"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... declining, and Moscow continued dull, silent, and as it were inanimate. The anxiety of the emperor increased; the impatience of the soldiers became more difficult to be repressed. Some officers ventured within the walls of ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... the features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully from the wall beside Him. And with my habit, formed during the long years of solitude, of addressing inanimate things aloud, I said ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... of the year. And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha. And, when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood upon his feet." Again, in the case of an inanimate substance, which had touched a living Saint: "And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul; so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them." ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... by experience they are found to be far the best." "The pores of the wood have a more and free liberty to move, stir, or secretly vibrate, by which means the air—which is the life of all things, both animate and inanimate—has a more free and easie recourse to pass and repass." This explanation accounts, in part at least, for the superiority of old over new instruments, and in language delightfully quaint ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... plain enough. There was a last lash of that tail, now faint and scarce rising above the water, but which, a few minutes ago, would have sent every boat round it flying into splinters. Then all was quiet. The mighty mass, now almost inanimate, turned slowly round upon its side, and then it ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world. His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... make the best possible use of his eyes; and, being a very shrewd fellow, he was not long in arriving at the conclusion that the gigantic monster on whose back he stood was, after all, nothing more nor less than an inanimate, though unquestionably wonderful, vehicle of some sort; and that the fair-skinned beings to whom he was talking, though they claimed to be the four Spirits of the Winds, were very similar in many respects to certain white ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the crew of any passing vessel had caught sight of us as we lay still and inanimate upon our sail-cloth, they would scarcely, at first sight, have hesitated ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... sympathy with my joyous and extravagant spirits," and many other instances of his laughing are recorded. He himself wrote in 1775 concerning the running away of some British soldiers, "we laugh at his idea of chasing the Royal Fusileers with the stores. Does he consider them as inanimate, or as treasure?" When the British in Boston sent out a bundle of the king's speech, "farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean), without knowing or intending it; for on that day, the day which gave being to ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... perceptual experience of their bodies. To this there corresponds in religion some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker. In more refined and highly developed religions the medium of God's ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... they been borne upon the unknown deep for twenty-five days, their resources were completely exhausted, and they had not eaten for forty-eight hours, when the boat, with its occupants lying inanimate at the bottom of it, was sighted from Halbrane Land. The rest is already known to the reader ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... ancestors used. They have no written language, and even the pictorial writing, which has often been found among rude people, seems to be utterly unknown among them. Their religious ideas(19) are of the most vague and incoherent description. The objects of worship are chiefly inanimate objects such as rivers, rocks and mountains. They seem to have a certain fear of the spirit land. They do not readily talk about their deceased ancestors. Their places of burial are concealed, and foreigners rarely obtain ...
— Japan • David Murray
... the hearth-rug, one arm stretched nonchalantly over the fender and the hand close to the fire. Her face was whiter than any face he had ever seen, living or dead. He shook; the inanimate figure with the disarranged clothes and hair, prone and deserted there in the solitude of the warm, familiar room, struck terror into him. He bent down; he knelt down and drew the arm away from the fire. He knew not in the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... abandon the things I loathe. The world with its nauseous swarm of life, its monstrous multiplications which are the eternal insult to the Omniscience I feel, still holds me. I am caught in a tangle and I remain suspended and inanimate, in the depth of a nightmare. But with your aid, Goliath, I will continue tenaciously mimicking an outward sanity so that people, when they see me, will go away happy in the assurance that I am as stupid ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... we find in the opinions of that ancient world? No trace of the divine unity. Adoration is dispersed over a thousand different beings. Not only are the heavenly bodies adored and the powers of nature, but men, animals, and inanimate objects. The feeling of the holiness of God is not less wanting, it would seem, than the idea of His unity. Religion serves as a pretext for the unchaining of human passions. This is the case unfortunately with religion in general, and the true religion is no ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of the elemental wealth of the world—I would rather think of them as unconscious dust—I would rather think of them as gurgling in the stream, floating in the clouds, bursting in the foam of light upon the shores of worlds—I would rather think of them as the inanimate and eternally unconscious, that to have even a suspicion that their naked souls had been clutched by an ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... became exhausted, and received a drink of water, after which he wildly kissed her lips, and bathed her inanimate face, as well as those of their ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... and love the actual condition of the human race, with its sorrows and consolations, its hopes and fears, its love and hate. They select their images from the habitual ideas of the people, and personify inanimate objects—the mountains tremble and exult, deep cries unto deep. Another characteristic of Hebrew poetry is the strong feeling of nationality it expresses. Of their two most sublime poets, one was their legislator, the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... their thought there is life. And it was perceived that children on the earth have nearly the same ideas when they are at their little plays; for as yet they have no such reflection as adults have about what is inanimate. ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... his old home in the Sunny South, and seemed to give him surcease from all the ills of life. Of that song a single verse is here reproduced, with deep regret that the other sixteen are lost, with all except a small fraction of the tune. Yet, cold, inanimate music notes on the paper would convey, to one who never heard him sing them, only the skeleton; the life, sympathy and soul of the song would be lacking. We needed no other ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... were concerted up to the time of meeting in Dock Square, it was evident the plan of operations had not been carried further than that, and the excited ones looked about eagerly for the enemy, but, seeing none, began to vent their fury on inanimate objects. ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... defiance which provokes the Wicked Lieutenant to descend into the waist of the ship and receive the well-merited weight of the hero's fist. The hero, with one foot planted on a coil of real rope and one arm supporting the half-inanimate form of his Susan, in deference to stage convention faced the audience, while with his other arm uplifted he invoked vengeance upon the oppressor, who scowled down from the ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... almost automatic tendency to destroy animate and inanimate objects, which results in frequent wounding, suicides, and homicides. This desire to destroy is also common to children. Fernando P. (Fig. 15), an epileptic treated by my father, when enraged was in the habit of smashing ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... fortuitous variations being occasionally preserved when not out of harmony with the state of affairs prevailing in the external world. Or variation may occur through the establishment of new relations between the species inhabiting some locality while inanimate nature remains uniform, or through migration into new inanimate or animate surroundings. Variations, in short, may arise under the influence of any change in the general environment which renders necessary adaptive changes in structure. But ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... But can you account for the males not having been rendered equally brilliant and equally protected? (440/2. See Wallace in the "Westminster Review," July, 1867, page 37, on the protection to the female insect afforded by its resemblance either to an inanimate object or to another insect protected by its unpalatableness. The cases are discussed in relation to the much greater importance (to the species as a whole) of the preservation of the female insect with her load of eggs than the male who may safely be sacrificed ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... "Strange that these poor inanimate things outlast The life that used them. Yes. I should like to try This good old friend of his. You'll leave me here An hour or so?" His hands explored the stops; And, while the music breathed what else were mute, His mind through many ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... the task of laying under oath fire and water, iron and all other metals, trees and shrubs, birds, beasts and creeping things, to do no harm to Baldur. With eager haste she went from place to place, nor did she fail to exact the oath from anything in all nature, animate or inanimate, save one only. ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... event that cried for blood; and blood he had, for he murdered the seducer, and that with an insatiable rapacity of revenge that was terrible. He literally battered the head of his victim out of all shape, and left him a dead and worthless mass of inanimate matter. The crime, though desperate, was openly committed, and there were sufficient witnesses at his trial to make it a short one. On that morning, neither arrest, nor friar, nor chaplain, nor jailer, nor sheriff could wring from him one single expression of regret or repentance for what he ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the clock struck five, his mother breathed her last. The boy gazed upon the inanimate form, but he was dazed, and could not realize that his mother had left ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... revive perceptions which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before. Wit lies in the assemblage of ideas, judgment in the careful discrimination among them. "Things are good or evil only in reference to pleasure or pain;" ... "our love and hatred of inanimate, insensible beings is commonly founded on that pleasure or pain which we receive from their use and application any way to our senses, though with their destruction; but hatred or love of beings incapable of happiness or misery is often the uneasiness or delight which we find ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... from inanimate to living objects; since I penned the last line I have been sitting with Mme. de Stael.... By appointment we called at 12.[41] For a few moments we waited in a gaudy drawing-room; the door then ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... delay she had been subjected to. The meal was a most merry one except to Baptista. She had desired privacy, and there was none; and to break the news was already a greater difficulty than it had been at first. Everything around her, animate and inanimate, great and small, insisted that she had come home to be married; and she could not get a chance ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... houses are not allowed, and for this reason. The angles of a Square (and still more those of an equilateral Triangle), being much more pointed than those of a Pentagon, and the lines of inanimate objects (such as houses) being dimmer than the lines of Men and Women, it follows that there is no little danger lest the points of a square or triangular house residence might do serious injury to ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... or Zunis, suppose the sun, moon, and stars, the sky, earth, and sea, in all their phenomena and elements; and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals, and men, to belong to one great system of all-conscious and interrelated life, in which the degrees of relationship seem to be determined largely, if not wholly, by the degrees of resemblance. In this system of life the starting point ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... he lifted her inanimate form from the carriage, bore it to the side of the brook, laid it gently upon the bank and dashed a handful of the cold water into her white face. She gasped, opened her eyes, and, sitting up, looked about her with an expression ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... There is often a perverseness in inanimate things which is beyond endurance. He had started with the highest hopes a few minutes before, confident of finding the Indian canoe without trouble, and now he was baffled and held back when on the very threshold ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... of inanimate Bodies and Plants, I pass'd to that of Animals, and particularly to that of Men. But because I had not yet knowledge enough to speak of them in the same stile as of the others; to wit, in demonstrating effects by their causes, and shewing from what seeds, ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... we become to old friends, though they be but inanimate objects. The old pipe put aside, I turned to a meerschaum, which had been presented to me years before, with the caution that I must not smoke it unless I wore kid gloves. There was no savor in that ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... the exterior graces of his person were such, that nature perhaps never formed anything more complete: His face was extremely handsome; and yet it was a manly face, neither inanimate nor effeminate; each feature having its beauty and peculiar delicacy: He had a wonderful genius for every sort of exercise, an engaging aspect, and an air of grandeur: in a word, he possessed every personal advantage; but then he was greatly ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... terror and in helpless agony, while Philibert rushed without hesitation into the water, swam out to the spot, and dived with the agility of a beaver. He presently reappeared, bearing the inanimate body of her brother to the shore. Help was soon obtained, and, after long efforts to restore Le Gardeur to consciousness,—efforts which seemed to last an age to the despairing girl,—they at last succeeded, and Le Gardeur was restored to the arms of his ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... oversight of this world,—a being whom all are required to worship, and alone to worship, as the only true God whose right it is to reign, and who does reign, and will reign forever and ever over everything that exists, animate or inanimate, visible or invisible, known or unknown, in the mighty universe of whose glory and grandeur we have such overwhelming ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... Mandeville, whose present ducal descendant combines the elegance of an Esterhazy with the intellect of an Argyle. That a scion of such blood as this has reduced a fellow-being to a condition of inanimate protoplasm, is to be regretted for his sake; but more for that of a country in which the philosophy of COMTE finds in a corrupt radical pantarchy all-sufficient first-cause of whatsoever is rotten in the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... How he beguiled the way with his learning!—in ecstasies all the time, enjoying everything, animate or inanimate, as you or I would enjoy a new play or a new opera. How I envied him! He was like a man always reading a new and pleasant book. At first the stockmen rode behind, talking about beasts, and horses, and what not—often talking about nothing at all, but riding along utterly without thought, if such ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... ascended the hill, and, standing on its summit, can look down on the wild deep sea beneath them that lies, to all possible seeming, as calm and passive at their feet as might a thing inanimate. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the like relative honor with regard to holy images. The saint showed, that far from derogating from the supreme honor of God, we honor him when for his sake we pay a subordinate respect to his angels, saints, prophets, and ministers: also when we give a relative inferior honor to inanimate things which belong to his service, as sacred vessels, churches, and images. But the tyrant was fixed in his errors, which he at first endeavored to propagate by stratagems. He therefore privately encouraged soldiers to treat contemptuously an image of Christ ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most admirable non-resistance. No wonder that May's discernment was at fault, I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have said that the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a bowl or a cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid of sensation and of will. At last my poor pet, thoroughly perplexed and tired out, fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly away, turning back once or twice to look at the object ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... any general idea of supernatural powers being possessed by natural inanimate objects, such as rivers or rocks; but, as already stated, fishers are in the habit of addressing the stream in supplication for fish, and it is possible there are other examples of the same sort of thing, which ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... good in the world of inanimate matter. There are three general classes of chemical compounds: Acids, bases, and salts. But along with these three general classes are found all kinds of connecting links: Acid salts, basic ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... leaning on her hands and knees, her hair disheveled, her clothes dripping with water, she contemplated the unhappy child, extended, almost expiring on the ground. Pale, inanimate, her eyes half open and without expression, her beautiful flaxen hair falling flat over her forehead, her blue lips, her small hands, already stiff and icy—one would have thought her dead. "La Goualeuse!" repeated La Louve, "what chance! ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... of men. He anticipates, indeed, the objection "that when you substitute Nature for God you take a thing heartless and pitiless instead of love and goodness." To this he replies, "If we abandoned our belief in the supernatural, it would not be only inanimate Nature that would be left to us; we should not give ourselves over, as is often rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers—winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fire. The God we should believe in would not be a passionless, utterly inhuman power." ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... I stood above her inanimate form. How lovely in death—but, oh! how cold! I looked upon her pale, transparent cheeks and forehead, through which the blue lines of veins, that were pulseless now, gleamed out, showing the former avenues of the sweet and blessed life. I was disarmed of my anger while I gazed. I bent down beside ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... produced by the marshaling of details in their exactitude for the purpose of bringing out character. The fact that they may be ugly and vulgar the reverse, makes not the slightest difference. The modern realist contemplates the inanimate things which surround us with peculiar complaisance, and it is right that he should as these things exert upon us a constant and secret influence. The workings of the human mind, in complex civilizations, are by no means simple; they are involved and varied: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... labor became more trying. Yet Henry Ware never murmured, though his soul was full of black bitterness. Often he would resolutely turn his eyes from the forest where he knew the deep cool pools were, and keep them on the sun-baked field. His rifle, which had seemed to reproach him, inanimate object though it was, he hid in a corner of the house where he could not see it and its temptation. In order to create a counter-irritant he plunged into work ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... woof of life in this house went the influence of that living tree; not as a blind thing of inanimate existence but as a sentient spirit and a warder whose voices and moods they loved and reverenced—as a link that bound them to the past of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Gordon states, that in various departments of the revenue, the saving of expenditure by the substitution of inanimate for animate power, would, in the Post Office alone, amount to upwards of half a million; whilst, from the cheapness of food which the substitution would produce, the navy and army estimates would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... unfeigned tears of his subjects. The body, according to ancient custom, lay in state in the vestibule of the palace; and the civil and military officers, the patricians, the senate, and the clergy approached in due order to adore and kiss the inanimate corpse of their sovereign. Before the procession moved towards the Imperial sepulchre, a herald proclaimed this awful admonition: "Arise, O king of the world, and obey the summons of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... axe, a tree in forest, it is the person that incurs the sin and not the axe by any means. Or, if it be said that, the axe being only the material cause, the consequence of the act (of cutting) should attach to the animate agent (and not to the inanimate tool), then the sin may be said to belong to the person that has made the axe. This, however, can scarcely be true. If this be not reasonable, O son of Kunti, that one man should incur the consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and talking excitedly to his companion. Instantly she understood. The young woods runner, with the rare quickness of expedient peculiar to these people, had allowed himself to be carried through the rapids muscle-loose, as an inanimate object would be carried, without an attempt to help himself in any way. It was a desperate chance, but it was the only chance. The slightest stiffening of the muscles, the least struggle would have thrown him out of the water's natural channel ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... on the vast silver basin of Lake Milar, seen Stockholm in all its pride, Upsal, the city of the ancient gods, and Gebel, the active and industrious, he found himself amid a region entirely silent, inanimate, and wrapped in a snowy pall. Soon he penetrated the bosom of a long pine forest, the shafts of which seemed, as it were, giants wrapped in cloaks of white. Now he ascended steep hills, then rapidly hurried to the Gulf, the shores of which the waves had made to look like point-lace, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Socrates was acquainted with them, and had a great mind to make them friends. Meeting therefore with Chaerecrates, he accosted him thus:—"Are you, too, one of those who prefer the being rich to the having a brother, and who do not consider that riches, being inanimate things, have need of being defended, whereas a brother is himself a good defence, and, after all, that there is more money than brothers? For is it not extravagant in such men to imagine that a brother does them wrong because they enjoy not his estate? Why say they not likewise, that all the world ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... "that not only people, but animals, plants, stones, buildings, and utensils have shades also. But a wonderful thing the shade of an inanimate object is not dead, it possesses life, moves, goes from place to place, it even thinks and expresses thought through various signs, most ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... next of the Quakers, that they are a cold and inanimate people; and that they have neither the ordinary affection, nor the gradation of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... mythologies of the Greeks and Romans must not be considered as the highest forms even of the worship of idols or inanimate things. The gods and goddesses of these mythological systems were principally the powers that were supposed to preside over the different forces and elements of nature, and were invested with the celestial attributes of a higher order of beings. Neptune ruled the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to believe even in the possibility of faith or honor among men, of constancy, or purity, or truth in women, no sooner saw his Melanie, whom he knew to be the wife of another, solitary and in tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form reclining on his bosom, than he was prepared to believe any thing, rather than believe ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... leather: there, top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, cars, come tumbling in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewigkeit hin: From Eternity, onwards to Eternity! These are Apparitions: ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... (Weber, i. 283.) he now, with axes and torches is advancing on the very sanctuary of Justice. Sacrilegious; yet what help? The man is a soldier; looks merely at his orders; impassive, moves forward like an inanimate engine. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... alkalkuli. In en. In front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted, and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy when ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... we are both old fools, Mr. Sharpe; but—we will talk this over with Lady Mainwaring. Come—" There was evidently a slight struggle near the chair over some inanimate object. But the next moment the Baronet's voice rose, persuasively, "Really, I must insist upon relieving you of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... had delayed her; she was driven desperate by that and malice of inanimate thing: every 'bus and tram was against her, whisking out of sight just as she wanted them, or blocked by slow crawling carts and lorries. There was a tight, hard pain in her heart, like toothache, round which her whole body gathered, pressing, impaled upon it; a sense of desperation, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... happiness and beatitude over all creatures, in proportion to their respective capabilities of participating in them, and to guide all beings towards that end, which, in the scheme of the universe, was pre-ordained by the Infinite Wisdom as the best. Now, the inanimate portion of the creation progresses unconsciously in the way ordained by Providence, obeys physical immutable laws, and is, therefore, only a means to a more exalted end. But the moral being, who has self-consciousness, resolves on action after deliberating upon what he thinks best, and carries ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... object that attracted their attention was the dead body of a female, reclining on a bed in an attitude of deep interest and attention. Her countenance retained the freshness of life: but a contraction of the limbs showed that her form was inanimate. Seated on the floor was the corpse of an apparently young man, holding a steel in one hand and a flint in the other, as if in the act of striking fire upon some tinder which lay beside him. In the fore-part of the vessel ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... rush of tears came to her eyes. The poor creature had tried to make all the reparation she could for thus hastily leaving the white woman in the desert. She had given back the money—all she had that was valuable! Beside the dollar rippled a little chain of beads curiously wrought, an inanimate appeal for forgiveness and a grateful return for the kindness shown her. Margaret smiled as she stooped again to pick up her things. There had been a heart, after all, behind that stolid countenance, and some sense of righteousness and justice. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... thought it more beautiful than that of York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so majestic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does not impress the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that has a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own,—a creation which man did not build, though in some way or other it is connected with him, and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to express ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strange harmony of Nature with the temperament of man, every phase of his passionate existence seeming to have its type in things inanimate, when a loud cheer from the land aroused me, and the words, "Charley! Cousin Charley!" came wafted over the water to where I lay. For some time I could but distinguish the faint outline of some figures ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 1865, have been carrying their messages under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated failures do not mean final failure. There is often said to be a malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... of the church's efforts in this direction is given by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study entitled "Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History". Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to animation in the male and female, but the canon law altogether negatived ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... the three others are Vriddhi, Kshaya, and Sthana, all of which arise from policy. Some of the seven limbs are inanimate, such as the treasury. But it is said that the treasury supports the ministers, and the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... modification of the early laughter of pleasure, betokening little more than kindly or joyous emotions. Although not always now genial, the smile continues to be used for the symbol of pleasure, even in reference to inanimate Nature, as where Milton writes "Old Ocean smiled." The smile may have preceded laughter, as the bud comes before the blossom, but it may, on the other hand, have been a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... a circle, then bestowed a solemn benediction on the two wall-flowers, and off to the parlour, where they found a pair lying dead drunk, and other two affectionate to tears. That they had straightway carried off the inanimate, and dragged off the loving and lachymose, kicked them all merrily each into ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a book it was to find something about nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case, inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most important thing in life. For who could look on earth, water, sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me more satisfaction than ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... there is in the power of a single felicitous word in poetry, toward making a perfect picture to the mind of the reader! It often invests an inanimate object with almost actual life, and makes the landscape a sentient thing. Here are a few lines that live in our memory—from PROCTOR, BARRY CORNWALL, if we do not mistake—which are eminently in illustration ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... modified in innumerable ways for the benefit of each species. The most general modification has been in such directions as to favour concealment when at rest in the usual surroundings of the species, sometimes carried on by successive steps till it has resulted in the most minute imitation of some inanimate object or exact mimicry of some other animal. In other cases bright colours or striking contrasts have been preserved, to serve as a warning of inedibility or of dangerous powers of attack. Most frequent of all has been the specialisation of each distinct form by some tint or marking ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... became rude in his efforts to break away. At last he flung her off, and she fell, her forehead striking on the sharp corner of a stone, which started the blood trickling down her fair white brow. The woman swooned. Sight of blood touched the heart of George Waters, and, stooping, he raised the inanimate form in his arms, as tenderly as if she had been an infant, and bore her to a public ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... bears; that is the touch of marvel which transforms the scene. The old woman who owned the obstinate pig is the centre of a circle in which stand only familiar images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... striking point about the room was the furniture. This was a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced by Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort. The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of Fancy's mother, exercised from the date ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... infer that Jesus, as the Omniscient Lord of the inanimate creation, knew well that fruit there was none under that pretentious foliage. We dare not suppose that He went expecting to find Figs; far less, that in a moment of disappointed hope, He ventured on a capricious exercise of His power, uttered a hasty malediction, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... When a man wants timber for his house, he says, "That is the tree I want," and the woodsman fells it and squares it for the sill. Does he want stone for his foundations or marble for his finishings? There are the rocks; quarry them. Men go into inanimate nature and get the materials they need. Nor is it very different in the great world of business and ambition. The giant takes one man for the foundation and cuts him down and builds him into the walls; he selects another man and uses him up, building his substance into the structure; ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But just there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not yet learned to boast its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... to Teresa. His gloomy gray eyes rested on her, as they might have rested on any inanimate object near him—on the railing that imprisoned the birds, or on the pipes that kept the monkey-house warm. "I have been playing the fool, ma'am, with this child," he said; "and I fear I have detained you. I beg your pardon." He pulled off his ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... and thirst of knowledge had likewise received a new direction. Books and inanimate nature were cold and lifeless instructors. Men, and the works of men, were the objects of rational study, and our own eyes only could communicate just conceptions of human performances. The influence of manners, professions, and social institutions, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... short, had become so critical that I felt it my duty to acquaint Sir Edgar with it forthwith; and I was on my way toward the companion in search of him when he emerged from it and joined me, the two seamen who had conveyed the inanimate body of the mate below following him and making their way forward, dodging the seas as best they might ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... nothingness. This declension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining some vestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greater proportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, below them man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere, as it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection; yet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinity would still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only a beauty in the whole, to whose ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... us, not the particular toy. And so the looking back on life ought never to be a mournful thing; it ought to be light-hearted, high-spirited, amusing. The spirit survives, and there is yet much experience ahead of us. We waste our sense of pathos very strangely over inanimate things. We get to feel about the things that surround us, our houses, our very chairs and tables, as if they were somehow things that were actually attached to us. We feel, when the old house that has belonged to our family passes ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... confined to the portrayal of the inanimate face before me, I often pause to take mental as well as pictorial notes of the surroundings. I observe that the defunct is attired in a suit of black, which has doubtless been provided by the undertakers; for the clothes are much too wide for his wasted anatomy, and give ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... them—if it ever existed—by hard blows of fortune; it is safer, they think, to transform the labour of their hands into gold, which can be moved from place to place or hidden from the tyrant's eye. They have none of our sentimentality in regard to inanimate objects. Eliza Cook's feelings towards her "old arm-chair" would strike them as savouring of childishness. Hence the unfinished look of their houses, within and without. Why expend thought and wealth upon that which ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... pleasant for a plain inanimate girl like that to have a beautiful young fellow come and sit down beside her and whisper to her that he is her slave—if that is what this one whispers. No wonder she likes it, and that she thinks me a cruel tyrant; which of course she does, though she is afraid—she hasn't the animation ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... as he desires the expression to be understood, it may be considered to imply a fear of the Evil One and his emissaries, a trust in benign spirits and saints, a faith in occult science, and a belief that a conjunction of certain planets or other inanimate bodies is capable of producing supernatural effects, either beneficial or prejudicial to man. Superstition, generally so called, has run through a course of ages from sire to son, leaving it still deeply rooted in the minds of many of the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... handing them down from step-ladders planted in the middle of the sidewalk. Ranged outside the larger establishments are rows of headless dummies, intended to represent the female form divine, and to show off on their inanimate busts and shoulders the sweetest assortments ever seen of new things in summer fashions. These headless dummies of the Bowery have a very ghastly look at night. They suggest a procession of the ghosts of Bluebeard's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Mont Blanc, or Mount AEtna, perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which can not belong to any part of inanimate nature—unless we adopt the system of Spinoza, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... some little trouble on account of it? Yet more, if emotion be eliminated, what difference is there, I say not between a man and a brute, but between a man and a rock, or the trunk of a tree, or any inanimate object? Nor are those to be listened to, who regard virtue as something hard and iron-like. [Footnote: Here, undoubtedly, Cicero refers to the sterner type of Stoicism, which in his time was already obsolescent, and was yielding place to the milder, while no less rigid, ethics of which ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... In our day multitudes of people fall victims to all kinds of dreadful disasters, explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings. Never before, perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the spirit of the times. Fred found a superb placard, the work of Cheret, a pathetic scene in a mine, banners streaming in the air, with the words 'Bazar de Charite' in gold letters on a red ground, and the ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... banner unfolding, expanding, and trailing far away from her smoke-stacks. There is a surging, hissing, and smothered screaming of the pent-up steam in her boilers, as if they had put on all energy for the moment. They had;—flesh, blood, bones, iron, brass, steel,—animate and inanimate,—were nerved up for the trial ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... herself, Pollyanna had always found plenty to interest her within the four walls of the house; for, if inanimate things failed, there were yet Mary, Jennie, Bridget, and Perkins. To-day, however, Mary had a headache, Jennie was trimming a new hat, Bridget was making apple pies, and Perkins was nowhere to be found. Moreover it was a particularly ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... anything, scarcely ventures at the present day even to try timidly to follow him. Meanwhile England, France, and the whole of Europe demand of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist. The classical system had its origin in the life of its time: that time has passed; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... as I sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... produced in great variety and in copious abundance. The presence in blazon of animated beings of whatsoever kinds, whether real or fabulous, led to rambling disquisitions in the most ludicrously unnatural of imaginary Natural History. From every variety also of inanimate figure and device, the simplest no less than the more elaborate, after the same fashion some "moral" was sought to be extracted. The technical language, too, of the early Heralds, had its expressive simplicity travestied by ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... trifle with it and dishonour her. It was enough. There was no trait in her nature to lead her to repine; it was entirely controlled by a dominant desire to punish the traitor. Hal could scarcely believe that this stern, resolute woman was the same woe-begone inanimate girl he had interviewed. She examined the letter carefully, noting its date and post-mark, and putting it ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... the house in Pemberton Square, three years after Maggie went to live there, on the very sofa where Andre Maggimore had lain, was stretched the inanimate form of another person, stricken down by the same malady. It was Mr. Checkynshaw. The two gentlemen with whom he had been conversing when attacked by the fit had placed him there, and Dr. Fisher had been sent for. From that sofa he was conveyed ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... past a strange, far-away musical note, like the murmur of running water, had struck my ear, and yet all about everything looked dead. Of animate or even inanimate pulsation there was no sign. One unbroken sheet of snow stretched as far as I could see, in which stood the great trees like mummies. Still the sound continued, seeming to come from under my feet. I stopped, and, kneeling down, put my ear to the crust, and there, as distinct as ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... little girl, you ought to have realized that it was a cruel and even a dangerous joke. You cannot carelessly dispose of little human beings as if they were dolls, or other inanimate things." ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... I said, scarce able to command my words, under the power of association, or memory, which was laying its message on my heart, though it was a flower that bore the message. Inanimate things do that sometimes - I think, often, - when the ear of the soul is open to hear them; and flowers in especial are the Lord's messengers and speak what He gives them. I knew this one ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... who was to represent, in the impending struggle, the forces of order and tradition was seated by the fire when Darrow entered. Among the flowers and old furniture of the large pale-panelled room, Madame de Chantelle had the inanimate elegance of a figure introduced into a "still-life" to give the scale. And this, Darrow reflected, was exactly what she doubtless regarded as her chief obligation: he was sure she thought a great deal of "measure", ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... educated at Eton, I have often caught myself envying the quaintly expressed motto of the more ancient seminary amid the Hampshire chalk-hills, i.e. Manners makyth man"; and to this day I associate General Paoli with an apostrophe "O Corsica! O my country, bleeding and inanimate!" etc., and with Miss Plinlimmon's foot-note: "N.B.—The author of these affecting lines, himself a blameless patriot, actually stood godfather to the babe who has since become the infamous Napoleon Bonaparte. Oh, irony! What had been the feelings ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quality that some people impart to a dwelling-place. Entering, one felt refinement, daintiness, and the ability to live above mere externals. Barbara had, very strongly, the house-love which belongs to some rare women. And who shall say that inanimate things do not answer to our love of them, and diffuse, between our four walls, a certain gracious spirit of kindliness ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... brings happiness; and in the course of trying to establish this heartless thesis to a heavy heart he breaks into a strain of the loftiest poetry in describing the blessedness of the righteous. All things, animate and inanimate, are upon his side. The ground, which Genesis tells us is 'cursed for his sake,' becomes his ally, and the very creatures whom man's sin set at enmity against him are at peace with him. All things are the friends and servants of him ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... first like persons in conversation, but gradually resolving themselves into varieties of one voice. It was an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from inanimate nature in deep secret places where water flows, or where ivy leaves flap against stones; but by degrees she was convinced that the voice was Winterborne's. Yet who could be his listener, so mute and patient; for though he argued so ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... not wholly condemned. Roentgen's rays have rearranged some of the older ideas of matter, while radium has revolutionised them, and is leading science beyond the borderland of ether into the astral world. The boundaries between animate and inanimate matter are broken down. Magnets are found to be possessed of almost uncanny powers, transferring certain forms of disease in a way not yet satisfactorily explained. Telepathy, clairvoyance, movement ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... all are Morpheus, Phobetor, and Phantasos, who inspire dreams into great persons only: Morpheus inspires such dreams as relate to men, Phobetor such as relate to other animals, and Phantasos such as relate to inanimate things. They have each their particular legions under them, to inspire the common people with the sort of dreams which belong ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... it comes to moral questions we are still dominated by the idea of the fatalistic power of inanimate things. We cannot think it possible to be just or good, not to speak of being cheerful, without looking at some physical fact and saying humbly "By your leave." We personify our tools and machines, and the occult symbols of trade, and then as abject idolaters we bow down before ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... himself king of the country, and striking every body he came near, till his companions, seeing no other security against his tyranny, knocked him down. Some, reduced before by long sickness and the scurvy, became on this occasion, as it were, petrified and bereaved of all sense, like inanimate logs, and were bandied to and fro by the jerks and rolls of the ship, without exerting any efforts to help themselves. So terrible was the scene of foaming breakers around us, that one of the bravest men we had could not help expressing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... magnificent quality of mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather, and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of response to ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... which they are held, and the strings with which they are tied getting entangled together. In an exaggerated pantomime, Madame Tres-Propre expresses her despair at wasting so much of our valuable time: oh! if it only depended on her personal efforts! but ah! the natural perversity of inanimate things which have no consideration for human dignity! With monkeyish antics, she even deems it her duty to threaten the lanterns and shake her fist at these inextricably tangled strings which have ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... notion, ... of a succession of extinction of species, and creation of new ones, going on perpetually now, and through an indefinite period of the past, and to continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the changes which must continue in the inanimate and habitable earth, the idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever conceived, so far as regards the attributes of ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... followed, and then another; he heard the sound of oars, the grinding of keels upon the sand, and where the Mormons had been a few moments before the beach was now alive with mainlanders. In the growing light he could make out the king's men below him, inanimate spots in the middle of the narrow plain. Helpless he stood clutching his pistol, the horror in him growing with each breath. Could he give no warning? Could he do nothing—nothing—At least he could join in the fight! He ran down the hill, swinging to the left of the Mormons. Half way, and ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... entire soul, like the reflection in a mirror, and is content with the illusion, the effect. By its power and beauty it awakens ideas and sentiments within him. He does not even consider the part which his own mind plays, and as his fancy is quite free, he tends to personify inanimate things, as the ancients did ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... her feet down to the floor. One of her silken mules had fallen off. Semi-consciously she groped for it with stockinged toes. As the inanimate will, the mule eluded recapture with impish ease. But beneath her foot something rustled and crackled lightly. She bent over and picked it up: a square ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... are filled with accounts of magical acts, performed by "the people of the first times." They annihilated time and space, commanded inanimate objects to do their will, created human beings from pieces of betel-nut, and caused the magical increase of food and drink. Those days have passed, yet magical acts still pervade all the ceremonies; nature is overcome, while ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... for a moment. Still holding her fast he set out, not for Flint House, but to the churchtown. Dizzy, panting, and staggering, he struggled on across the moors, and as he walked he listened anxiously for any sound from the inanimate ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... being, distinct from inanimate matter and from vegetable life on the one side and from mental and spiritual existence on the other. Thus man is properly classified as an animal. But because the animal life is the lowest and rudest part of his being and that which he shares with inferior creatures, to ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... interested in inanimate things, especially in using them, and so he plays with his toys. He builds bricks, runs engines, solves simple puzzle pictures, asks to work with his father's gardening tools, or his mother's cooking utensils. He is interested in the life of the garden, in the growing things, in ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... over the "copy" his colleagues were missing. "The mark is there right enough. Queer how inanimate objects like a rose-tree can make mischief. I remember a case in which a chestnut in a man's pocket sent him to penal servitude. There was absolutely no evidence against him, except a possible motive, until that chestnut was found and proved to ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of "irritable weakness" is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... rose the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact. Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon as this, the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... scanned her features, and being positive of her identity I took the inanimate form of Arletta in my arms and kissing her tenderly, was overcome ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... emergency brakes. Then he looked again and the red-light was gone. But caution is a magic watchword with all railroad men, and he stopped. Climbing down out of the cab of the engine, he took his torch, and started out to investigate. He didn't have far to go, when he came upon the limp, inanimate form of Mary Marsh, the extinguished red-light tightly clasped in ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... hut with our almost inanimate burden, we found the captain and Charlie in a state of great anxiety to know what had happened; for they had, I should have said, been undressed, and placed in our hosts' beds, their wounds preventing them from putting on their clothes. The captain insisted on turning out when he saw the ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... seen in the dull glow of a smouldering tree poking vigorously—seeming as ants attacking living monsters infinitely beyond their strength. Perhaps it is there that the fascination of the work comes in—the triumph of conquering tons of inanimate matter by efforts so small. At any rate it is always hard to leave the scene of action, and certainly the first glance next morning is to ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... made such a view of it impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the cause of any one phenomenon (at least in inanimate nature), must be the cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the undesigned concurrence of a number of {44} independent agencies: and ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... eagles, lions, tigers, etc. Thus, they said, ru puz, ru naual, pedro lae cot, balam, 'Peter's power, his naual, is a lion, a tiger.' They also applied the words puz and naual to certain trees, rocks and other inanimate objects, whence the Devil used to speak to them, and likewise to the idols which they worshiped, as gazlic che, gazlic abah, huyu, k'o ru naual, 'The life of the tree, the life of the stone, of the hill, is its naual,' etc.; because they believed there was life in these objects. They ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... to drop with a strange, detached effect into the conversation between them. His habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and from the word dropped into it ripples that came to his feet upon his margin of the pool and ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... rich presents made to the inanimate clay which yesterday influenced those who still trembled lest the spirit of the dead war-chief would haunt them. The richest cloth enrobed his body, and, a short distance from the village, he was placed ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... she saw him as a man suddenly stricken with age. His face was grey. He led her to a settee by the high oak fireplace, and there—white, inanimate as a ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... The inanimate body, wrapped in linen, was deposited in a spacious,[44] cool rock chamber, the entrance of which was closed, not by a well-fitting door, but by a stone rolled against the opening, which would of course allow free passage of air. A little more than thirty-six hours afterwards (Friday, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... would not be able to carry the inanimate figure, so he hurriedly put on his clothes and set out on a run for Colonel Zane's house. The first person whom he saw was the old negro slave, who was brushing ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... edelweiss, and the heart of a princess is first the heart of a woman, and must blossom when its spring comes. All the conventions that man can invent will not keep back the flower. All created things, animate and inanimate, have in them an uncontrollable impulse which, in their spring, reverts with a holy retrospect to the great first principle of existence, the love ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is far greater. Indeed, it is 'life atoms' that a man in a blind passion throws off unconsciously. Let any man give way to any intense feeling such as anger, grief, &c., under or near a tree, or ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... transformation. M. des Rameures remarked it to them. The neighboring country people felt in the Count's language something new—as it were, a tender humility; they said that in other years he had been polite, but this year he was angelic. Even the inanimate things, the woods, the trees, the heavens, should have borne the same testimony, for he looked at and studied them with a benevolent curiosity with which he had ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... were filled with quiet, and from the hall at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction. After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war on its battered ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... shadow, and on unseemly canvas limned it for all time in forms of unuttered and unutterable loveliness. They shaped into glowing life the phantoms of grace that were always flitting before their enchanted eyes, and poured into inanimate marble their rapt and passionate souls. They struck the lyre to wild and stirring songs whose tremulous echoes still linger along the corridors of Time. Some sought the icebound North, and grappled with dangers by field ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sight and in idea, orderly variety, the waving line, neither straight nor crooked. The waving line is the symbol, or memento, as I may say, of grace, wherever it is seen in whatever form, animate or inanimate; and may be justly styled the line ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck's armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man's susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck's further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl's possession. It was then that the first glimmer of an opening for ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... and in a few moments Leopold landed her on the narrow beach beneath the lofty rock. The maiden left the boat, climbed the high rock, and wandered about among the wild cliffs and chasms, all alone, for Leopold could not leave the inanimate Rosabel—which the rude sea might injure—to follow the animate and beautiful Rosabel in ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturniug brave,—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, shall ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... It must be remembered that all Oriental languages give power to gems, perfumes and talismanic symbols. This fact makes direct translation of Oriental writings a difficult task for the Occidental scholar, who, until recently at least, gave no power to so-called "inanimate" things. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... picked them up just as he would have picked up a paper-cutter, a pencil, a match-box, if any of these had been within reach of his nervous fingers. Most men who are at times mentally embarrassed find relief in touching small inanimate objects. So he said reassuringly: "Don't let a pair of gloves worry ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... distance from ordinary medical prac- tice to Christian Science is full many a league in the line of light; but to go in healing from the use of 106:1 inanimate drugs to the criminal misuse of human will- power, is to drop from the platform of common manhood 106:3 into the very mire of iniquity, to work against the free course of honesty and justice, and to push vainly against ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... we have separated and sorted exhaustively, an operation in which Phoebe shows a delicacy of discrimination and a fearlessness of attack amounting to genius, we count the entire number and find several missing. Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we "scoop" one from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by himself in solitary splendour in the ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... marvellous history of the Hebrew nation, the beautiful scenery in which they lived and moved, the stately ceremonial of their liturgy, and the promise of a Messiah. Its chief strength and charm is that it personifies inanimate objects, as in the sixty-fourth Psalm, where ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... associations—that, of course, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without the quality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter, and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, the sense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by its inanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life, and to a great extent he does ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock |
