men of divine ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to a degree. Some are a great deal more than others, and these are the ones that are apparent. Impose the right conditions and a quasi-hypnotic condition could be affected on ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... affairs association plays a very curious part. When a man is shouting for joy he can scatter largesse with a free hand, but he cannot loosen his purse-strings while he is holding his breath; and even when it is only being held for him by a sort of hypnotic suggestion, his nature is still ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... hellebore and two other constituents, which vary according to the purpose which the maagun is intended to serve. This renders the subject particularly open to subjective hallucination, and a pliable instrument in the hands of a hypnotic ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... situation! There I was, a young man fresh from America, full of the most extravagant romance, sitting alone in the moonlight before the gate of a mediaeval walled city, and a city, too, so rich with traditions that I grew dazed in trying to recall them. It may be that the moon became hypnotic in its influence, for I lay down and stared up at ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Perth, Scotland, May 11, 1852. The son of a physician, he studied medicine in Edinburgh, and after obtaining his degree of M.B., in 1873, he settled at Goole, Yorkshire. Fired by the unfinished work of Braid, Bernheim and Liebeault, he began, in 1889, a series of hypnotic researches, which, together with a number of successful experiments he had privately conducted, created considerable stir in the medical world. Abandoning his general practice and settling in London in 1892, Dr. Bramwell became one of the foremost authorities in the country on hypnotism as ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... addressed to a woman. Surely he saw her as a woman, queenly and distressed and very proud. He was physically anguished for her, and the man who loved her was the very brother of his bones. There were some words the effect of which were almost hypnotic on him—The Isle of the Blest, The Little Dark Rose, The Poor Old Woman and Caitlin the Daughter of Holohan. The mere repetition of these phrases lifted him to an ecstasy; they had hidden, magical meanings which pricked deeply to his heartstrings and thrilled him to a tempest ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens |
