"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of inanimate things. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... points. On the other hand, if in the blackest midnight I should come to her, she would not need to ask who the comer was. It is by the mind, not the eye, that these people know one another. It is really only in their relations to soulless and inanimate things that they need ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... 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 of the good Paoli, could he have foreseen ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with an 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 of an act done by another, then, guided by this, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... transformation. Once he had known a minister, a very good man indeed, who had been forced into a fight. The clergyman had acted his unwilling part with such muscular enthusiasm that his brutish opponent had been reduced to the lethargic condition of inanimate pulp. Mortimer compared his present exploit with that of his friend, the clergyman; he felt that he was very much in the same boat. He was eager to have the bet made and get out into the less congested air; his companions of the betting ring were not men ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... to the other, with as much watchfulness, as much grief, and almost as much intelligence as the surviving friends; now crouching at the cold feet of Hazlehurst, now licking the stiff hand, now raising himself to gaze wistfully at the inanimate features of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... sight of the white face, she uttered a cry of joy, and running up to the body, patted the cold cheeks, while she kept calling 'Mah-nee, Mah-nee,' and saying words unintelligible to all, but full of pathos and love, and child-like coaxing for the inanimate form to rouse itself, and ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... means by which the earth becomes the companion of man—his friend and his teacher! In the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could only be seen preparation for his existence;—the characters which enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily—in all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with, it ministers to ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... supreme Deity a providential 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... him, and this with night coming on in a strange village. Scarcely, Rodriguez reflected, he knew where he was going himself. Yet if old tunes lurking in its hollows, echoing though imperceptibly from long-faded evenings, gave the mandolin any knowledge of human affairs that other inanimate things ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... creature about twenty-five years old, dressed in a floating Watteau-like garment of vaporous blue, painted with faded pink roses. She was seated in a large carved and gilded chair, opposite an excessively Louis-Quinze mirror, while her pale golden hair was being brushed out by a brown, inanimate-looking maid. Her little oval face, with its soft cloudy hair growing low on the forehead, long blue eyes, and rosebud mouth, had something of the romantic improbability of an eighteenth-century miniature. From the age of two Felicity had been an ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... would be were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, "They have loved darkness better than light because their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognize ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... of its cognate expressions, "holiness," "holy," and the like, is separation. We see this very clearly in connection with buildings or things which are said to be "holy" or "sanctified." It is obvious that no thought of purification is applicable to buildings and inanimate objects. We must, therefore, understand sanctification in this case as equivalent to consecration. This is also the root-meaning of the word "sanctify" in relation to persons, and it may be questioned whether the word, as used in the original, ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... that the open-hearted and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken from him; and at length he takes a melancholy leave of his ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... little singular," said Risk, "that a ship is the only inanimate object ever seen as an individual apparition. There are not many of these ghostly ships on the seas, however. I do not remember to have heard of more than one—that of the celebrated 'Flying Dutchman,' off the Cape of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... shout of rage and pain he gathered Wanda in his arms, calling her name, hoping for a twitch of life. Then he whipped out his knife and sawed through the cord and lowered the body upon the floor, felt for the heart, turned up the dropped eyelids, even shook the inanimate stiffening form of his pet. He knew it was in vain—that never again would she jump trustingly upon him, never again would she appear absurdly with one of his slippers in her wide mouth that always seemed to smile at the joke, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... from a storm, Anthony; it's like growing old. I want to kiss you so—in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you've got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you're gone. I can't even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in the station who haven't any right to live—I can't resent them even though they're dirtying up our world, because I'm ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... belongings likely to be of use. The spirits of these latter are set free, either by having holes bored in them or some part of them broken or removed, so that thus being rendered useless to the living, they suffer what in the Eskimo mind corresponds to the death of inanimate objects. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... so plainly and highly exalt the good which is communicative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as the Holy Faith; well declaring that it was the same God that gave the Christian law to men, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake of before; for we read that the elected saints of God have wished themselves anathematised and razed out of the book of life, in an ecstasy of charity and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... hive laden with stolen honey, while her neighbors gossiped about it, or the stately elm that played sly tricks, or the log which proved to be a good bedfellow because it did not grumble. Burroughs's way of investing beasts, birds, insects, and inanimate things with human motives is very pleasing to children. They like to trace analogies between the human and the irrational, to think of a weed as a tramp stealing rides, of Nature as a tell-tale when ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... country-side with their plaintive long-drawn lowing. The strident cocks crowed to each other from farm to farm. There came up the irregular beat of the flails in the barns. The fevered life of myriads of creatures swelled and flowed through the peace of inanimate Nature. Uneasily Olivier would watch the ever hurrying columns of the ants, and the bees big with their booty, buzzing like organ-pipes, and the superb and stupid wasps who know not what they want—the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally {151} animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... looked around her as if seeking more inanimate things upon which to vent her anger, but finding none she dashed into the cottage and soon reappeared with a much-worn straw hat which she jammed on her flaxen head and then, with a determined air, walked down the plank and marched up the path toward the bridge—the same direction ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise rattled gaily along ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Sometimes inanimate objects, abstract ideas, or the lower animals are given the attributes of human beings. Such a figure is called personification, and is in fact a modified metaphor, since it is based upon some resemblance of the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... naked, repelling, unlovely earth rose the Stockade, in hideous ugliness. At the gate the two men continued at their monotonous labor of tossing the dead of the previous day into the wagon-heaving into that rude hearse the inanimate remains that had once tempted gallant, manly hearts, glowing with patriotism and devotion to country—piling up listlessly and wearily, in a mass of nameless, emaciated corpses, fluttering with rags, and swarming with vermin, the pride, the joy of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... mutely by a look, and rushing to the house where the child still lay, seemingly inanimate, on the floor among the soiled clothes, she caught it up eagerly, and hurried away to her own poor garret in a tumble-down tenement at the farthest end of the alley. The infant had been stunned by its fall, but under her tender care, and rocked in the ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... form," where the change in nature is generally believed to be a rearrangement of the very same atoms). If you mean to assert that the difference between a live animal and a dead animal, i.e., between animate and sensitive matter, and the same matter when it becomes inanimate and insensitive, is a mere rearrangement of the same atoms, your premiss is intelligible. (It is a bolder one than any biologists have yet advanced. The most sceptical of them admits, I believe, that "vitality" is a thing per se. However, that is beside ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... bridge, had been precipitated into the river. The affair seemed to be considered as a huge joke, and the chief amusement now consisted in hanging over the broken side and contemplating the gruesome spectacle of a half-submerged motor, and four human bodies lying inanimate on some rocks, rapidly swelling, thanks to ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... 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 ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. And, at the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of art, a life worthy of ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Satisfaction in thinking otherwise. There is something so pitifully mean in the inverted Ambition of that Man who can hope for Annihilation, and please himself to think that his whole Fabrick shall one Day crumble into Dust, and mix with the Mass of inanimate Beings, that it equally deserves our Admiration and Pity. The Mystery of such Mens Unbelief is not hard to be penetrated; and indeed amounts to nothing more than a sordid Hope that they shall not be immortal, because they ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... little smoking-room in 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 to his bed, still insensible. His eyes were open, ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... 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 ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... might bind up her head and stanch the blood; but he did not hear, or heed,—he was lost in grief. M. de Bois also appealed to him, but in vain; then Gaston attempted to use force to recall him to reason, and, seizing both of Maurice's arms, essayed to unclasp them from their hold of the inanimate form, saying as he ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... day there persisted that sense of complete detachment from all but her whose body they had laid to rest on the windy hill overlooking the broad water. His father, Aunt Barbara, the cousins and relations who thronged the church were no more than inanimate shadows compared with her whose presence had come last night into his room, and had not left him since. The affairs of the world, drums and the torch of war, had passed for those hours from his knowledge, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... work. The Pathfinder narrowly escaped the passage of this formidable missile as it entered; but when it exploded, Mabel could not suppress a shriek, for she supposed all over her head, whether animate or inanimate, destroyed. To increase her horror, her father shouted in a ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... wonder,' said the youthful Abbe, as he tenderly lifted the inanimate figure. 'This has been a night of horrors. I was coming in haste to know whether the King knows of this frightful plot of M. de Guise, and the bloody work ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. But now that I had finished, breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room. I tried to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bone, his teeth chattering like castanets, the old man was stooping over the inanimate form on the ground when the two men came up. In answer to their startled questions, he merely said that he had seen the struggle from across the street, but had been too late to prevent ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... lived, the peculiar talent which nature had bestowed on him, and the degree of excellence to which he had brought it in his performances, were always fairly considered. There was no predilection for spiritual or temporal subjects, for landscape or for city views, for animate or inanimate: the question was always about the ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a method of gratifying a grasping habit with impunity, the law has been amended upon this point by imperial constitutions, by which it is enacted that it shall not be lawful for any one to forcibly carry off movable property, inanimate or animate, even though he believe it to belong to him; and that whosoever disobeys this shall forfeit the property, if, in fact, it be his, and if it be not, shall restore it, and along with it its value in money. And ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... to that narrow corridor. Disregarded, thrown aside, are a cloth and a besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and there the red stains are dry, and clotted as with bloody glue; and the hairs of the besom start up, torn and ragged, as if the bristles had a sense of some horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds. If you passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly housework. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... itself, 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 this adaptation in some cases takes place in the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... self-ownership to enactments of the Divine Legislator, and to the bright morning of time, when he came forth from the hand of his Maker, "crowned with glory and honor," invested with self-control, and with dominion over the brute and inanimate creation. You soothe the conscience of the slaveholder, by reminding him, that the relation, which he has assumed towards his down-trodden fellow-man, is lawful. The abolitionist protests, that the wickedness of the relation is none the less, because it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... carefully blacked, but a thin skin of mould had gathered over them. They looked like Lemuel Shackford. They had taken a position habitual with him. Richard was struck by the subtile irony which lay in these inanimate things. That a man's hat should outlast the man, and have a jaunty expression of triumph! That a dead man's shoes should ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... so he always contrived to keep a clear head and a steady eye and hand. He also took good care of his horse and dog for his own sake, as he wanted to make the best and the longest of their services, and was shrewd enough to know that you cannot get out of anything, whether animate or inanimate, more than is put into it. So self and wife, and horse and dog were all well fed and cared for, and ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... however, turned in a different direction, for the music suddenly ceasing, and the dancers stopping, he learnt that the May Queen had fainted, and presently afterwards the crowd opened to give passage to Robin Hood, who bore her inanimate form in ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... impressions by full enumeration of details, or by emphasis on prominent or characteristic details? How often and how fully does he describe scenes of human activity (such as a street scene, a social gathering, a procession on the march)? 3. How frequent and how vivid are his descriptions of the inanimate background of human life—buildings, interiors of rooms, and the rest? 4. Does the author skilfully use description to create the general atmosphere in which he wishes to invest his work—an atmosphere of cheerfulness, of mystery, of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... charge of our capture. We left him with the lantern, stowing away the decoys, live and inanimate, in the Invigorator. Within fifteen minutes thereafter I was sleeping the sleep of the moderately ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... the crowd had besieged the doors; they were admitted, and beheld the inanimate remains of Napoleon in respectful silence. The officers of the 20th and 66th Regiments were admitted first, then the others. The following day (the 7th) the throng was greater. Antommarchi was not allowed to take the heart of Napoleon to Europe with him; he deposited that and the stomach ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... 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 ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... that there was one of the party wrapped up in a blanket, and with a wide straw hat on the head, which completely concealed the form from me. The fact is, that the woman looked like a bundle, and remained by the fire quite as inanimate. At my saying that I never saw a woman, the man burst ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... impress itself on his 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 ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... tones that they looked red or blue, and inversely of the colors that they sounded cheerful or sad. A girl a few years older than she named her the blue song." Both phenomena, the attributing of life to inanimate things, to which one speaks as to beloved human beings, as well as the phenomenon of synesthesia, color audition and seeing of tone colors, are as we know positively today, to be ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... Pararuma again excited in us that interest, which everywhere attaches man in a cultivated state to the study of man in a savage condition, and the successive development of his intellectual faculties. How difficult to recognize in this infancy of society, in this assemblage of dull, silent, inanimate Indians, the primitive character of our species! Human nature does not here manifest those features of artless simplicity, of which poets in every language have drawn such enchanting pictures. The savage of the Orinoco appeared to ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... then starts up an Ecclesiastic, who you know has nothing to do with women, and he pronounced in dogmatical terms, it was neither one nor the other; at length the wiser magistrates of the town agreed to send it as a present to their august monarch Lewis the XIVth; and if you have a mind to see an inanimate woman who has made such a noise in the world, you will find her at Versailles, without any other notice taken of her or the quarrels about her, than the following words written (I think) upon her pedestal, La ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... of war. When I had read it, I drew my sword, and, as I ran my eye along its cold, sharp blade from hilt to point, I thought how strange was its power to let out a man's life, and turn him, in a moment, into a heap of inanimate carrion. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at the swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate object, and he glared at her in return, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... life to inanimate matter the gift of man? I would it were! You should speedily see a Historia Naturalis Americana, that would put the sneering imitators of the Frenchman, De Buffon, to shame! A great improvement might be made in the formation of all quadrupeds; especially those in which velocity ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pitiless. implacable, implacable, unappeasable. implorer, to implore, beseech. important, important, weighty. importer, to be of importance; il n'importe, no matter. imposteur, m., impostor. impuissant, powerless, impotent. impur, unclean, foul. imputer, to ascribe. inanim, inanimate, lifeless. inconnu, unknown. inconstance, f., inconstancy, restlessness, fickleness. Inde, Indus (river). Indien, m., Indian. indigne, unworthy, shameful. indompt, wild, untamed, indomitable. invitable, unavoidable. inexorable, inexorable, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... her knee, and a hand resting on it still held a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly might even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... to destroy the national stronghold, Josephus is anxious to preserve his patron's reputation for gentleness and invest him with the appearance of piety and magnanimity. Voicing perhaps the conqueror's later regrets, he declares that he protested against the Romans' avenging themselves on inanimate things and against the destruction of so beautiful a work, but failed despite all his efforts to stay the conflagration. The historian writes a lurid description of the catastrophe, but he omits the simple details that make the account in the Talmud so pathetic. "The Temple," runs the Talmudic ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... the sun and moon. I cannot make out that they possess a trace of the deification of ancestors, though their rude nature worship may well have been the primitive form of Japanese Shinto. The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate nature appears to be the reverence paid to Yoshitsune, to whom they believe they are greatly indebted, and who, it is supposed by some, will yet interfere on their behalf. {21} Their gods—that is, the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... triumphantly. She could relish a bloodless victory over an inanimate rival. Then she said softly, "Arthur, what I am going to ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... 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
... familiar language amongst us to call corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as to take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?"[141] And Plutarch condemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to inanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: "they who give the names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as are destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical opinions in the minds ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... now 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
... together without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the snow, not moving again. Then, with a cry, another fell, and another. From the woods on every hand came the whistling shot, and the rushing slugs of the rebels. Every tree had behind it a rebel, with deadly aim. But the murderous bullets seemed to come out of the inanimate wilderness, for not no much as the hand that pulled the deadly trigger could be seen. The police had a mountain gun, which Major Crozier now ordered them to bring to bear on the rebels, but the policeman who loaded it was so confused that ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... vulture, what is there remarkable in that, or in that other feat of his, O Bhishma, viz., in his slaughter of Aswa and Vrishava, both of whom were unskilled in battle? If this one threw drown by a kick an inanimate piece of wood, viz., a car, what is there, O Bhishma, wonderful in that? O Bhishma, what is there remarkable in this one's having supported for a week the Govardhan mount which is like an anthill? "While sporting on the top of a mountain this one ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... descended the companion-way with their apparently inanimate burden, the young sailor could not help furtively kissing the floating tresses of dark brown hair that swept across his face as he tenderly supported Kate's head on his shoulder, guarding it jealously in the passage below. His anxiety was soon afterwards ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... 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! I who came to tell my Martial the good and evil she ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... sincerity, goodness, intelligence, and {445} many other traits. We see them angry or bored, amused, full of energy. To be sure, none of these human characteristics is directly and fully sensed, but that is the case also with many characteristics of inanimate objects which, nevertheless, we perceive by aid of the senses. We perceive anger or sincerity in much the same way that we perceive moisture or smoothness by the eye. To experience the anger of another person is a complex experience, but a single element ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... her bundle of shawls moved of its own accord, and, for one whole minute after the train had left, he stood motionless, meditating on that curious phenomenon. He had often heard of table-turning, but never until now had he seen inanimate matter move of its own accord. Can we feel surprised that he was both astonished and perplexed? Proceeding to the booking-office he held a brief conversation with the clerks there; then he sauntered into the telegraph-office ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... non-partisan observer who did, is neither here nor there. I merely state the fact as one of the many bits of evidence which should be taken into consideration. I have no case for Prussian militarism in so far as applied to inanimate objects. The German system of destruction in the early part of the war was utterly without excuse or justification; the wreck and desolation, the hunger and suffering of the larger portion of Belgium are utterly ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... is attracted by every other particle with a force proportioned inversely to the square of their distances. Vague ideas of some such principle had long been floating in the minds of some men; had probably been thus floating since ever men began to think seriously over the phenomena of inanimate nature. But the discovery of the principle was, however, as distinctly the achievement of Newton as "Paradise Lost" is the work of Milton. We find it hard now to form to ourselves any clear idea of a world to which Newton's principle was unknown. It would be almost as ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... plenty, and cleanliness; and as a proof of the attention of government to preserve the splendor and ornaments of the capital, a particular inspector was appointed for the statues; the guardian, as it were, of that inanimate people, which, according to the extravagant computation of an old writer, was scarcely inferior in number to the living inhabitants of Rome. About thirty years after the foundation of Constantinople, a similar magistrate was created in that rising metropolis, for ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... be lowering down thy bridge to the bottom, If from stupor inanimate peradventure he wake him, Leaving muddy behind him his sluggish heart's hesitation, 25 As some mule in a glutinous sludge ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... fountain, or of rills that slip Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of their silent course. Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds, But animated nature sweeter still, To soothe and satisfy the human ear. Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one The livelong night: nor these alone, whose notes Nice-finger'd Art must emulate in vain, But ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... his heart—an inanimate burden—he kissed her cold lips, her eyelids, her hair; called her by names whose use she had long forgotten, whose revival caused her pain like nausea. If he could have known it, this was the last way to win her. It was like pressing upon a queasy invalid the sweets which had made him sick. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... a life-long feud with inanimate things," a pure Cerebral friend remarked to us recently. "I have a fight on my hands every time I attempt to use a pair of scissors, a knife and fork, a ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... commanded the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell me what you ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered. The lines from "Childe ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to feel better, she went to Bessie, who pale and inanimate, seemed to be gently fading away, and only now and then raised her little finger to play ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... time he sat down before the closed door, regarding it wistfully but being too wise to bark or speak to such inanimate object. It had been part of his early puppyhood education to learn that only live things could be moved by plea or threat, and that while things not alive did move, as the door had moved, they never moved of themselves, and were deaf to anything life might have to say to them. Occasionally ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... him to the boat which was to convey him to the river; but as they passed along, the anxious wife, who watched the countenance of her husband, saw a change. Death had stamped his signet on those pale features; and, when they arrived at the water side, all that remained of Boardman was a cold, inanimate corpse. The voyage down the river was a sorrowful one. Every cheek was flowing down with tears and every heart was bleeding ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... 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 ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... these writers seems to have been led, independently and contemporaneously, to invent the same name of "Biology" for the science of the phenomena of life; and thus, following Buffon, to have recognised the essential unity of these phenomena, and their contradistinction from those of inanimate nature. And it is hard to say whether Lamarck or Treviranus has the priority in propounding the main thesis of the doctrine of evolution; for though the first volume of Treviranus's "Biologie" appeared only in 1802, he says, in the preface to his later work, the "Erscheinungen ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... was an awful accessory to the attempted murder. The inanimate object had moved as a human being would if suddenly shot through a vital part. Perhaps the very gasp of horror Enoch had uttered reached the ears of him who had fired from ambush. At least the enemy did not seek to come nearer. Indeed, the youth heard ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... appearing upon a field whose every object has long since been placed and studied; with Will, it was a feathered headdress where there should have been but tree, or rock, or grass; a moving figure where nature should have been inanimate. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... gone—first the quaint old service with the Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother. When one after one ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... in what he tolerantly calls "tricks" of horsemanship and marksmanship, he studied the signs of the trail, forest and prairie, as a sailing-master studies the waves and clouds. The knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems little less than miraculous. And when you ask him how he knows these things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... feeling—to talk about men as men and not as names or things. It is an attempt to look upon life with sympathetic human eyes and to put living people into the reports of the day's news. If a man falls and breaks his neck, a bald recital of the facts deals with him only as an animal or an inanimate name. The fact is interesting as one item in the list of human misfortunes, but no more. And yet there are many people to whom this man's accident is more than an interesting incident—it is a very serious matter, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... he, pointing to the Smiler's inanimate form, "Here's poor Sam all swounded away at touch o' my hook like any woman—and him my bo'sun! Pshaw! I want a man!" Here he stooped, and wrenching the silver pipe from Smiling Sam's fat throat stared from one shuffling rogue ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... response is a perfectly clear notion in the case of answers to questions, but in other cases it is much more obscure. We may say generally that an object whether animate or inanimate, is "sensitive" to a certain feature of the environment if it behaves differently according to the presence or absence of that feature. Thus iron is sensitive to anything magnetic. But sensitiveness does not constitute knowledge, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... glittering insignia of his new rank reached Canada, Sir Isaac Brock's eyes were closed in death. His inanimate body, from which one of the noblest souls of the century had fled, lay rigid in its winding-sheet ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body, lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... all—he is grandfather of all living things. I think, however that the stone is merely the symbol of the everlasting, all pervading, invisible Ta-ku Wa-kan—the essence of all life,—pervading all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Thkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... was thrust into the Adventurer's face; and the Adventurer, caught at a disadvantage, since his hand in his coat pocket was below the intervening table top, stood there as though instantaneously transformed into some motionless, inanimate thing, his fingers still gripping at another sheaf of banknotes that he had been in the act of scooping out ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... woman. A sudden 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. Margaret decided that Indians were ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... month Stefan brooded. He hung about the house, dabbled at a little work, and returned, all without signs of life or interest. He was kind to Mary, more considerate than he used to be, but she would have given all his inanimate, painstaking politeness for an hour of his old, gay thoughtlessness. They had reached the stage of marriage in which, all being explained and understood, there seems nothing to hope for. Alone together they were silent, for there was nothing to say. Each ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... age was that for song! That age, when not by laws inanimate, As men believed, the waters were impelled, The air controlled, the stars their courses held; But element and orb on acts did wait Of Powers endued with visible form instinct, With will, and to ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the little reason that poor man had is useless. To say anything against the priest was blasphemy and to say anything against God was blasphemy—to ask a question was blasphemy. Finally we sank to the level of fetishism. We began to worship inanimate things. If you will read your bible you will find that the Jews had a sacred box. In it were the rod of Aaron and a piece of manna and the tables of stone. To touch this box was a crime. You remember that one time when a careless Jew thought the box was going ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... turned about to all the points of the compass; ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows, horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets, seemed to be all indiscriminately huddled together where there was little or no room for them. To find the inn amid this confusion of animate and inanimate objects, was no easy matter; and when we at length discovered it, pushed our way through the live stock in the garden, and opened the kitchen door, this was the scene which burst instantaneously ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... conceived the idea that the forces which rule in the realm of living things are not different from the forces that we know in the inanimate world. He has made some very striking and arresting experiments with protoplasm and chemical stimuli and opened a new field of problems in biology. If the physical universe can be so increasingly explored, shall not the spiritual universe be also ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... the other appurtenances which usually belong to their race; children in a state of nudity; turbaned heads, features thoroughly Oriental; tarnished finery, books, music, and musical instruments, scattered about; everything, in short, whether animate or inanimate, as entirely in contrast with what you have just left behind, as you might expect to find it, were you transported suddenly into some region of the earth, of the very existence of which you had previously been ignorant. I have passed ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... we must recognize the distinction between inner and outer force. The one is cause, the other effect. The one is spiritual, the other physical. In this important particular, animate force differs from inanimate force—the power of man, coming from within and expressing itself outwardly, is of another sort from the force of Shimose powder, which awaits some influence from without to explode it. However susceptive ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... You must sit by the fireside of the heart; above the clouds it is too cold. You must be simple in your speech: too much polish suggests insincerity. The great orator idealizes the real, transfigures the common, makes even the inanimate throb and thrill, fills the gallery of the imagination with statues and pictures perfect in form and color, brings to light the gold hoarded by memory, the miser—shows the glittering coin to the spendthrift, hope—enriches ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... strikingly distinguishes the Japanese poetic muse from that of Western nations is a certain lack of imaginative power. The Japanese are slow to endow inanimate objects with life. Shelley's 'Cloud,' for example, contains enough matter of this kind for many volumes of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... declining, and Moscow continued dull, silent, and seemingly inanimate. The anxiety of the emperor increased, and the impatience of the soldiers could scarcely be repressed. Some officers ventured within the walls of ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will. Now and then he fancied that this plan was destined to be the successful one. A skill and insight beyond his consciousness seemed occasionally to take up the task. The mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul, appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the facile material, bringing with it more ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that he has been throughout ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... how attached 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 pipe for me. I tried another brier, and it made ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... room as he spoke to open the door for her. His fingers were on the handle, but he did not turn it, awaiting her answer. She did not look at him, but past him towards the shaded lamp with that desire to fix her attention upon some inanimate object which he knew ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... somewhat to the surprise of Harley, produced ten shillings to serve for markers of his score. "He had no change for the beggar," said Harley to himself; "but I can easily account for it; it is curious to observe the affection that inanimate things will create in us by a long acquaintance. If I may judge from my own feelings, the old man would not part with one of these counters for ten times its intrinsic value; it even got the better of his benevolence! ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... show it most. It 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 was to Dr. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... surface, as majestic as the great sea serpent in miniature, carrying his head well out of the water, with the toad still in his mouth, reminding me of Caesar with his Commentaries. He landed close to my feet; I threw him in again, and this time he let go the toad, which remained floating and inanimate an the water; but after a time he discharged his superfluous gas, and made for the shore; while the snake, to avoid me, swam away down ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat) |
