"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first attempts were, like most beginnings, simple and imitative. The birds flew with wings, therefore man put on artificial wings and essayed to fly like the birds. It was not until many grievous disappointments and sad accidents had befallen him, that he unwillingly gave up wings in ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... huge mother from the den into the open world, their lessons of life begin. These lessons are acquired partly through imitation and also through design upon the part of the wise old dam. Nearly all small creatures are imitative, so, as the old bear did only those things that were for her good, the cubs soon learned by imitation which of the wild creatures to be upon good terms with and which were ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... bannocks, perhaps made of the grain of the sacred last sheaf from the previous harvest, and therefore sacramental in character, were also used in different ways in folk-survivals. They were rolled down a slope—a magical imitative act, symbolising and aiding the course of the sun. The cake had also a divinatory character. If it broke on reaching the foot of the slope this indicated the approaching death of its owner. In another custom in ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... first to open a new road, and in that meaning it may be called his road; but his it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an incommunicable excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever led his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this was just as valuable, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on account of their youth, no direct instruction about method of study would be advisable, that teachers should set a good example of study by their treatment of lessons in class, and rely only upon the imitative tendency of children for some effect on their habits of work? Or should extensive instruction be imparted to them, as well as ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... sporting instinct," said he. "They only fish because they see men doing it. They are imitative animals." ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... that, man being an imitative animal and bishops being regarded by many as good examples, there seemed to him a serious danger of an epidemic of what he might call Brobdingnagitis. Fortunately the results would not be immediately apparent, otherwise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... the suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... spirit, local pride, provincial independence, influence the individual man precisely because they appeal to his imitative tendencies. But thereby they act so as to render him more or less immune in presence of the more trivial of the influences that, coming from without his community, would otherwise be likely to reduce him to the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... men in his rank of life, when once the golden days of youth and early manhood have passed away. Such years are in many men's lives marked by the projection, or even by the partial accomplishment, of literary undertakings on a large scale, and more especially of such as partake of an imitative character. When a juvenile and facile writer's taste is still unsettled, and his own style is as yet unformed, he eagerly tries his hand at the reproduction of the work of others; translates the "Iliad" or "Faust," or suits himself ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... leaps from point to point of the figure. The theory is therefore remodeled by substituting for the movement sensations of the eye, the tendencies corresponding to those early movements of touching imitative of the form, by which we learned to know a form for what it is, and the reproduction of feeling-tones belonging to the character of such movement. The movements of touching and feeling for a smooth continuous ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... may have studied. Oxford will soon have little left of the beauty and antiquity of Patey's Quad in Merton, as represented in our illustration. What the next generation will think of the multitudinous new buildings, it is not hard to conjecture. Imitative experiments, without style or fancy in structure or decoration, and often more than medievally uncomfortable, they will seem but evidences of Oxford's love of destruction. People of Hearne's way of thinking, people who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... to urge teachers who tell stories to little children to bear these thoughts, and better ones of their own, in mind? Not, I think, if it be fully accepted that the story hour, as a play hour, is a time peculiarly open to influences affecting the imitative faculty; that this faculty is especially valuable in forming fine habits of speech; and that an increasingly high and general standard of English speech is one of our greatest needs and our most instant opportunities in the schools ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... thicket a spring of blandly therapeutic qualities. A complaisant medical faculty of San Francisco attested to its merits; a sympathetic press advertised the excellence of the hotel; a novelty-seeking, fashionable circle—as yet without laws and blindly imitative—found the new hotel an admirable variation to the vulgar ordinary "across the bay" excursion, and an accepted excuse for a novel social dissipation. A number of distinguished people had already visited it; certain exclusive families had secured the best rooms; there were a score of pretty ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of the middle ages—but in the perusal of such German works as were current in those days. Under the influence of these he, at the age of fifteen, wrote two short prose romances of slender merit. The sentiments and language were exaggerated, the composition imitative and poor. He wrote also a poem on the subject of Ahasuerus—being led to it by a German fragment he picked up, dirty and torn, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This fell afterwards into other hands, and was considerably altered before it was printed. Our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... is quite true," returned Mrs. Bernard: "the gentleman of whom I spoke, has a little monkey, which frequently affords him much amusement, by his sagacious, imitative tricks. As he was one day sitting near the pen in which the monkey was confined, he observed him making many ineffectual efforts to regain a nut which had rolled beyond his reach. After several vain attempts, he ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... the acts of trained animals are due to their power of mimicry and are produced by imitation rather than by original thought, even their imitative work reveals a breadth of intelligence, a range of memory and of activity and precision in thought and in energy which no logical mind can ignore. To say that a chimpanzee who can swing through thirty or forty different acts "does not think" and "does not ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... has just struck ten, when quick, light steps approach the studio door. A gentleman enters—trips gaily over the imitative pen and brush—and, walking up to the fire, begins to warm his back at it, looking about him rather absently, and whistling "Drops of Brandy" in the minor key. This gentleman ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Parsons was not of these half dozen; but the plain, hard-headed builder who had erected it for the original owner was shrewd and imitative, and had avoided ambitious deviations from the type he wished to copy—the red sandstone, swell front variety, which ten years before would have seemed to the moral sense of Benham unduly cheerful. Mr. Parsons was so fortunate as to be able to buy it ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... five years. Then followed letter-writing and easy composition. This completed the education of the vast majority of the boys not intended for the public service. The chief merit of the system was that it developed the memory and the imitative faculty. For secondary education somewhat better provision was made, practically the only method of attaining eminence in the state being through the schools (see Sec. Civil Service). At prefectural cities and provincial capitals ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and style quite outshining significance and suggestion. He learned all he knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was eclectic rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as Raphael the frescos of the Baths of Titus, or Donatello the fragments of antique sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its Italian leading-strings. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry was exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off only some strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sell dear," or its practical equivalent—so scary and imitative are investors—Buy during the last of a selling movement and sell during the last of a buying movement, resolves itself, we venture to repeat, into: Buy when the decline caused by a panic has produced such liquidation that discounts and loans, after steady and long-continued diminution, either ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... the bed of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... which is at once fair and warm, and which can kindle in moments of excitement into a brilliance far outshining any brunette skin. She talked rapidly with much gesture. She was giving John an account of the stupidity of the people with whom she had been dining. Her imitative faculty amounted almost to genius. No smallest peculiarity of manner or speech escaped her, and she could become a dozen different persons in a minute. John laughed as he listened, but not so heartily as he was wont to ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... first place, we always find a complete correspondence between imitative colouring and instinctive endowment. If a caterpillar exactly resembles the colour of a twig, it also presents the instinct of habitually reposing in the attitude which makes it most resemble a twig—standing out from the branch on which it rests at the same angle ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... and then, with a wonderful display of the imitative faculty, he went through a clever pantomime, turning his black face into a grotesque copy of Mallam's, as he made believe to pour rum out of a bottle, drinking again and again, smiling in an imbecile manner at first, and then beginning to grow fierce, while his companions squatted ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... was of a romantic turn, wore in her breast the miniature of some field-officer unknown, which she had purchased, a great bargain, not very long before; the other ladies displayed several dazzling articles of imitative jewellery, almost equal to real, and Mrs Crummles came out in a stern and gloomy majesty, which attracted ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... spontaneous reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of intelligence. It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide exactly how far it is intelligence and how far memory, instinct, imitative genius, obedience or mechanical impulse, the effects ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Nine-and-a-half bars, opening in C minor, and passing to, and closing in E flat. It contains imitative passages evolved ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... value of copies can only be proportioned to the scarcity of originals: among sculptors and painters, a fine statue, or a beautiful picture, of some great master, may deservedly employ the imitative talents of young and inferior artists, that their appropriation to one spot may not wholly prevent the more general expansion of their excellence; but, among authors, the reverse is the case, since the noblest productions of literature are almost equally attainable with the meanest. ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... faithful, and trustworthy people than they are. When made contented and happy, as they always should be, they reflect their master in their thoughts, morals, and religion, or at least they are desirous of being like him. They imitate him in every thing, as far as their imitative faculties, which are very strong, will carry them. They take a pride in his wealth, or in any thing which distinguishes him, as if they formed a part of himself, as they really do, being under the influence of his will, and in some measure assimilated, in their spiritual nature, to him—loving ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... twenty-four when he published this rather immature work, and it might have been better if he had waited longer. It was to him what the "Sorrows of Werther" was to Goethe, but while the "Sorrows of Werther" made Goethe famous in many countries, "Fanshawe" fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative of Scott than the "Sorrows of Werther" is of Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the "Sorrows of Werther" ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why "Fanshawe" should not have proved ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... want ashes, and the Japs hold the jar. They are so "advanced" that cremation is becoming a fad with them. It would not be surprising to find that the impending danger of the Japanese is excessive imitative progress, which is not certain to be exactly the right thing for them. They have reached a point where it is worth while to examine the claim of new things with much care before adopting them. We have very high authority ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... have received no encouragement from those who are the best critics of this art, though I have submitted my work to many since I left school. Some have said that my work was commonplace, others that it was imitative; all have agreed that it was dull, and they have unanimously urged me to abandon every thought of such composition. Nevertheless I am convinced that I have the highest possible talents not only in this department of letters ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... (Gracula), of which there are several kinds in India, articulate as distinctly, and are as imitative, as the parrots. One of these birds was once brought as a present to my little girl. The donor took his leave, assuring us that the bird was a great speaker, and imitated a variety of sounds. This I found to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... recently, and to a large extent still are, non-progressive, in bondage to uniformity and mechanism in culture, imitative, unimaginative, torpid, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... this time, had been tentative and imitative, being mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him in his reading. He had read considerably in some six languages, (Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French and English) and widely in at least four ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... form of 'Beowulf' is that of virtually all Anglo-Saxon poetry down to the tenth century, or indeed to the end, a form which is roughly represented in the present book in a passage of imitative translation two pages below. The verse is unrimed, not arranged in stanzas, and with lines more commonly end-stopped (with distinct pauses at the ends) than is true in good modern poetry. Each line is divided into halves and each half contains ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... indeed the mimic works of Art, But Nature's works far lovelier. I admire, None more admires, the painter's magic skill, Who shows me that which I shall never see, Conveys a distant country into mine, And throws Italian light on English walls. But imitative strokes can do no more Than please the eye, sweet Nature every sense. The air salubrious of her lofty hills, The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales, And music of her woods—no works of man May rival these; these all bespeak a power Peculiar, and exclusively her ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... missionary. The man himself was captured by Lady Glendower, who explained her woe at the perfidious behaviour of Myung Yang, the most interesting convert ever seen, who was now in penal servitude for exercising his imitative skill on my lady's signature. "And I expended a fortune, Mr. Ferrier, on those ungrateful people. Is it not enough ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... at once an imitative and an appreciative art on the part of the pupil. He must be trained to appreciate the meaning of the writer; but he will depend upon the teacher at first, and, indeed, for a long time, for an example of the true mode of expression. This the teacher must be ready to give. It is ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... American birds. Most numerous in the tropics. Their long tails serve a double purpose-in assisting their flight and acting as an outlet for their vivacity. Usually they inhabit scrubby undergrowth bordering woods. They rank among our finest songsters, with ventriloquial and imitative powers added to sweetness of tone. Brown ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... movements. But our poet applied the idea to an individual. To him a rude, uncivil, impolite, ungracious, uncourteous, unpolished, uncouth, boorish, blunt, bluff, gruff, brusk, or burly person was as the unplaned lumber or the unpolished gem; and we imitative moderns still call such a man rough. But we do not think of the man as covered with projections that need to be taken off, unless forsooth we receive rough treatment at his hands. And note how far we have journeyed from the original idea of the word when we say "I gave ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... this effort a certain imitative melody, but disapproved of the subject itself as low and unworthy ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... almost every line, especially in our knowledge and use of electricity and photography, and also in our manufacturing and scientific skill. However, they have decidedly surpassed us in imitative and ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... broader culture, such as are being bred through the public schools and through the introduction of improved methods in business and social life. First-class white men must take hold of the reins of government throughout the Southland. The Negro is an imitative creature, and he takes on the color of his environment. If it be charged that he is frequently immoral, dishonest and shiftless, the dissolute whites with whom he has been closely identified have furnished a model that he has copied only too faithfully. Let the Christian element become a more ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... this, and Captain Miles hearing what had been said, every word being distinctly audible on the poop, began speaking to Mr Marline about the imitative habits of negroes. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Gnawing his tail, like the Greek symbol, Suggesting infinite meanings Unto the mind of a modern Crammed with the olden mythologies. Now, uncoiled in the sunlight, He stretches himself out at full length In all his undulate longitude. His body is a constellation of mounds, Artfully imitative, From the fatal tail to the more fatal head. Overgrown they are with grass, Short, green grass, thick and velvety, Like well cared-for lawns, With strange, wild flowers glittering, Made up of alien mould Brought hither from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... numerous points on which two equally good Greek scholars may well differ in the mere interpretation of the words. What, for instance, are the 'two natural causes' in Chapter IV which have given birth to Poetry? Are they, as our translator takes them, (1) that man is imitative, and (2) that people delight in imitations? Or are they (1) that man is imitative and people delight in imitations, and (2) the instinct for rhythm, as Professor Butcher prefers? Is it a 'creature' a thousand miles long, or a 'picture' a thousand miles long ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... quite natural," persisted Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for not ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... readers patience. I have refrained from pointing to those Natives who have proved their scholastic capabilities at various universities and colleges because it is generally surmised that these men are exceptional or that their success is due to a highly developed imitative faculty coupled with a strong memory, with which it is fashionable to credit the successful Native student, and I have advisedly confined myself to instances drawn from the everyday life and thought of the normal and uneducated ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... extending his ample surface in the most convenient manner to the blaze, appeared, with eyes half-shut, pondering deeply some inward abyss of thought, yet not wholly indifferent to the objects around him. His tall and bony figure looked more like some stiff and imitative piece of mechanism than a living human frame with flexible articulations, so fashioned was every motion of the body to the formal and constrained habits and peculiarities of the mind. Seaton had observed, with no slight uneasiness, the suspicious circumstances in which they were placed; but he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the first reported aboriginal crime has been attended with impunity, how much more does the imitative faculty cling to it. Ill- judged mercy falls, not like dew, but like a great heap of manure, on the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... resemblances are not purely figurative or symbolic, but that they are also magical in intention, being supposed not merely to represent the object of the supplicant's prayer, but actually, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to contribute to its accomplishment. If that is so, we must conclude that the religion of these savages, as manifested in their prayers to the spirits of the dead, is tinctured with an alloy of magic; they do not trust entirely to the compassion of the spirits and their power to help them; ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... this work seems admirably done. My praise, however, is not much worth the Author's having; but you may thank him in my name for his. The idea is new—we have excellent imitations of the Satires, etc. by Pope; but I remember but one imitative Ode in his works, and none any where else. I can hardly suppose that they have lost any fame by the fate of the Farce [3]; but even should this be the case, the present publication will again place them on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the curiosity of persons who are skilled in grammar."—Murray's Gram., Pref., p. iii. "This rule refers only to nouns and pronouns, which have the same bearing or relation."—Ib., i, p. 204. "So that things which are seen, were not made of things which do appear."—Heb., xi, 3. "Man is an imitative creature; he may utter sounds, which he has heard."—Wilson's Essay on Gram., p. 21. "But men, whose business is wholly domestic, have little or no use for any language but ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition. But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... our rectified information, we may except against the picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse, his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it triumphantly in his maturity by those Novels by Eminent Hands in which the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... fairly happy. Confusion is shown by the various objects in crooked and wavy lines, with those tiny crosses, many little cares, and yet the tree shades the house. Your castle on the highway with the little child's crib and the parrot, an imitative, ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... this portrait has preserved for you a part of what you loved. This picture, too, may influence Melissa's fate; for Caesar has a fine taste in art, and one of the wants of our time which has helped to embitter him is the paralyzed state of the imitative arts. It will be easier to win his favor for the painter who did this portrait than for a man of noble birth. He needs such painters as this Alexander for the Pinakothek in the splendid baths he has built at Rome. If you would but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... a reverential attitude helps to arouse real reverence, and a smiling face and cheery tone actually bring cheerfulness in a case of the blues. Little children are so imitative that they quickly copy the outward manifestations of a feeling, and the inner state tends to follow. This is further a reason for leading them into acts of loving service, that love and kindred gracious feelings may gain strength through the reflex influence ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she worked things out for herself. Her words were her own, and not another's. She was not imitative, nor yet was she bizarre; she was individual, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... slender strands of college gossip. But a woman of barely thirty, too old for friendships with young girls, too young to find her placid recreation in the stereotyped round of social functions, that seemed so perfectly imitative of the normal and yet so curiously unsuccessful at bottom—what was there ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... drill, obeyed words of command, and carried arms of precision. He had devoted great pains to the manufacture of a formidable artillery, and what with presents from the British Government and the imitative skill of native artificers he was possessed at the outbreak of hostilities of several hundred cannon. His artisans were skillful enough to turn out in large numbers very fair rifled small-arms, which they copied from British models; and in the Balla Hissar magazine ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of one's boyhood; it breathes of a world very vaguely realized—a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... one of the long list of representatives of the species of novels which began with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Immermann tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the principal social forces of his period. But he was too imitative in following his great model, and too much confused by subjective preoccupations, to comprehend and to state clearly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and early thirteenth centuries, at least, Greek philosophy found its way largely into Europe in Arab versions, and these characteristically Arabian additions of the discussion of curious trivial questions came with them and produced an imitative tendency among ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... beam opposite Debtor's Door, Newgate, about eight o'clock in the morning; him, therefore, every consideration of interest and of gratitude combined to render subservient to the reasonable wishes of Mr. Quirk. He was a most ingenious little fellow, and had a great taste for the imitative arts—so strong in fact, that it had once or twice placed him in some jeopardy with the Goths and Vandals of the law; who characterized the noble art in which he excelled, by a very ugly and formidable word, and annexed the most barbarous penalties ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... are, rites caught and fixed and frozen. "Drawing," says a modern critic,[50] "is at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper." Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang. But imitation is not all, or even first. "The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truth will encumber and ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... until he was nearly forty, William Sharp was no more than a skillful literary practitioner, a higher sort of hack, who had done some better writing of a tenuous kind of beauty but imitative in substance and art, in "Sospiri di Roma" and "Vistas," and that after forty, when he was developing one undeveloped side of himself as "Fiona Macleod," he developed another undeveloped side of himself in "Silence Farm." That he attained in a sort of writing, and greatly, that he had ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the people, nourished by the people, living among the people, the Burnses, the Brangers, the Heines are unknown in Russia. I have already stated that originality must not be looked for on Russian soil; that Russian literature is essentially an imitative literature in its forms, hence imitative force must have time to look about, examine, copy, and for this ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... a worthy successor of Cremazie and has won the distinction of having his best work crowned by the French Academy. French Canadian poetry, however, has been often purely imitative of French models like Musset and Gautier, both in style and sentiment, and consequently lacks strength and originality. Frechette has all the finish of the French poets and, while it cannot be said that he has yet originated fresh thoughts, ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy—a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of her the same as I do," cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to port. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... expose the glaring faults which characterize Mr. Doyle's performances from a purely artistic point of view, his feeble attempts of light, his undeveloped "sense of the nature of material," and his absence of imitative study. It is somewhat singular that whilst Mr. Hamerton is silent on the subject of the book etchings of Leech and Phiz, he should have selected for criticism those of Doyle, who never intended to claim for these sketches the dignity of etchings. The critic, however, is not only just, but ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... grow there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others, causes the winds to rush towards them as toward a centre: so that if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... manner of testifying to his own preference for the ideal of usefulness and immediate efficiency. But even so he would never for an instant admit that he was pursuing a merely conventional good. He may be largely imitative in his standards of value, recognizing such aims as are common to some time or race; nevertheless none would be more sure than he of the truth of his ideal. Question him, and he will maintain that his is the reasonable life under the conditions of human existence. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Kaltschmidt, contend that there was but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the "bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua, call the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... and ingenuity young people possess, the less are they likely to be amused with the toys which are usually put into their hands. They require to have things which exercise their senses or their imagination, their imitative, and inventive powers. The glaring colours, or the gilding of toys, may catch the eye, and please for a few minutes, but unless some use can be made of them, they will, and ought, to be soon discarded. A boy, who has the ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... eyes, her voice is low, her English is far better than you might expect, and, best of all, she's tall and slender. If she was short and fat I'd call her rather hopeless, but you hang good clothes on these slim ones and it works wonders. Besides, she's imitative as a parrot." ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first-hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found in ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... gallant resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth, exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and set up her tea-table near the black marble fireplace. The next time the banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs. Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had chosen Mrs. Kemp for ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... to paint: as to that there were always plenty—but for the very reason that there were more than anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the emulative—that is on my part: W. J., I see, needed no reasons, no consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because he could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I think we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... lake; heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds. His composition ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... for the feeble-minded. It is absolutely impossible with the most devoted love and the most lavish expenditure of money, to do at home what can be, and is constantly, accomplished even in a pauper idiot asylum. The imitative faculty, which is usually very strongly marked in the idiot, furnishes one great means of his improvement; while besides there are many of the moral powers which cannot be brought out except in the society of other children of his own ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... by Grigson's chair. Grigson is our Flight Commander—one of those rugged and impenetrable individuals who seem impervious to any kind of shock. There is a legend that on one occasion four machine-gun bullets actually hit him and bounced off, which gave the imitative Hun the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... chemistry of man, or the chemistry of flowers, or the chemistry of skies. We deal with color as with sound—so far ruling the power of the light, as we rule the power of the air, producing beauty not necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so that, wherever color is introduced, ornamentation may cease to represent natural objects, and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or flamings, or any other condition of arrangement ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... difference of age between the children, F.R. (who was three years younger than his elder brother, and more than four years older than his sister, the third child) had no male companionship and was constantly alone with his mother. "Being naturally imitative," he remarks, "I think I acquired her tastes and interests and habits of thought. However that may be, I feel sure that my interests and amusements were more girlish than boyish. By way of illustration, I may mention that I have often been told by a friend of my mother's that, on one occasion, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... as well as extravagant, there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical symbolism, such as Euripides hints at—the soberer influence, in the Thiasus, of keen air and animal expansion, certainly, for art, and a poetry delighting in colour and form, it was a custom rich in suggestion. The imitative arts would draw from it altogether new motives of freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms. It is from this fantastic scene that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the heads suddenly ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the problem of flight and virtually gave the aeroplane its present place in aeronautics, there were three definite schools of experiment. The first of these was that which sought to imitate nature by means of the ornithopter or flapping-wing machines directly imitative of bird flight; the second school was that which believed in the helicopter or lifting screw; the third and eventually successful school is that which followed up the principle enunciated by Cayley, that of opposing a plane surface to the resistance of the air by supplying ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... and of whom two-thirds are now native-born,—a novel that would have corrected the too languidly accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... just as he leads them. They would sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that its acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever. It is only the elect Who Say with Plato: [Greek: tois pollois polla dokei] which means that the public has a good many bees in its bonnet, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion" (1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the various kinds of fences designed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... he confounded with our synthesis of objects in actual experience, which is always, of course, empirical. Thus, too, he regarded the principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and indicates a necessary connection, as a mere rule of association, lying in the imitative faculty of imagination, which can present only contingent, and not ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... peculiarities of their social life and forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys, parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself—at least, in all save its very highest phases—but the faculty of accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action only, because ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... ape is imitative in a high degree. This faculty also it does not share with the lower animals, but does with man, imitation being one of the methods by which he has attained his supremacy. Observation, imitation, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... proved that he had profited by his residence abroad, for he cheated us entirely to our satisfaction, and with such a grace as almost to make us fear he was robbing himself, and only exchanged his articles for our coin, out of respect for our country. These Chinese are truly said to be an imitative people. ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... world-literature,—poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;— and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry. That one is the Roman one. Its author was a Celt, and his models were Greek; and he was rather a patient imitative artist than greatly original and creative;—but he wrote for Rome, and with the Italian soil and weather for his inspiration; and their forces pouring through him made his didactics poetry, and poetry they remain after nineteen centuries. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris |
