"Human face" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... table, he looked down into her eyes with an expression such as Letty had never before seen in a human face. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the bush beyond, There are two birds—if you can call them birds— I could not see them rightly for the leaves. But they've the shape and colour of horned owls And I'm half certain they've a human face. ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... not to me returns Day, or the sweet Approach of Ev'n and Morn, Or Sight of vernal Bloom, or Summer's Rose, Or Flocks or Herds, or human Face divine; But Cloud instead, and ever-during Dark Surround me: From the chearful Ways of Men Cut off, and for the Book of Knowledge fair, Presented—with an universal Blank Of Nature's Works, to me expung'd and raz'd, And Wisdom at one Entrance quite ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... at Laura. She was before her easel as of old; but the pale nun had given place to a blooming girl, who sang at her work, which was no prim Pallas, but a Clytie turning her human face ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... executed, and their choice of colors admirable. In profile work or bas-relief they get on very well, where there is no perspective required, but in grouping they pile houses on the sea and mountains on the housetops. At caricature they greatly excel, indeed they scarcely attempt to represent the human face and figure in any other light. In place of entertaining any idea of what is lovely in our species, they look only at the human face and form from the ludicrous side, and this they render by giving ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... not, therefore, of success, for my mind presages that thou wilt be happy, nor shalt thou want my assistance." Ins al Wujjood having thanked him for his hospitality and generous offers, the hermit informed him, that for nearly twenty years past he had not beheld a human face till a few days prior to his coming, when, wandering over the mountains, he had seen an encampment on the margin of the great lake below, in which appeared a crowd of men and women, some very richly habited, part of whom had embarked on ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... dermoid cysts, and almost all physicians are well acquainted with their occurrence. The curious formations and contents and the bizarre shapes are of great variety. Graves mentions a dermoid cyst containing the left side of a human face, an eye, a molar tooth, and various bones. Dermoid cysts are found also in regions of the body quite remote from the ovary. The so-called "orbital wens" are true inclusion of the skin of a congenital origin, as are the nasal dermoids ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... three equal horizontal bands of light blue (top), white, and light blue; centered in the white band is a radiant yellow sun with a human face known as the Sun ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... presides over the destiny of fishermen is distinguished by a huge silver-paper fish and numerous three-pronged fish-spears. Among other queer objects whose meaning defies the penetration of the traveller unversed in Japanese mythology is a monstrous human face, with a nose at least three feet long, and altogether ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... negro; "and we three, hunters of men, made a better day's sport than he did. Kennedy, his horses, his elephants, and his numerous servants did not get their tiger—but we got ours," he added, with grim irony. "Yes; Kennedy, that tiger with a human face, fell into our ambush, and the brothers of the good work offered up their fine ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... poor persons, several families of each class having occupied it jointly and amicably "from the foundation of the city." One of the humble habitations of the lowest terrace is noticeable for its rude resemblance to the human face, or rather to such a simulacrum of it as a boy might cut out of a hollowed pumpkin, meaning no offense to his race. The eyes are two circular windows, the nose is a door, the mouth an aperture caused by removal of a board below. There are no doorsteps. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... dragon swallowing a man. Bird and young. Dragon and lions. Three dragons, one with a human face. Winged figure with a tabour. Dragon devouring a bird. Coronation of the Virgin. Three griffins. Pelican in its act of piety. Dragon and lion fighting. Griffin and two young ones. Two dragons joined together. Two storks eating ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... a human face, Lit for me with light divine, I recall all loving eyes, That have ever answered ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Again, to use our old solecism, that is the lesser part of the truth; the greater part, for men of religion, is that Jesus is of God, that He belongs to Him. His chief office for our world has not been to show us what men can be like; it has been to give us the vision of the Eternal in a human face. For if He does reveal God to man then He must hold, as President Tucker says, the quality and substance of the life ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... William Sewall thought he had never seen a sweeter smile on a human face, young or old. "You are kind to come and tell me so, George," said he. "I had thought never to preach ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... water, where he pointed, I saw a head of hair or a bunch of seaweed, I could not tell which; but, on the chance of its being the former, I sculled up to it. The sun shone forth brightly, and I caught a glimpse of a human face convulsed with agony beneath the tide. Twice it eluded me; but stretching out my arm, and almost going overboard and capsizing our already over-crowded boat, I got firm hold of a person by the hair, who, I saw, had a midshipman's patch ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... and—greatly to Mr. Jones's annoyance—took the corner seat opposite him. Being a confirmed bachelor, he had a horror of all babies, but this child in particular struck him with disfavour; seldom, he thought, had he seen such a peevish discontented expression on any human face. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... when Dick had soared above his original line of business, and highly disdained any allusion to it, that, after having been estranged for several years, we again met in the village of Gandercleugh, I holding my present situation, and Dick painting copies of the human face divine at a guinea per head. This was a small premium, yet, in the first burst of business, it more than sufficed for all Dick's moderate wants; so that he occupied an apartment at the Wallace Inn, cracked his jest with impunity ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... Skeleton, says a recent writer, "is a scene truly Calderonic — the hour, the place, the intended assassin, and the sudden reflection of himself, with his guilty conscience impersonate before him; it reminds us of that wild fable of Jeremy Taylor or Fuller, about the bird with a human face, that feeds on human flesh until it chances to see its reflection in a stream, and then it pines away for grief that it has killed its fellow." — WESTMINSTER REVIEW, vol. ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... notice that the curtain over the doorway had been cautiously lifted several times, and that a human face had peered into the apartment. She even failed to hear the shuffling step of two men who stealthily entered the room. Only when they stood quite near her did the woman start and look up. Both men broke out into roaring laughter at her surprise. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... painter, tearing off the cloth which concealed the flat object which he had borne beneath his arm. It was a leaf-shaped sheet of glass bearing upon it a face with a halo round it, so delicately outlined, and of so perfect a tint, that it might have been indeed a human face which gazed with sad and thoughtful eyes upon the young squire. He clapped his hands, with that thrill of joy which true art will ever give ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hear it not I seem to lose The substance of my being—my strongest grasp Sends inwards but weak witness that I am. I seek to cheat the echo.—How the half sounds Blend with this strangled light! Is he not here— [Looking round. O for one human face here—but to see One human face here to sustain me.—Courage! It is but my own fear! The life within me, It sinks and wavers like this cone of flame, Beyond which I scarce dare look onward! Oh! If I faint? If this inhuman den should be At once my death-bed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a Scumite does not resemble a human face of our planet. The mouth and jaws are at right angles to ours and this arrangement seems to be just as convenient to these Scumites as the formation of our mouth is to us. The nose lies above the mouth, but ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and scepticism have no place. It takes possession of the mind, and drives forth the thought into the exile of utter unbelief. After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... were tree trunks whereon some loitering young Siwash had delineated a human face by a few deft and powerful strokes of the axe, the sculptural planes of cheeks, brow, and chin being indicated broadly but with truth and decision. Often by some old camp a tree would bear on a planed ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... therefore went, Past thro' the solitary room in front, Paused for a moment at an inner door, Then struck it thrice, and, no one opening, Enter'd; but Annie, seated with her grief, Fresh from the burial of her little one, Cared not to look on any human face, But turn'd her own toward the wall and wept. Then Philip standing up said falteringly 'Annie, I came to ask ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... impressed me in Father Alexyei (that was the priest's name). In the first place, he not only asked nothing for himself but announced plainly that he required nothing; and, in the second place, I have never beheld in any human face a more sorrowful, thoroughly indifferent—what is called an "overwhelmed"—expression. The features of that face were of the ordinary rustic type: a wrinkled forehead, small grey eyes, a large nose, a wedge-shaped beard, a swarthy, sunburned ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... hawks standing on a pylon, and facing each other in Tattu; the former has upon his head a disk, and the latter, who is human-headed, the white crown. It is a noticeable fact that even at his meeting with R[a] the soul of Osiris preserves the human face, the sign of his ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Nagas (serpents) are demigods with a human face and serpent body. They inhabit Patala or the regions under the earth. Bhogavati is the name of their capital city. Serpents are still worshipped in India. See Fergusson's Tree ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... sufficiently dwelt upon by former writers. This is the remarkable faithfulness of the artists and sculptors of these statues and inscriptions to a standard. Thus, at Copan, wherever the same kind of hieroglyph is to be represented, it will be found that the human face or other object employed is almost identically the same in expression and character, wherever it is found. The same characters at different parts of a tablet do not differ more than the same letters of the alphabet in two ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... a human face, composed of various flowers, whose roots are snakes, a poppy, forming ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... a quick glance backward, and Saxe followed his example, his eyes catching directly a glimpse as he thought, of a human face high up, and peering down at them from among some stones which had fallen upon ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... woman, who seemed to be his mother, was hideously swollen and disfigured. A man, crouching down with his head between his hands, endeavoured to hide the seamed and knotted mass of protruding blue flesh, which had once been a human face. The forms of leprosy, elephantiasis, and other kindred diseases, which I have seen in the East, and in tropical countries, are not nearly so horrible. For these unfortunates there was no hope. Some years, more or less, of a life which is worse than death, was all to which they ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... and three nights, as they coasted southward, with the peaks of the Norland on their port, and to starboard the skerries that kept guard on the firths. Through the haze they could now and then see to landward trees and cliffs, but never a human face. Once there was an alarm of another fleet, and the shields were slung outboard, but it proved to be only a wedding-party passing from wick to wick, and they gave it greeting and sailed on. These were ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... are responsible for a great many of the unnecessary wrinkles on the human face. Too many have thought it would be impossible to be happy in two worlds, and so, having elected happiness in the one which they thought would last longest, they have no choice but to be unhappy in this one. In fact, some seem to suppose that the greater their ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... moment of terror and perplexity, a human face, black, and having grizzled hair hanging down over the forehead and cheeks, and mixing with mustaches and a beard of the same colour, and as much matted and tangled, looked down on them from a broken ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seeker), if he is a God capable of being God, he will speak the clearest grandest word of guidance which he can utter intelligible to his creatures. For us, that word must simply be the gathering of all the expressions of his visible works into an infinite human face, lighted up by an infinite human soul behind it, namely, that potential essence of man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God. If God should thus hear the cry of the noblest of his creatures, for such are all they who ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... size of a pea two inches to the right, and if we look at the cross with the left eye closed, the spot disappears. The size of the blind spot is large enough to cover in the heavens a plate which has twelve times the diameter of the moon. It may cover a human face at a distance of 6', but we do not observe this because we generally fill out the void. If we see a line in the place in question, we see it unbroken, because we know it to be so, and therefore ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... from the hand That formed of earth the human face, And to the elements did stand In nearer kindred, than our race. In many a flood to madness tossed, In many a storm has been his path; He hid him not from heat or frost, But met them, and defied ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... gleamed out, unnaturally cleanly in those not overclean surroundings, and although I had propped my book up against the water-bottle at my own table, where I sat over my solitary dinner, I found my eyes straying from the printed page to the human face which gave the promise of greater interest. Before very long he became conscious of my glances, and returned them when he thought I was not observing him. Inevitably, however, the moment came when our eyes met, We both looked away as though taken in ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... leading his bride through the chapel at the conclusion of the ceremony, when his attention was caught by something outside one of the windows. At first he thought it was a black cat curled up in some impossible fashion, but soon saw it was a dark human face. And that face he discovered to be Mr. ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... with dilating eyes, to read in a human face whether such a deed as this could really be done by man upon his fellow. They uttered wild cries ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... should think we might settle a few families very happily here, which is an object I have much at heart, for I have no notion of the proprietor who is only ambitious to be lord of the "beast and the brute," and chases the human face from his vicinity. By the bye, could we not manage to have ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of Achaia, a man endowed with all the virtues, said, in the 4th century, that to deprive the Greeks of those Sacred Mysteries which bound together the whole human face, would ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... spatially, and thus fall into spatial patterns. They also are in constant change and motion, and so fall into temporal patterns, many of which are spatial as well. The visual sensation aroused, let us say in a young baby, by the light entering his eye from a human face, is a spatial pattern; the visual sensation aroused by some one's turning down the light is a pure temporal pattern; while the sensation from a person seen moving across the room is a pattern both spatial and temporal. Finding the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... to few ever to have had the opportunity of observing the different aspects which the human face puts on at the sudden approach of certain forms of death by violence; and as it is a knowledge of little use I only mention it here as being the most startling example of what I mean. In the nervous temperament the face becomes pale (this is the only recognized effect); in the sanguine ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... and a nasal noise between groan and snort seems to signify that they ask to be asked again, a sort of ha—a—h? "long drawn out." The human face and the face of nature, at that hour, were as an east of thunder fronting a west of golden blue summer serenity. The Mawworms of Calvinistic Methodism have made a sort of monkery of all Wales, as regards externals at least. To think a twilight or noonday walk for pleasure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... indeed wholly to ignore the fact, that the form and feature of a building may be made to express religious, civil, domestic, or a dozen other feelings, as distinctly as the form and features of the human face:—and yet this is a fact as well known by all true architects, as that joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, are capable of irradiating or darkening the countenance. Yes, and we do not say too much, when we add, that right expression in a building for religious ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... represent something of the progress of art in the spirit world; and would be enabled to depict marvels of landscapes, and the seraphic beauty of the human face with its grace and perfection of form, as it meets ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... shall often have to refer, more especially in the latter part of this volume, to the muscles of the human face, I have had a diagram (fig. 1) copied and reduced from Sir C. Bell's work, and two others, with more accurate details (figs. 2 and 3), from Herde's well-known 'Handbuch der Systematischen Anatomie des Menschen.' The same letters refer to the same muscles ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair Presented with a Universal blanc Of Natures works to mee expung'd ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... large even plain, where there was no trace of any habitation, and where no human face could be seen; even in this [solitary and dreary scene], owing to the princess's company, the day appeared festive and the nights joyful. Proceeding on our journey, we came suddenly to a large river, the sight of which would appal the firmest ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... likeness, like a portrait by Vandyck or Titian. When the subject is favorable, his achievements in this regard are memorable, and fill the eye and mind with ideas of beauty and meaning undreamed of by those who consider marble portraits as wholly imitative and mechanical. Was there ever a human face which so completely reflected inward experience and individual genius as the bust which haunts us throughout Italy, broods over the monument in Santa Croce, gazes pensively from library niche, seems to awe the more radiant images ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... apache queen on finding her intended victim gone. Suddenly a real love, not the love of the wanton, but a purer, deeper emotion wakens in her breast. Close-up showing muscular reflexes produced upon the human face by ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... perhaps a prospector now and then," he said. "Last year I travelled a hundred and twenty-seven days without seeing a human face except that of my ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... with the fine serpent he had brought from Macedon twisted in coils about the prophet's neck, and its head hid under his arm-pit, while a head artfully formed with linen, and bearing some resemblance to a human face, protruded itself, and passed for the head of the reptile. The spectators were beyond measure astonished to see a little embryo serpent, grown in a few days to so magnificent a size, and exhibiting the features of a ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... her manner had seemed to transform into something like a witness stand in a court of justice. Her hungry eyes had grown hungrier each second, and her breath came and went quickly. The very face she had looked up at on her last talk with T. Tembarom—the oddly human face—turned on her as he came to her. It was just as it had been that night —just as ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and now and then gathering himself for a great bounding leap, when the moon reached the key-stone of her arch. Then came a wonder and a terror: she began to descend rolling like the nave of Fortune's wheel bowled by the gods, and went faster and faster. Like our own moon, this one had a human face, and now the broad forehead now the chin was uppermost as she ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... vision one of the heroes of the antique world. He rode for many, many days, yet saw no kindly human face. After long wanderings and toils he came to the Gardens of Twilight, the rich and rare gardens of the primeval world, known by rumour to the ancient Greeks as the Hesperides. He looked around with wonder; the place was ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... lifted her han' an' stopped me, an' if death was ever writ on a human face it shorely wuz stomped on hers. 'I want you to tell my father I'm sorry,' she sez. 'He swore he'd marry me inside of an hour. This man hyer—his brother—made out like he wuz a preacher an' married us. Tell my father ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... fire is the “eye” of a room, which can no more be attractive without it than the human face can be beautiful if it lacks the visual organs. The “gas fire” bears about the same relation to the real thing as a glass eye does to a natural one, and produces much the same sensation. Artificial eyes are painful necessities in some ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... correspondingly. He climbs upon a chair with difficulty and cannot see over the table. This being, so lately from heaven, creeps upon the earth, and his first experiences are with the feet and under side of things. Ask the creeper how the human face, a room and its furniture appear to him. My father's face as I looked up to him seemed to be very narrow and a yard long. A face there was not. Nor had my mother's round table any top; but its two crossbars beneath, screws and catch and three feet belonged to my under world. I could explore the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... great length on the floor in a low couchant position, not too close to where the man sat—and search the strong human face with eyes more strong. Without the twitch of a muscle anywhere in his whole body, he would endure the man's gaze as long as the man chose, with a level look of cold, untiring rebuke. There was no anger in it, no flash of light, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... mounted cheerfully his feet— And straightway was aglow with an incalculable heat! His face was as effulgent as a human face could be, And caloric emanated ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... was of this offense, for that experience had taught him that no white woman was safe at all times, from assault, and those who were rearing daughters in that part of Canada, might well tremble at the danger by which they are threatened. He told me that he never saw a really brutal look on the human face until he beheld the countenances of the negroes charged with the crime of rape. When the lust comes over them they are worse than the wild beast of the forest. Last year, in broad daylight, a respectable white woman, while walking in the public road within the town of Chatham, was knocked down ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... forth noiselessly to within a couple of yards of where he stood, then two more followed with a quick, wavy jerk. And now behind these, a head, as large as that of a man, black, hairy, bearing a strange resemblance to the most awful and cruel human face ever stamped with the devil's image—whose dull, goggle eyes, fixed on the appalled ones of its discoverer, seemed to glow and burn with ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... confounded with other colours. Raphael did not keep it quite distinct from his flesh colour. I will not say that we have a more perfect recollection of the human voice than of that complex picture the human face, but I think the sudden hearing of a well-known voice has something in it more affecting and striking than the sudden meeting with the face: perhaps, indeed, this may be because we have a more familiar remembrance of the one than ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... morning and Hell every evening—when at the moment of his birth the Angel's finger had struck him on the upper lip and sent him into the world crying at the pain, and with that dent under the nostrils which, in every human face, is the seal of oblivion of the celestial spheres. But on the anniversary of the great Day of the Decalogue—on the Feast of Pentecost—the synagogue was dressed with flowers. Flowers were not easy to get in Venice—that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Thomas took,—and, in a trice, Grasp'd, with his thumb and finger, like a vice, That feature which the human face embosses, And pull'd the Duke of Limbs by ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... character. It would perhaps be better if I said that I saw her nose—for somehow I never could look upon herself save as subordinate to this feature. It were an insult to so majestic a promontory to suppose it the mere appendage of a human face. No—the face was an appendage of it, and kept at a viewless distance behind, while the nose stood forward in vast relief, intercepting the view of all collateral objects—casting a noble shadow upon the wall—and impressing an air of inconceivable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the human face divine—the feminine hyper-aethereally. Like the first John Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the people. They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as you will see ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... condescen' sae far as to luik at ony; for gien ever she set ee upo' ane, she never loot it rist: her ee aye jist slippit ower a face as gien the face micht or micht not be there —she didna ken or care. A'body said she had sic a hauchty leuk as was never seen on human face afore; an' for freen'ly luik, she had nane for leevin' cratur, 'cep' it was her ain father, or her ain horse 'at she rade upo'. Her mither ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my life. I used to do as Jean Jacques did—lie down in my boat and let it glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... inhabited. He introduced them into his work with skill and decision, and obtained composite types by their aid which we may compare to those of Egypt. But there were some differences which deserve to be remembered. The human face received more consideration from the Mesopotamian sculptors than from those of Egypt. Except in the sphinxes and in two or three less important types the Egyptians, as our readers will remember, crowned a human body with ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... only a few square inches—of cells and things, no one quite knows what—on a human face, but a man can see more of the world in those few inches, and understand more of the meaning of the world in them, put the world together better there, than in any other few inches that God has made. Even one ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... centre fire heaves underneath the earth, And the earth changes like a human face; The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask— God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged With foam, white as ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... emulate himself, not to equal another.(2) But the artist undertakes to imitate another, or to do what Nature has done, and this it appears is more difficult, viz. to copy what she has set before us in the face of nature or 'human face divine,' entire and without a blemish, than to keep up four brass balls at the same instant, for the one is done by the power of human skill and industry, and the other never was nor will be. Upon the whole, therefore, I have more respect ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... a hotly debated point whether the devil and his hood are purely the work of nature or not. My own impression is that to a certain extent they are, but that someone—centuries ago—being struck by the resemblance of the rock to a human face, added a few ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... being, he is crushed beneath the weight of the priest. Two other human figures support a platform, from which rise two batons crossed like a St. Andrew's cross. These support a mask, from the center of which a hideous human face looks out. The Aztecs sometimes represented the sun by such a mask, and hence the name "Temple ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the candle-light and inspected it. A grey mask: what was such a thing doing in Quebec? There were no masks in Quebec save those which nature herself gave to man, that ever-changing mask called the human face. A grey mask: what did it recall to him? Ah! Like a bar of light the memory of it returned to him. The mysterious woman of the Corne d'Abondance! But this mask could not be hers, since she was by now in Spain. With a movement almost unconscious he held the silken fabric ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... not all alone: around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chase; Whose young, unwakened world was ever new, Nor sin, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view A frown on Nature's or on human face: The free-born forest found and kept them free, And fresh as is a torrent ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... reprimand was certain and very severe. She could not nurse the sick or wounded personally, for her whole time was necessarily devoted to executive duties, but her smile was the sweetest, I believe, that ever lit up a human face, and standing by the bedside of some poor Alabamian, away from home, and wretched as well as sick, she must have seemed to him like an angel visitant. A more decided woman in dealing with all who came within her influence ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... smiling. Was it in the pleasure of literary creation—an artistic ecstasy? I should have liked to answer yes, but I doubted it very much. Without pretending to Miss Liston's powers, I have the little subtlety that is needful to show me that more than one kind of smile may be seen on the human face, and that there is one very different from others; and, finally, that that one is not evoked, as a rule, merely by the evolution of the troublesome encumbrance in pretty writing vulgarly ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... one hour good and the next bad, who aspires greatly but fails in practice, who sees the higher but too often follows the lower course. There arose at one time a school of art, which delighted to paint the human face as perfect in beauty; and from that time to this we are discontented unless every woman is drawn for us as a Venus, or, at least, a Madonna. I do not know that we have gained much by this untrue portraiture, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... After World War II, a truncated Czechoslovakia fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. In 1968, an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops ended the efforts of the country's leaders to liberalize Communist party rule and create "socialism with a human face." Anti-Soviet demonstrations the following year ushered in a period of harsh repression. With the collapse of Soviet authority in 1989, Czechoslovakia regained its freedom through a peaceful "Velvet Revolution." On ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... was now perceived to be shining not upon the ivied wall as usual, but upon some object close to the glass. It was a human face. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... apoplexy, one half of your face being twice the length of the other, and the entire of it of a bluish-green tint—pretty enough in one of Turner's landscapes, but not at all becoming when applied to the "human face divine." Let no late arrival from the continent contradict me here by his late experiences, which a stray twenty pounds and the railroads—(confound them for the same) —have enabled him to acquire. I speak of matters before it occurred to all Charing-Cross and Cheapside to "take the water" ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... MORDIEU! I should like to have seen you in my place! I had been fifteen days without seeing a human face, and had been left to brutalize myself in the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... human face so full of the love of God, so shining with love of humanity, as the face ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... next two days in sketching and outlining his various expressions as far as possible from memory. She would learn to catch those evanescent lines—that something which makes the human face eloquent, though the ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Effects of moon, clouds, stars, and night-sheen, never surpass'd. I am out every night, enjoying all. The sunset begins it. (I have said already how long evening lingers here.) The moon, an hour high just after eight, is past her half, and looks somehow more like a human face up there than ever before. As it grows later, we have such gorgeous and broad cloud-effects, with Luna's tawny halos, silver edgings—great fleeces, depths of blue-black in patches, and occasionally long, low bars hanging silently a while, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... my ears a doubtful sound - And was that ship a REAL ship whose tackle seemed around? A moon, as if the earthly moon, was shining up aloft; But were those beams the very beams that I have seen so oft? A face that mocked the human face, before me watched alone; But were those eyes the eyes of man that ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... little cough just as Eunice finished her nasty speech, and we all turned quickly and there in the open door stood Jane, as white as a sheet, with her great, big blue eyes looking black as coals and such suffering I never saw in a human face—and she just stood and looked at them all, a hurt, loving, searching look, as if she was reading their souls, and no one spoke nor moved, only Eunice, who got very red, and Eugenia, who straightened up and got haughty and hateful, looking as if she was glad ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... scarlet; the figure was seated between a holly-tree and an oak, and the berries of the former were not more vivid than her dress, and the brown leaves of the latter not more brown and wrinkled than her cheeks. At first sight King Arthur thought he must be bewitched—no such nightmare of a human face had ever seemed to him possible. Her nose was crooked and bent hideously to one side, while her chin seemed to bend to the opposite side of her face; her one eye was set deep under her beetling brow, and her mouth was nought but a gaping slit. Round this awful countenance hung snaky locks ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... it may be often necessary to forego, but bad taste is never necessary. Ugliness is not mere absence of beauty, but absence of it where it ought to be present. It comes always from a disappointed expectation,—as where the lineaments that do not disgust in the potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus, whom accordingly Nature kindly puts out of sight. It is bad taste that we suffer from,—not plainness, not indifference to appearance, but features misplaced, shallow mimicry of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... the practice of taking the heads of fallen enemies arose by extension of the custom of taking the hair for the ornamentation of the shield and sword-hilt. It seems possible that human hair was first applied to shields in order to complete the representation of a terrible human face, which, as we have seen, is commonly painted on the shield, and which is said to be valued as an aid to confusing and terrifying the foe. It is perhaps a difficulty in the way of this view that the use ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... never told How, from a flower, into a fish of gold Apollo chang'd thee; how thou next didst seem A black-eyed swan upon the widening stream; And when thou first didst in that mirror trace The placid features of a human face: That thou hast never told thy travels strange. And all the wonders of the mazy range O'er pebbly crystal, and o'er golden sands; Kissing thy daily food ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... thing which is generally composed of brass or iron. It has frequently a violent resemblance to the "human face divine," or the ravenous expressiveness of a beast of prey. It assumes a variety of phases under peculiar vinous influences. A gentleman, in whose veracity and experience we have the most unlimited confidence, for a series of years kept an account of the phenomena of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... at the chair; and, suddenly as he looked at it, a most extraordinary change seemed to come over it. The carving of the back gradually assumed the lineaments and expression of an old, shrivelled human face; the damask cushion became an antique, flapped waistcoat; the round knobs grew into a couple of feet, encased in red cloth slippers; and the whole chair looked like a very ugly old man, of the previous century, with his arms akimbo. Tom sat up in bed, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Cross, on Craven Street, at No. 8, is still the door-knocker which so looked, to Scrooge, like a human face. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... of the frightened servants could be heard as the assailants neared the house. Was it fancy, or did McNerney see a grim, human face glaring out of the window of a round tower at the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... dainty intelligence of the human countenance. The mystery of it is indeed absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in so slight a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and tossed lightly from hand to hand. But in his firm hold on the harmonies of the human face, the designer of this tranquil head of [139] Demeter is on the one road to a command over the secrets of all imaginative pathos and mystery; though, in the perfect fairness and blitheness of his work, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... fell from Thebes. He fled, Nor utter'd more; and after him there came A centaur full of fury, shouting, "Where Where is the caitiff?" On Maremma's marsh Swarm not the serpent tribe, as on his haunch They swarm'd, to where the human face begins. Behind his head upon the shoulders lay, With open wings, a dragon breathing fire On whomsoe'er he met. To me my guide: "Cacus is this, who underneath the rock Of Aventine spread oft a lake of blood. He, from his brethren ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... sinless quite of brain and soul, The very image of a barber's Poll; It shews a human face, and wears a wig, And looks, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... journey she always presents the same face to us. One might think that the fear of losing us had immobilized her globe, and prevented her from turning. And so we only know of her the vague sketch of a human face that has been observed ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... often forgotten by composers, we have nothing but gratitude for an author who once more strives to bring it into notice. But it is only a one-sided truth, and insufficient. By the same rigid reasoning it might be contended that a human face, being nothing but modelling and colour, can never express anything but functions of lines and forms, and colours. Everything in nature as well as in art has for those who look below the surface a significance beyond its external features. ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight |
