"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... follow the words of the accompanying songs, or cantillations, the result might be more entertaining. That would not, however, improve the actual dancing, in which I was disappointed. In Japan, on the other hand, I succumbed completely to the odd, hypnotic mechanism of the Geisha, the accompaniments to which are more varied, or more acceptable to my ear, than the Indian music. But I shall always remember the sounds of the distant, approaching or receding, snake- charmers' piping, heard through the heat, as it ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... always a trial. The silence, the bodily inactivity while the mind is strained to be keenly alert, have a sort of hypnotic influence. An untrained man will certainly fancy he hears and sees things, and even a trained man has to light hard against the desire to sleep. There comes a longing for something, anything, to happen. I think I got ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... in the mind when men tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken, and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs—"up there before our eyes, the striation ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... gone the hypnotic silence which held the crowd, broke suddenly. Someone stirred. Another cursed beneath his breath. Instantly all was clamour and a running hither and thither. Buck Daniels caught from the body of Jim Silent the small metal circle which Dan had dropped. He stood ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... audience as 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
... 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 it could ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... proposition has been made to him by Margrave, a wanderer in many countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some occult fashion, knit together, and that only ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... brood long, however, as the monotonous sounds exerted a hypnotic effect on his senses. Once or twice as he was almost falling asleep, he felt himself clinging desperately to Caradoc's hand, his grip weakening, the fearsome void gaping under him, then he would awake with a start ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... synthesis of images seems to take place without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a gentle full current which bends in one direction all the water-weeds and the long grasses trailing from the banks; ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... hypnotic gaze upon a bland, blue-eyed bystander who had just joined the charmed circle, he murmured, invitingly: "Better try your luck, Olaf. It's Danish dice—three chances to ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... a packed football stadium when the Flying Eyes appeared and cast their hypnotic power over half the crowd. Thousands of people suddenly began marching zombie-like into the woods where they vanished into a ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... subluxations, distortions and displacements of bony structures, muscles and ligaments; weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, petit ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... been advanced that the methods employed to procure "temple sleep" were similar to those in use at the present time for the production of the hypnotic state. A cure was effected by awakening a healing instinct in the patient's ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the door, according to order, or rather, according to hypnotic suggestion; for it seems that it is the chauffeur who alone knows anything of the way, and who, while appearing to be non-committal, is virtually planning the tour. "Valescure might be a good stopping-place for lunch," ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... them, as she caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister's white form, that was clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and who like to drive through them or look at them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite—they do not want a whole treeful ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... rises mechanically and cuts a slice from the loaf of bread with the air of one under an hypnotic influence. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... more than that, Sir Brian! Can it be that some intelligence presides over that establishment and exercises—shall I call it a hypnotic influence upon the inmates?" ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... 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
... and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase 'hypnotic suggestion'. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... 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, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Cassowary, whom his sister met clandestinely and kissed—the kiss rankled! And yet it was nothing against Cassowary that he had been following Hood about like an infatuated fool. Deering knew himself to be equally culpable on that score, and he was even now trudging after the hypnotic vagabond with a country calaboose as their common goal. The chauffeur's interview with Constance had evidently cheered him mightily, and he joined his voice to Hood's in a very fair rendering of "Ben Bolt." Deering ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... way, and Seth, yielding as of old to this man's almost hypnotic command over him and still bewildered by the unexpected meeting, followed like a whipped dog. Under the shelter of ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Janet, Professor of Philosophy in 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 upon the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... difficult for me to reply. First we must be en rapport. Our system is not simple as yours, but more effective, for yours depends on thought ideas, not altogether universal. Place these on your heads, for only a moment. I must induce temporary hypnotic coma. Let one try first if you desire." The leader of the visitors held out one of the several headsets they had brought, caplike things, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the climax to her suspense seemed at hand. The unknown thing, until 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 ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... There was grace in every movement, save when at times she held herself rigid, with fixed blank eyes as though fascinated, or gripped by some invisible power. More than once I had wondered whether she were under hypnotic influence, but that theory had been completely negatived ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... literature. That he stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything said; and, when Rossetti speaks, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... difficult, Mr. Raal," Irving said sourly. "There are extremely severe penalties against any complicity in the unsupervised use of hypnotism or hypnotic drugs, and their use against the will of the subject is ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... not suggest what I knew to be true, that the Sultan would have been more than delighted to take him at his word, for I remembered the incident of the lampmaker's wager. A considerable knowledge of Moghrebbin Arabic, in combination with hypnotic skill of a high order, would have been required to draw from Boubikir his real opinions of the outlook. Not for nothing was he appointed British political agent in South Morocco. The ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... 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 ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... called a "painting 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 for ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... with your kind permission, put my daughter into a mesmeric or hypnotic trance; and while she is in it, I hope to show you some particularly interesting ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... seemed to be inoffensive. The rubber-workers, who had no doubt had many encounters with reptiles, told me about large sucurujus or boa-constrictors, which had their homes in the river not many miles from headquarters. They told me that these snakes were in possession of hypnotic powers, but this, like many other assertions, should be taken with a large grain of salt. However, I will relate an incident which occurred while I lived at Floresta, and in which I have absolute faith, as I had ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... which he was noted. "Brother Frank," he began, "I want to bear my testimony to you that this is the work of God—and nothing can stay its progress—and all who interfere will be swept away as chaff"—rising to those transports of auto-hypnotic exaltation which such as he accept as the effect of the spirit of God speaking through them. "You were born in the covenant, and the condemnation is more severe upon one who has the birthright than upon ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... 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 ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... mystery of the vision within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... with a flatfoot's jaw while he was trying to make hypnotic passes at me. He's coming to ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... 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
... theft of the Key that has prompted me to speak, Deacon. Madame has some sort of power—hypnotic power. She employed it on me once, to my cost! Paul Harley, of Chancery Lane, can tell you more about her. The house she's living in temporarily used to belong to a notorious Eurasian, Zani Chada. To make a clean breast of it I daren't thwart her openly; ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... rate, the first line of it, which they hum to themselves, over and over again without rest: "In the good old summertime—in the good old summertime! In the good old summertime—in the good old summertime!" There seems to be something hypnotic about this, with its endlessly recurring dominant. It has put a stupor upon every one who hears it, as well as upon the men who are playing it. No one can get away from it, or even think of getting away from it; it is three o'clock in the morning, and they have ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... however, thar arises as I recalls eevents but few examples in Arizona. The Southwest that a-way ain't the troo field for them hypnotists, the weak-minded among the pop'lation bein' redooced to minimum. Now an' then of course some hypnotic maverick, who's strayed from the eastern range, takes to trackin' 'round among us sort o' blind an' permiscus. But he never stays long, an' is generally tickled to death when some vig'lance committee so far reelents as to ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the front ranks—some of them were bold men and deadly—withstood the pressure. They held their eyes on that grim, white face, or watched the two muzzles of that shotgun which he swept back and forth across their gaze with hypnotic effect. ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... would be outrageous if 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 ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... trouble," he said. "And there are decontamination chambers in the air locks, which would clean up anything he brought in; so there would be no epidemic. The exposure would take place outside of the domes—say if he opened his helmet to smell the perfume of the famous hypnotic marspoppy, or something like that. Then he would be infected, and after that it's non-contagious. All we need is somebody to buddy up to him, and take him out there. Nature and the poppy will ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald
... would have known it was the 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
... restored to full strength. Her cheeks were flushed again, but this time with the color of health. The firelight played on her hair, glowing in it prismatically. Her eyes, as she turned them on him, caught the lights and drew them into their depths. They were once more fathomless and hypnotic. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... instincts of the 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 ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... open eye and when you said "Fido" his ears would answer you, taut with response, while his tail would beat the floor in indolent happiness. Is there anything in life so infectiously joyous as a wagging tail? Worry, distress, crossness, all melt at the sight of it—a hypnotic conductor's, baton beating the rhythm of ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... be jogged by reference to past favors, he perceived the celebrated Doc Macnooder in earnest conclave with Appleby, to whom he was offering to sell the Lawrenceville rights of his latest invention, the Folding Toothbrush. Given Bill Appleby's natural canniness, and Macnooder's hypnotic eloquence, the discussion was apt to be long and difficult, so Skippy hovered at a respectable distance ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... touch of his big hand. Healing light streamed from 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
... set up. There is in many people a tendency to project outward the blame for those acts or thoughts which they dislike. In the pathological field we get those delusions of influence that are so common. Thus a patient will attribute his obscene thoughts and words to a hypnotic effect of some person or group of persons and saves his own face by the delusion. In lesser pathological measure, men have fiercely preached against the snares and wiles of women, refusing to recognize that ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... little while she listened, but soon the room became blurred to her and she sank farther and farther among the heavy shadows and the old paintings on the wall. The rain beat against the muffled windows drowsily. The fire warmed her brow like some hypnotic hand. Then his voice ceased and she drew her feet beneath her and slept in the chair, looking like a soft ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... unexpectedness of these happenings had numbed my brain. To precede Buck meekly upstairs and to wait with equal meekness while he interviewed Mr Abney had seemed the only course open to me. To one whose life has lain apart from such things, the hypnotic influence of a ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there—for they were ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... of blue-and-gold streamers suddenly drifted toward him on an unfelt current. Cully was held, entranced. They flowed before him, their colors dazzling, hypnotic. ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... his sombre and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth screwed up into a whistle. The tune—a tawdry but haunting little melody—came through his lips. And Terry's quick ear sensed that every note was flat. She turned back to the ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... discoursing to the acolytes on the religious classics. In the chapel of meditations, among lighted incense sticks, monks seated before images were telling their beads with the object of working themselves into a state of ecstatic contemplation (somewhat resembling a certain hypnotic trance), for there are undoubtedly devout lamas, though the majority are idle and unholy. It must be understood that all Tibetan literature is 'sacred,' though some of the volumes of exquisite calligraphy on parchment, which for our benefit ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... puzzle, and corrupt our prime, Our sport and pity, punishment and crime. What glorious motives urge our authors on, Thus to undo, and thus to be undone? One loses his estate, and down he sits, To show (in vain!) he still retains his wits: Another marries, and his dear proves keen; He writes as an hypnotic for the spleen: Some write, confin'd by physic; some, by debt; Some, for 'tis Sunday; some, because 'tis wet; Through private pique some do the public right, And love their king and country out of spite: Another writes because his father writ, And proves himself a bastard ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man—for since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism—seeks to find reasons for his conduct. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... otherwise sensible nose. She had good straight-looking, expressive eyes, too, and a big, wide, really beautiful mouth, with square white teeth in it, which, when she smiled or yawned—and she yawned more luxuriously than any girl who had ever sat in his classes—exerted a sort of hypnotic effect on him. All that, however, left unexplained the quality she had of making you, whatever she did, irresistibly aware of her. And, conversely, unaware of every one else about her. A bit of campus slang occurred to him as quite literally ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... But another mental effect is still more significant than the impulse to increase rapidity. The uniformity of the movements, and especially of the revolving movement, produces a state of half dizziness and half numbness with ecstatic elements. We know the almost hypnotic state of the whirling dervishes and the raptures in the savage war dances; all this in milder form is involved in every passionate dance. But nothing is more characteristic of such half-hypnotic states than that the individual loses control of his will. He behaves ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... birds, looked low for the reason and found, sitting with tail wickedly twitching at the tip, a brindled cat. Being gentle in her ways and considering that all things have rights, she approached him with crafty steps and a murmured hypnotic, "kitty! kitty!" got her hands on him, and carried him off down the drive, to drop him in the street and suggest, with a warning pat and conciliating stroke, the desirability ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... One has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in this manner have seen no one, and they go mad or die without ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... answered, cheerfully. "Such a concert as I was treated to! I had always had an idea that my father was rather appalling, but your ancient sea-faring friend was positively extraordinary. After you left I read just a little to Daddy, and the hypnotic quality of my voice had rapid effect. After this Captain Sammy curled up on the floor, just like one of the local dogs, and spurned my offer of rugs and pillows with the specious excuse that if he made himself too comfortable and chanced to fall asleep he would never wake up. ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... Chicago tough, whose only knowledge of a horse had been gained by observation, could so quickly become a trusted member of this desperate gang of cattle-thieves he could not conceive. Was there some occult power about the man—some almost hypnotic influence that passed his crossed eyes and ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... one-volume edition of Trilby—undoubtedly the most successful tale that has ever dealt with hypnotism—and the success of the dramatic version of Trilby presented a few days ago by Mr. Tree, invite one to apply the test. Clearly there are large numbers of people who enjoy hypnotic fiction, or whose prejudices have been effectively subdued by Mr. du Maurier's tact and talent. Must we then confess that our instinct has been unjust and unreasonable, and give it up? Or—since we must like Trilby, and there is no help for it—shall we enjoy the tale under protest ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... first applause; and Trimmer's people, seeing the crowd had taken Hector's point, sprang to their feet and began to cheer. At a tense moment, such as this, cheering is often hypnotic, and good managers know how to make use of it on the floor. The noise grew thunderous, and when it subsided Hector was master of the convention. Then, for the first time, I saw how far he would go—and why. I had laughed at him all my life, but now I believed ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... in arms that remained unshaken and sat on the edge of the bed looking into her eyes with an almost hypnotic forcefulness. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers of that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... of 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, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... she felt, had somehow affected, at the very outset, a degree of tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his hand—a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for bungling than the initial venture—with the exact degree of insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... slowly, his will, which drew its force from the hypnotic influence of horror, was thrust back, and light crept into his imagined world, flowers blossomed in it, trees swayed in the wind, larks went soaring above green hills blazing with yellow gorse, birds hopped to their nests and sang, dogs barked and gambolled with ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... continued, continued without end during days and months as it had done for years; and it seemed as if the whole world, all the miseries and sufferings of humanity, came in turn and passed in the same hypnotic, contagious kind of round, through that rocky nook, ever in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... gentleman will rise, train his compelling orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhaust his alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorable member of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power and hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of the method are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" will no longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech," to the irritating abridgment of the inalienable right to pursuit of sleep. Honorable members will ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... be no more than an antecedent of hypnotism; few, if any, of the distinctive features of the modern science appearing in an appreciated form in its practices. Mesmer had little experience and no appreciation of the hypnotic state, or of the phenomena of suggestion; he constantly elaborated his physical manipulations, denied the imagination any place in his effects, and regarded the crisis as the distinctive and essential factor in his cures; and when confronted with subjects in hypnotic ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Chantelle, across her knitting, discoursed of their afternoon's excursion, with occasional pauses induced by the hypnotic effect of the fresh air; and Effie, kneeling, on the hearth, softly but insistently sought to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the relation between a vertical attitude ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... my principal experiments in the mysterious force or agency known as hypnotic suggestion. Whether or not it could be employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am unable ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... it 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 ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... 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 the ticket-window, ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... Evolution would have taught Weismann that biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... mathematics; and there was a fallacy abroad then as there is now that the feminine mind is not mathematical. That the great men whom Hypatia met in each city were first amazed and then abashed by her proficiency in mathematics is quite probable. Some few male professors being in that peculiar baldheaded hypnotic state when feminine charms dazzle and lure, listened in rapture as Hypatia dissolved logarithms and melted calculi, and not understanding a word she said, declared that she was the goddess Minerva, reincarnated. Her coldness on near approach ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... wielded the same hypnotic power, highly intensified, that he had felt in Shaver. He knew that he was going to attempt what she asked; that he was committed to the project of robbing two houses merely to please a pretty young woman who invited his cooeperation at ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... "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 on ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... von 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 spread over ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Culpepper—blessed if it didn't burn him—carries the scars to this day. Then there was that case in Denver. Ever hear about that? A young girl, nervous patient. Nails driven through the palms of her hands,—tenpenny nails,—under the hypnotic suggestion that she wasn't being hurt. Didn't leave a cicatrice as big as a bee ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... at some hypnotic call, Nor with a doubtful cry; But a clear faith, like a banner above us all, Rolling ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... hard-headed physician regarded with particular detestation it was that of mediumship. All mediums, in his opinion, were knaves or fools and their so-called occult manifestations were either conjurers' trickery or self-created illusions of a hypnotic character. He had never attended a spiritualistic seance and had no ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... then in vogue among his set was alluded to in his speech; everything that then was, and some things that still are, considered to be the last words of scientific wisdom: the laws of heredity and inborn criminality, evolution and the struggle for existence, hypnotism and hypnotic influence. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... the flesh of a white bull, probably a sacrificial animal, a man lay down to sleep, while four Druids chanted over him "to render his witness truthful." He then saw in a vision the person who should be elected king, and what he was doing at the moment.[1045] Possibly the Druids used hypnotic suggestion; the medium was ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... both of whom have made their life's aim the perfection of psychoanalysis, and who for that reason now concern themselves exclusively with it, appreciate all forms of verbal treatment, as well with hypnotism as without it. Hypnotic suggestion and suggestion given when awake was used at an earlier period by both of them with good results, and they still are not averse to using this method where quick comprehension and the immediate subdual of a troublesome ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... half-sister, you know—much older than me." She had put her hands up to both cheeks of Jolly's horse, and was rubbing her nose against its nose with a gentle snuffling noise which seemed to have an hypnotic effect on the animal. Val contemplated her cheek resting against the horse's nose, and her eyes gleaming round at him. 'She's really a duck,' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... chills on part of the scalp, part of the shoulder, part of the face, or the ribs, etc., may be experienced; they are possibly signs of slackening hypnotic power. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... somber and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth screwed up into a whistle. The tune—a tawdry but haunting little melody—came through his lips. Terry turned back to the piano. "Of course you know you ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... University, Professor Otto Pfungst. He found that when Hans was put on the witness stand and subjected to rigid cross examinations by strangers, his answers were due partly to telepathy and hypnotic influence! For example, the discovery was made that Hans could not always give the correct answer to a problem in figures unless it was known to the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... gully—odorous of napie and rotten vegetables—they arrived at an innocent little door in a high blank wall. After some whispered parley with an old Chinaman, the pair were admitted and ushered into a large, low saloon, where scores of gamblers were engrossed in the hypnotic pleasures of "Fan Tan," or the "36 animal lottery," so popular ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... learns that you can rig up a hypnotic ray from a flashlight battery, a piece of bamboo, and a few lengths of wire. That'll get Ali in an awful sweat. He can't get weapons. None at all. And for the Sultan," Trimmer was warming up to his intrigue, chewing on his cigar with gusto, ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... 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 than able to adopt; but now the ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... 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 ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... marked 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 ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... want unbroken, smooth roads. Now it is lovely... only in the light of street lamps... Mary... surrounded with dark rain— This is the way it should be. I would like to be with you. What are mountains and the flat land to me— What are cities to me and colorful hypnotic nights— Back to the ocean... back to the starry shore. You are not entirely Mary, whom I sought. But you are also Mary—boundless... Beloved... ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... eyes he turned on her and she was not unaware of a certain savage, picturesque appeal in him. She felt again a strange, undesired impulse that had troubled her ever since her first meeting with the man—the urge to go close and look deep into his pale, hypnotic eyes. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... 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 ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 colour of gold, and about ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... little bag of sugar and a lump or two were eagerly accepted. Then going to Salt's side she crooned into his ear some of her mysterious "nightmare talk," as Shelby called it. It was a curious power the girl exercised over animals—almost hypnotic. Salt nozzled and ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... for nearly two years. After recovery and during the interruptions the patient explained his mutism, refusal to swallow, his filthiness and general negativism as all occasioned by delusions. He was commanded by God to act thus, the attendants were devils, and so on. He spoke, too, of being under hypnotic influence. In addition there were other delusions such as that he had killed his brother. The attack came on with the belief that he was going to die, otherwise none of the ideas were typical of the stupors we have studied. Another incongruous ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... at a glance from Stoddard he drew back and concealed his smirk. Then for half an hour with his most telling arguments and the hypnotic spell of his eyes Whitney Stoddard outdid himself to win her over while Rimrock sat by and smiled. He had tried that himself in days gone by and he knew Stoddard was wasting his breath. She had made up her mind and that was the end of it—there would be no ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... I requested, with a calm air of command that I had known to prove hypnotic, "to convey my card to mademoiselle, and to say that I beg of her, before her departure, one ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... human 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
... don't know. Sometimes I think he controls her by some infernal hypnotic power; and then again, from some phrase of her own, I think she considers her mind diseased, and marriage with ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the doctor should have been willing to accept this invitation, and still more surprising that his wife should have consented to accompany him to Syria. But the East was still 'a-calling,' and the almost hypnotic influence which her ladyship exercised over her dependants seems to have lost none of its efficacy. Accordingly, as soon as the Meryons could arrange their affairs, they embarked at Marseilles, landing at Beyrout on July 1, 1837. ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... 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 woman who was once the wife of Maxwell ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Home's fire-tests, which Miss Johnson practically admits are inexplicable by any process either of fraud or of hallucination known to her (p. 498), she passes on to what are called "quasi-hypnotic" effects. To many of the incidents classed by Miss Johnson as due to suggestion, I should be inclined to give an entirely different interpretation. Some of them doubtless resemble hallucinations in a striking degree, but what evidence is there that, e.g., passes made over the heads ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... 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 ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... and he was left in peace, his horror began to pass. He turned the thing over in his mind a dozen times a day, and found it absorbing. But he began to reflect that, after all, he had nothing more than he had had before in the way of evidence. An hypnotic sleep might explain the whole thing. That little revelation he had made in his unconsciousness, of his sitting beneath the yews, might easily be accounted for by the fact that he himself knew it, that it had been a deeper element ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... of our marriage, she died as you know it, in my arms. I don't think she knows it yet. But it won't be long until she does discover it. We were quite alive when you found us; she was in an hypnotic state induced by her condition. She heard and saw nothing. But I knew. And I must keep my faith. I must, and you are the only one ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... asked by way of answer, "a treatise of Aristotle concerning which we had a discussion one day? Its subject was the hypnotic power possessed by the eyes of certain reptiles. I laughed the idea to scorn; you maintained that it was possible. Well, I agree with you; and I'd like to have about a dozen of our modern skeptical scientists in this cave with me for about ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... it wasn't a barroom where anything could be rightly started. Doc Martingale's feelings was running high, too, account, I suppose, of certain full-hearted things his wife had blurted out to him about the hypnotic eyes of this here Nature lover. He was quiet enough, but vicious, acting like he'd love to do some dental work on the poet that might or might not be painless for all he cared a hoot. He was taking his own drinks all alone, like clockwork—moody ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby" impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the hypnotic influence of Svengali. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all. I have worshipped in cathedrals, sweated cold in operating theatres, trembled before judges, but there is something about large surfaces of polished mahogany and very soft, dimly coloured turkey ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... long or closely," said Phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "As I have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. You are, of course, aware that many Eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... 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 still to be found. In fact, all operations conducted under finite rules, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... stood still, and again Browning felt that strange spell stealing upon him, as if hypnotic eyes were peering out from the shadows and looking down into his soul. He shook himself, he even looked around in search of those eyes; but he saw nothing save the dark, gloomy ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... and then the breasts, and then a part of the face—it was awful. The poor creatures on the islands awaiting their fate tried to cover their eyes with their hands to hide the fearful sight, but now I saw that they too were under the hypnotic spell of the reptiles, so that they could only crouch in terror with their eyes fixed upon the terrible thing that was ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mind as curiously stored and equipped as its whole genius was charming and gracious. If he could not talk, but could only write, then the pen in his hand is taken as an instrument capable of exerting hypnotic force, and converting by magic ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... table, talking of wonderful things; Madame Riennes looked at him and sometimes took his hand, which he did not like, and then he remembered no more until he woke up, feeling tired, and yet in a way exhilarated, for with the mysteries of hypnotic sleep he was not yet acquainted. Nor did it occur to him that he was being used a medium by certain of the most advanced ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... hypnotic to-and-fro of those swaying, poised, alert human figures, he encountered Marise, coming on her suddenly, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and Darrel, ibid., 124-125. It must be recalled that when this was first tried before a commission they were convinced that it was not imposture. A layman cannot refrain from suspecting that Darrel had hypnotic control over Somers. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... made ill by his own negative thoughts and emotions, he is also under the hypnotic spell of the race mind. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not." We are all under the spell, more or less, of a huge illusion. The evil, disease, sickness and other imperfections ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... undertones; the psychological melody is clear and consistent without 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 ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen |
