"Mental attitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is just the discovery of convenient phrases or labels, such as "pessimist," or "socialist," or "pacifist" or "Bolshevik." When any puzzling mental attitude comes before their notice, they pin one of their labels to it, and, having labelled it, they think they understand it. The Press supplies them with these labels, and, consciously or unconsciously, they store them up in their ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... characteristic wish of the proprietor—namely, that he may be indulged in a frantic orgie—has been gratified without any apparent intervention of the supernatural, we are left just in that proper equilibrium between scepticism and credulity which is the right mental attitude in presence of a marvellous story. Balzac, it is true, seems rather to flag in continuing his narrative. The symbolical meaning begins to part company with the facts. Stories of this kind require the congenial atmosphere of an ideal world, and the effort of interpreting such a poetical ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... fascinating. One's mental attitude toward him was one of defence, of being tensely on guard. Then he ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... of gentleman, he should do nothing that could be construed as an endeavor to take advantage of the consideration to which that act might seem to entitle him. Bound and buried in the deepest dungeon, waiting only for the announcement from his of the day of his execution. This was his mental attitude as the months passed and he began to receive an occasional letter from Mr. West, in each of which he looked for the news ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... the young man. Unfortunately, a large proportion of young men do not realize that they have any problem in this field to solve until circumstances, more or less accidental, have already established in them a mental attitude and, perhaps, a habit of life that may not ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... beautiful thoughts? this is surely too great a paradox to be borne. Rather, it is the fire within the author's breast which overflows in the torrent of his burning, irresistible eloquence; it is the poetry of his inner soul, which relieves itself in the Ode or the Elegy; and his mental attitude and bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance, the force and keenness of his logic, are imaged in the tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language. Nay, according to the well-known line, "facit indignatio versus;" not the words alone, but even the rhythm, the metre, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... plain, then, go one step further in the logic of that reasoning. Put yourself in the mental attitude of a man looking for deer. His eye sweeps rapidly over a side hill; so rapidly that you cannot understand how he can have gathered the main features of that hill, let alone concentrate and refine his attention to the seeing of an animal ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... have the advantage that the section of annals gives at once the events of a particular year, the monographs describe the development of a particular field of knowledge, and the biographical section offers information concerning particular personalities. The mental attitude is that of the gentry: shortly after the time of Ssu-ma Ch'ien an historical department was founded, in which members of the gentry worked as historians upon the documents prepared by representatives of the gentry in the various ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... was the latest and the most profound of a long series of impressions which had been influencing my mental attitude towards the excellent, the successful, the entirely agreeable Mr. Alpha. I walked home, a distance of some three miles, and then I walked another three miles or so on the worn carpet of my study, and at last the cup of my feelings began to run over, and I sat down and wrote a letter ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... favorite epithet of "Queenie." There was even more of the Puritan left in her than there was in him, and although she encouraged the liberal movements and tendencies of her time, one always felt in her mental attitude the inflexibility of the moral law. To her mind there was no shady border-land between right and wrong, but the two were separated by a sharply defined line, which was never to be crossed, and she lived up to this herself, and, in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... walk up to strange students and tell them the error of their ways. To me, that course of action savors too much of conceit of our own virtues. The best we can do is to be perfectly honorable about the examinations. Our mental attitude toward dishonorable proceedings ought to have its influence without our going about making ourselves ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... being shot, having therefore a vast advantage over the desperado of two or three victims, who does not yet accept the fact that his own days are numbered. The only trouble in regard to this new bad man from below was that his mental attitude on this point was much the same as that of Sheriff Bill Watson. Therefore the sheriff was extremely careful about the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... unhealthy pallor, from which his small dark eyes glittered restlessly; his thin lips, tightly closed, were set in an almost straight line. Clean-shaven, sleek of hair, he wore an expression of cautious slyness that implied a mental attitude ever on guard against some sudden exposure of his real ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... our attention, however, to the art of preparing talismans proper: I may remark at the outset that it was necessary for the talisman to be prepared by one's own self—a task by no means easy as a rule. Indeed, the right mental attitude of the occultist was insisted upon ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... Peter together and heard their manner of speaking to each other, and made mental note of the many points of interest which seemed to exist between them. He returned to San Francisco with a good deal of a "See-the-conquering-hero-comes" mental attitude. He went directly to his office, pausing on the way for a box of candy and a bunch of Parma violets. His first act on reaching the office was to send for Miss Thorne. Marian came almost immediately, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... true that the average child to-day is less often and less severely punished than the child of the past. If it disobeys, it has less fear of the consequences, so the importance of obedience becomes a dwindling factor in its mental attitude and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Byamee. He knows; why weary him by repetition, disturbing the rest he enjoys after his earth labours? But a prayer need not necessarily be addressed to the highest god. I think if we really understood and appreciated the mental attitude of the blacks, we should find more in their so-called incantations of the nature of invocations. When a man invokes aid on the eve of a battle, or in his hour of danger and need; when a woman croons over her baby an incantation to keep him honest and true, and that he shall be spared ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... and souls of people. Sir Walter Raleigh thought of laying his cloak under the feet of Queen Elizabeth as she passed over a mud-puddle, and all the rest of his career followed, as the effect of Sir Walter's mental attitude. Elias Howe thought of a machine for sewing, Eli Whitney of a machine for ginning cotton, George Stephenson of a tubular boiler for his locomotive engine, and Cyrus McCormick of a sickle-bar, and the world was changed by those thoughts, rather than by the machines themselves. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... it!' he said, after another pause. 'Do you think anybody will be content to put self nowhere, as Christ did, giving up his whole life and strength—and means—to the help and service of his fellow men, unless he has come to that mental attitude we were speaking of? No, it seems to me, and the more I think of it the more it seems to me, that to follow Christ means to give up seeking honour or riches or pleasure, except so far as they may be sought and used in His service. I mean for His service. All I read ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... importance, both in the scientific study of psychology and in individual progress and evolution, is the mental attitude of the individual; his point of view; his open-mindedness and utter refusal to prejudge anything. He will often say, "I do not know." He will sometimes say, "I do not care." That phase or presentation does not ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Hoof's mental attitude. He attributed his misfortunes to his weakening medicine. Let the cost be ever so dear he must strengthen that medicine; and he firmly believed a human sacrifice would be the most ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... two other excited children getting ready for school that morning. They had both slept on their troubles, but were very differently prepared to meet the day. Ada Singer's mental attitude was, "I'll never give in, and Lucy Berry ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... and it may be conjectured that the present-day custom of naming from the names of fish—thus, Jack the hake, Bill the cod, Joe the eel, Pat the trout, Mat the turbot, etc.[399]—may be a remnant of the mental attitude of the folk towards that belief in kinship between men and animals which is at the basis of totemism. But, returning to the fox, we have in the belief that meeting this animal would prevent them from going ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... profitless! No wonder Honora valued it so lightly. How Horace Endicott had raved over this whited sepulcher five years ago, believed in her, sworn by her virtue and truth! And to-day he regarded her without feeling, neither love nor hate, perfect indifference only marking his mental attitude in her regard. Somehow one liked to feel that love is unchangeable, as with the mother, the father; as with God also, for whom sin does not change relationship ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... down leisure to the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... they had been for a long time past. The meeting at Lakefield had changed her mental attitude toward Derek Pruyn, taking a large part of the pain out of her thoughts of him, as well as out of his thoughts of her. She had avoided seeing him after that one night, and she had heard nothing from him since; but she knew it was impossible for him to go on thinking of her altogether harshly. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... They had examined everything he brought from the worksite, since he had been working in the evenings in his room, but ignored everything he manufactured as being beyond their comprehension. This primordial mental attitude had been of immense value for in addition to the sword he carried a sack of molotails, a simple weapon of assault whose origins were lost in pre-history. Small crocks were filled with the most combustible of the refinery's fractions and wrapped around outside with cloth that he had ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... patient's whole mental attitude is sometimes changed, so that he becomes irritable, unstable, and incapacitated for brain-work—traumatic neurasthenia. In some cases self-control is lost, and alcoholic and ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... like those 'don'ts'; they are hers, not mine." Here is a clear recognition of the difficulty involved in controlling the organism, and this is greatly accentuated when we remember that all such communications must be given when the soi-disant communicator is in a constrained mental attitude—"gripping the light," "hanging on to the medium's body," while giving the communications. There is a double strain involved; and, as Dr. Hyslop said: "With what facility could I superintend the work of helping ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... One result of the mental attitude generated by the conditions indicated above is that any attempt to deal with subjects other than those which are authorized because they are customary, or tolerated because they are familiar, is liable to be greeted with cries of reproach and accusations ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... secretiveness which caused the child to refrain from speaking of certain things. She herself could not have explained the reasons for her silence; also it had never occurred to her that explanation and reasons were necessary. Her mental attitude was that of a child who, knowing a certain language, does not speak it to those who have never heard and are wholly ignorant of it. She knew her Aunt Hester as her mother did not. She had seen her often in her dreams ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... powerful influence in the development of Christian social teaching must be added to the others in order the better to grasp the mental attitude of the mediaeval thinkers. This was the rise and growth of monasticism. Its early history has been obscured by much legendary detail; but there is sufficient evidence to trace it back far into the beginnings of Christianity. Later there had ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... been listening to the conversation with every muscle tense, in much the same mental attitude as that of a peaceful citizen in a Wild West saloon who holds himself in readiness to dive under a table directly the shooting begins, began to relax. What he had shrinkingly anticipated would be the biggest thing since the Dempsey-Carpentier fight seemed to be turning into a pleasant social ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... difference between these men and ordinary piece workers lay in their changed mental attitude toward their employers and their work, and in the total absence of soldiering on their part. The ordinary piece worker would have spent a considerable part of his time in deciding just how much his employer would allow him to earn ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Chrisoganus passages, especially those in the earlier portions of Histriomastix, pertain to the play in its original form. If the reader will take the trouble to read Chapman's Hymns to the Shadow of Night (1594), his poem to Thomas Harriot, and his Tears of Peace, and compare their mental attitude and verbal characteristics with the "Chrisoganus" and "Peace" passages of Histriomastix, Chapman's authorship of the latter will become apparent. The following parallels from four of Chapman's poems are convincing, and they can ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... usual mental attitude of one anxious to justify the other man, ended by seeing only his employer's argument. He did not perceive that the latter's proposition introduced into the transaction a gambling element. It became possible for Morrison & Daly to get a certain amount of work, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... infinite number of stars is not so marvellous as the rationality that fain would comprehend them. In seeking other minds than ours we seek for what is almost infinitely complex and coordinated in a material universe relatively simple and heterogeneous. In our mental attitude towards the great question, this fact ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... ancient physicians were in the habit of employing the "Cock-a-doodle-doo" treatment; and I might recommend it to the faculty to-day as very effective in certain cases. Now I do not think the reader will attribute any particularly occult significance to "Cock-a-doodle-doo." The power is in the mental attitude. To "cock-a-doodle-doo" at any suggestion is to treat it with scorn and derision, and to assume the very opposite of that receptive attitude which enables a suggestion to affect us. That is the secret of this method of treatment, and the principle is the ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... walls, and the wind moaned drearily about the house. Its occupant was, however, oblivious to his surroundings and sat very still in his chair, with pouches under his fixed eyes and his lips set tight. He looked malignant and dangerous, and perhaps his mental attitude was not quite normal. Close study and severe physical toil, coupled with free indulgence, had weakened him; there were drugs he was addicted to which affected the brain, and he had long been possessed by one fixed idea. By degrees it had become ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... reorganized condition of mind, how sharp the change had been. He would have preferred to stay away. He expected that now he should hear nothing except sentiments which would be a reproach to him in his changed mental attitude, and he rather wished he might be excused. And yet he didn't quite want to say that, he didn't want to show how he did feel, or show any disinclination to go, and so he forced himself to go along with Barrow, privately purposing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... honesty, industry and perseverance. If these are lacking in various degrees, as they often are, little progress will be made. If the student is studying merely for "society purposes," not much can be expected until that mental attitude is changed. Students always want to sing well, but they are not always willing to make the sacrifice of time and effort; consequently they lack concentration and slight their practice. Sometimes ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... nearly nineteen, she knew everything about life which an intelligent girl should know. What puzzled her most was to determine her own mental attitude towards marriage. Not yet having met a man for whom she could feel any especial regard, the idea of forming with any man as close an association as marriage would mean was repellent to her. The intimate relation the marital tie pre-supposes frightened and appalled her as it has done ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... with all her experience, was puzzled. She speedily became conscious of the absence of a certain warmth and genuineness in Bart's manner and words. The thermometer is not so sensitive to heat and cold as the intuition of a girl like Miss Hargrove to the mental attitude of an admirer, but no one could better hide her thoughts and feelings than she when once ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... I pray without ceasing? Not if by prayer you mean only words of supplication and petition, but if by prayer you mean also a mental attitude of devotion, and a kind of sub-conscious reference to God in all that you do, such unceasing prayer is possible. Do not let us blunt the edge of this commandment, and weaken our own consciousness of having failed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a MOST curious animal—a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven years, to a Cashier's position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay among the factories of the North. Perhaps he would have done better on the Bombay side, where they are happy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... personality to such a woman as she? His mother's severe hints about young men who could not pluck ripe fruit hanging ready to their hand spurred him, but whenever he was in Phillida's presence something of preoccupation in her mental attitude held him back from tender words. He thought himself a little ridiculous, and when he tried to imagine himself making love he thought that he would be ten times more absurd. If he could have got into his favorite position ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... off the sense of guilt that oppressed her, the mental attitude of arraignment. He was a young man when he journeyed away in that snowy dawn. She did not know what changes had come in his experience. Perchance his effervescent piety was only a habit of speech, and had no significance as far as she was ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... gift of intuition which is fostered in the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much on antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what to say. All ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... or charm, such as Mr. W. S. GILBERT would use in his Creatures of Impulse, his Fogarty's Fairy, and his Sorcerer, whenever he wishes to bring about a sudden and otherwise inexplicable transition from one mental attitude to another, and entirely opposite. But for the earnestness of the actors, this reductio ad Fairydum would have imparted an air of unreality to the characters and incidents which does not belong to them. The plot is a model of neat construction; and, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... jelly that nobody eats, and clothes that nobody can wear. But an Irishman shied a cabbage at her head while she was tryin' to convince him that the bath-tub wasn't really a coal bin, and that his mental attitude was ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... perch and wandered among the other guns, talking to the men who were lying on the sod, or interested in the battery horses behind the shelter of trees quietly munching the thin grasses. He returned to Cushing's guns, and being in the mental attitude of intense attention to things he would not usually have noticed, he was struck with the young captain's manly build, and then with his delicacy of feature, something girl-like and ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... across the Atlantic as being won and settled, not for the benefit of the men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and traders who stayed at home. It was this that rendered the Revolution inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act or set of acts. The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of grievances against ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... fools among the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some of them wander about in a merely private capacity, nagging without knowledge, depositing poison, breeding doubts as to integrity, and all the while pretending to maintain a mildly impartial and judicial mental attitude. Their souls never rise from the ground. Their brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled malice. They suspect hero-worship; it smacks to them of sentiment. They examine, but never praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find something meretriciously melodramatic about men and nations ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... woman!" snarled John Flint, his face going brick-red. "Stop licking my hand, and get up!" Although he did not know it, Katya symbolized the mental attitude of every laborer in Appleboro toward him ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... they did not like me; perhaps it was because I failed to appreciate a certain something that was the key note to their mental attitude. However that may have been, I always felt wretched in their company, and my attempts at saying something out of the common usually ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... studies for the right hand, though he never stressed technic too greatly. On the other hand, Auer's most notable contributions to violin literature are his revisions of such works as the Bach sonatas, the Tschaikovsky Concerto, etc. In a way it points the difference in their mental attitude: Hubay more concerned with the technical educational means, one which cannot be overlooked; Auer more interested in the interpretative, artistic educational end, which has always claimed his attention. Hubay personally was a grand ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... as this is contagious. In every big business or school, there is one man's mental attitude that animates the whole institution. Everybody partakes of it. When the leader gets melancholia, the shop has it—the whole place becomes tinted with ultra-marine. The best helpers begin to get out, and the honeycombing ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... in contradiction to what he himself has observed. Fray Gaspar's letter impresses the reader, at first, as being the complaint of an irritable and querulous old man (he wrote it at the age of seventy); but another cause for his mental attitude may be found toward the end of his letter, where he argues against the proposed ordination of Filipino natives as priests—a plan which aroused great opposition from the religious orders. The MS. which we use contains a ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... Any action that we take, any word that we utter, is done without thought, without knowledge, and without any result. And yet neither the cause nor the effect are, strictly speaking, physical. The position is a mental attitude, in this case mental helplessness, and this is dependent solely upon the relation of the mind to exterior circumstances. When we are fully conscious, we are ourselves each the centre of a little world, which includes ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... he walked, and a pair of wistful brown eyes, like those of an aged hound that has been worn out by hard service. Past seventy now, his youth had been trained to a different civilization, and there was a touching gentleness in his face, as if he expressed still the mental attitude of a class which had existed merely as a support or a foil to the order above it. Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had endured the greatest evils of slavery. With the curse of free labour on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the labourer. Like ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... been as an open book, he would surely have become a figure of interest. His mental attitude was that of a professional beau of acknowledged preeminence; he was comparing the self at home in the mummy case with the remnants of defunct Pharaohs here exposed under glass, and he was sniffing, in spirit, at their lack of kingly dignity and their inferior ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Different from Machiavelli's, in mental attitude, in cultural preparation, and in manner of presentation, G.B. Vico must yet be connected with the great Florentine from whom in a certain way he seems to proceed. In the heyday of "natural law" Vico is decidedly opposed to ius naturale and in his attacks against ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times; an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude. And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed—more brutal rushing and throwing—for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall, I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand and struck ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... K. C M. G., Governor of the Windless Islands, stood upon the veranda of Government House surveying the new day with critical and searching eyes. Sir Charles had been so long absolute monarch of the Windless Isles that he had assumed unconsciously a mental attitude of suzerainty over even the glittering waters of the Caribbean Sea, and the coral reefs under the waters, and the rainbow skies that floated above them. But on this particular morning not even the critical eye of the Governor could ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... study of the old Talmudic lore was maintained, the greatest teachers developed tradition afresh by a philosophical restatement designed to make it appeal to the mental attitude of the enlightened. The sermon flourished again, collections of Haggadah (Yalkut) were made as storehouses of homilies, and metaphysical treatises modelled upon the works of the schoolmen set forth a philosophical Judaism for the learned world. It is ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... in the second heaven, the spirit becomes part of the nature forces which work upon the earth and change its climate, flora and fauna. A spirit of an indolent nature, who indulges in day dreams and metaphysical speculations here, is not transformed by death respecting its mental attitude any more than regarding its moral propensities. It will dream away time in heaven, glorying in its sights and sounds. Thus it will neglect to work upon its future country and return to a barren and arid land. Spirits, on the other hand, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... our little home," says Mrs. Wales in a hoarse whisper. "I see it objectively. It is mine. I claim it out of the boundless all-good. I have put myself in the correct mental attitude of reception; I am holding to the perfect All. My own ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... to ask questions. Jane knew her brother too well to presume to do this. If he had come to his senses, so much the better. It was not to be expected that he would admit it. That was not his way. Any change in his mental attitude would be quickly apparent, however, in his actions, his deeds confessing the faults his lips were too proud to utter. ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... no answer. He was a quiet patient, and lay all day with wide-open, dreaming eyes. He seemed to be waiting for something. This, indeed, was his mental attitude as presented to his neighbours, and perhaps to the few friends he possessed in Dantzig. He had waited through the years during which Desiree had grown to womanhood. He waited on doggedly through the first month of the siege, without enthusiasm, without comment—without ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... genius is two parts inspiration, ninety-eight parts perspiration. So happiness is two parts circumstance, ninety-eight parts mental attitude. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... feminine woman though she had a mental attitude rightly held to be more characteristic of men. Being so feminine, so enraged under her calm and ease, she was, of course, not completely consistent. She was still angry, and very scornful of Miss Townsend. She was hurt with ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... was greeted amiably. "Anything rather than sit still!" is the mental attitude of a ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Revolutionists in her salon, mourned that though the ideas were many, the resulting measures were few. It is the woman's eternal complaint against discussion—nothing comes of it. In a country like our own, where reflection usually follows action, the woman's natural mental attitude is exaggerated. It is one reason why we have so few houses where there is anything like conversation, why with us the salon as an institution is out of question. The woman wants immediately to incorporate her ideas. She ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... house or fed. They lived on rats, mice, birds, and the field mice, and were practically wild animals. In their frightened, suspicious actions at sight of a human being, Geraldine recognized a reflection of her own mental attitude; and she pitied the poor things even ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... within you the force to break from your traditions and stop drifting, you will make the fact evident. If you haven't it would be useless for me to attempt to drag, drive, or coax you out of old ways. I am too busy a man to attempt the useless. But until you tell me your present mental attitude, and what has led to it, we are talking somewhat at random. I have merely aimed to give you ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... significant by undertaking the subjective task of a study in ministerial personality. "What we are," to paraphrase Emerson, "speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say." Every great calling has its characteristic mental attitude, the unwritten code of honor of the group, without a knowledge of which one could scarcely be an efficient or honorable practitioner within it. One of the perplexing and irritating problems of the personal ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... especially religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony. That was typical of his mental attitude,—he knew and loved the melody of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... attachment to things, till "they are under thee and thou not under them," that you will gradually resolve the opposition between the recollective and the active sides of your personality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom—for these are two aspects of one thing—will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... When once he fears our power, and perceives that there would be no hope of contending against us, even if he were at liberty, he will respect us. This change in his mental attitude may tend to make him communicative. I do not see why we should despair of learning his language from him, and having done that, he will serve as our guide and interpreter, and will be of incalculable advantage to us when we have ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... about our attitude when employing that word, but add to this information the name of the emotion corresponding with that attitude: the emotion of admiration. For the selfsame object or proceeding may sometimes be called good and sometimes beautiful, according as the mental attitude is practical or contemplative. While we admonish the traveller to take a certain road because he will find it good, we may hear that same road described by an enthusiastic coachman as beautiful, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... long, strong legs trembling beneath him, sank upon the nearest bench, and tried to catch hold of the world again, of the reality of the world. His hands, unconsciously expressing his mental attitude, held the bench's ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Lawford Tapp's tendencies toward living such an irresponsible existence as all wrong—for him. The rather exciting information she had just gained changed her mental attitude ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... well named l'esprit arriviste—the desire to concentrate on outward success, to push on, to be climbers, to advance themselves and their children in fashionable society. This spirit means the willing sacrifice of all ideals of ethics or of patriotism to family egoism. To this mental attitude, and to the corresponding absence of religion, he attributes the decline of population. In conclusion the following evidence is quoted by ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... people that have never seen a railroad, a cow, a horse. They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon men in Queen Elizabeth's day. You hear such expressions as "enow," "forninst," "forby"; and the mental attitude to life is two ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... expected. She had anticipated his attitude would be a little cynical, but to her surprise he oozed loving-kindness. Had she known Mr. Marcus Stepney as well as Jean knew him, she would have realised that he adapted his mental attitude to his audience. He was a man whose stock-in-trade was a knowledge of human nature, and the ability to please. He would no more have attempted to shock or frighten her, than a first-class salesman would shock or ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition that would pass. "A phase, only. Now that she is back among familiar things, she will become again a daughter ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... account of which he had seen in the newspapers, and ending by hoping that his new life would "drop some shekels into his clothes." Mrs. Breen, on the contrary, while she had had no opportunity of expressing her mental attitude toward the exile, never having seen him since he walked out of her front door, was by no means oblivious to Jack's social and business successes. "I hear Jack was at Mrs. Portman's last night," she said to her husband the morning after one of the ex-Clearing ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... change in business methods, in our mental attitude towards trade, has all grown out of a dimly perceived but deeply felt belief in the brotherhood of man, of the solidarity of the race—also, in the further belief that life in all of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... been taking my tonic regularly but apparently without deriving beneficial results. Its especial purpose is for the thinning of the blood. Assuredly though, if my blood has been appreciably thinned my mental attitude remains unchanged. Perversely I continue to be the subject of contradictory and conflicting moods impossible to understand and difficult to describe. Certainly I have never been in this state before. Query: Can it ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... solicitations of theory or prejudice. No one can read the plays in connection with the literature of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental attitude. If they do not afford evidences of a profound culture in philosophy, letters, or science, they offer no trace of intellectual blindness or conceit, and they leave no doubt that their author had thought ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... or otherwise, a fervent "Amun" was certain to resound through the building, either because long custom had led him to regard the appendage as indispensable to it, or because like an old soldier suddenly roused to "attention," he awoke from a stolen slumber to jerk himself into the mental attitude most familiar to him. This last supposition, however, is a libel upon his fair character. I cannot believe that Wren ever slept on duty. He kept near to him a long hazel stick, wherewith to overawe any of the younger members of the congregation who were inclined either to ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... lecturer's judgment presents itself when he is called upon to choose his subject. Look over the list of subjects on the syllabus of any speaker and the man stands revealed. His previous intellectual training, or lack of it, what he considers important, his general mental attitude, the extent of his information and many other things can be predicated from ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... describe my mental attitude as acquiescence and far less cheerful acquiescence," grumbled Summerlee over his pipe. "I submit because I have to. I confess that I should have liked another year of life to finish my ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was to have been expected of Whistler because of his aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly, speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type, exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge. Nearly all the Balliol dons—even those who never spoke of religion—seemed to start with the same foregone ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... as an opportunity to better health, not to more illness, our mental attitude will put complaint out of the question; and as the practice spreads it will as surely decrease the tendency to illness in others as it will ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... moral and spiritual life in our day, its accelerated movement, is not to be claimed by or traced to any one set of influences or propaganda. The awakening has been all along the line; and it has resulted in a new mental attitude toward the human life of the world, both as a whole and in its various parts. Its great outcome is the learning to live with, rather ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... point of view this was anything but satisfactory. But he yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged her so much in one way that he must make some compensating concessions to her in another. This weakness was part of his mental attitude towards her, which swung constantly between confidence and diffidence, esteem and indifference, affection and coldness; at times he inclined to put her from him entirely; at others he opined that no one on his Council was more capable ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... caused this disintegration in a usually fairly fluent prattler with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... smiling lips and sinister eyes, greeted her with the suave courtesy which is so characteristic of his race and class. He typified the worst of the Spanish folk, even as the young girl did the best. To a keen student of physiognomy the mental attitude of the Duke of Alva would have been an open book. To Maria Theresa, loyal to family and countrymen, he was the symbol of her own strata in Spain—yet, beneath her gracious forgiveness of and enforced indifference to many things, there lurked a latent ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... director of the popular feeling of "the heart of Russia." Not only did it seem to him (as to all administrators) that he controlled the external actions of Moscow's inhabitants, but he also thought he controlled their mental attitude by means of his broadsheets and posters, written in a coarse tone which the people despise in their own class and do not understand from those in authority. Rostopchin was so pleased with the fine role ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were largely a condition of the full success of the vespers," says his biographer, "which were seldom elsewhere so impressive or seemed so genuine as a devotional act. They needed, for their perfect effect, the influence of a leader with whom worship was an habitual mental attitude, and who, combined with the instinct of religion the art of a poet and of a musician."[12] The form of service thus initiated was adopted in many other churches, and slowly had its influence in giving greater beauty and spiritual expressiveness ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... secretary, the priestess, should share this uncivil apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past life ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... special charge of the armed forces. It is their task to weld the assemblage of men, armed and maintained by the State, into an harmonious whole, skilled in technique and imbued with a psychological and mental attitude which will not admit that any ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... literatures which extended over the Oriental world from a remote epoch," cannot be understood aright "except in the light of the contemporaneous literature of which they form a portion." From the point of view implied by such words as these, it is only necessary to recall the mental attitude of our grandfathers to appreciate in some measure the revolution in thought that has been wrought in this field within the last half-century, largely through the instrumentality of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... this man, and he a stranger; and but that circumstance was kind to him, her effort might have resulted cruelly. And now that she had done so much for Con Hite, it was her pleasure to take it out on him, as the phrase goes. All unaware of this curious mental attitude, he winced under ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... gentle natures, with deep affections, but without much brain-power in whom an idea, a mental attitude, and especially a personal liking or disliking, is very easily implanted; yet, easily as it is introduced, once it has taken hold it can never be dislodged. The intellect has not energy enough for reconstruction; it accepts too readily, and, once saturated, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... on again without speaking. All three were busy with their own thoughts. Marjorie's brain was in a whirl. She was trying to readjust her mental attitude. Miss Norton! Miss Norton, whom she had mistrusted and suspected as a spy, was Eric's idolized aunt, and had gone to the Royal George on no treacherous errand, but to tell fairy tales to an invalid child! When the cold scholastic manner was dropped she had caught ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... ought to make the best lover, for he knows the tastes and weaknesses, the temperament and surroundings of the woman he has chosen. They will be bound by countless old associations, but this very familiarity may breed, not contempt, but a matter-of-fact mental attitude that will rob courtship of more than ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... theologian. The redemption, the regeneration of man, lies in faith. In that is the substance through which and by means of which man comes into conscious communion with God. It is by the intense activity possible to this mental attitude that he conquers the problems of the universe, that he advances in knowledge, and advances in the increasing capacity to receive the Divine messages and to follow the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... of life here was to attain everlasting bliss in the world to come. To be able to appease the dread Judge at the Day of Judgment, prayer, penance, and holy contemplation were the important things here below. It was preeminently the age of the self-abasing monk, and this mental attitude ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... not so much because of the probability of the tale as of a great and abiding wonder that people should be paid real money for writing such impossible trash. You will pardon my candor, but it is necessary that you understand my mental attitude toward this particular story—that you may credit ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... shoulders gave the impression of her being above medium height; she had evidently been an extremely pretty creature of the Dresden-china type, and she still bore the manner and assurance of beauty, fortifying this mental attitude by a genius for dress. Thus she succeeded in maintaining an illusion perfectly satisfactory to herself, if not quite to others, for it was rather a hungry beast of an illusion and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of guidance in an ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... to stammering, either internal conflicts, or external instigators which throw these conflicts into activity. The internal conflicts are either conscious or unconscious fear of betrayal (and therefore a wish to retain a secret), and this mental attitude leads to the dread of speaking, a genuine conversion of morbid anxiety into defective speech. . . . The external stimuli act like dream instigators, for instance the fear of speaking to relatives or to intimate ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the man's powers suddenly fail. The way in which these two distinguishable elements combine in the same nature,—the one absolutely unalterable, and the other subject to change in two directions opposed to each other—explains the variety of mental attitude and the dissimilarity of value which attach to a man at different periods ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... explain my state of mind at that moment, to render understandable by contrast with the cold fear which had visited me so recently, the utter apathy of my mental attitude. To this day I cannot recapture the mood—and for a very good reason, though one that was not apparent ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... for an individual of average purpose to understand or comprehend this mental attitude where the individual is fired with such zeal that he is willing to suffer physical destruction ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... swept over Alan. The words were spoken so softly that he thought she had not wanted him to hear. It was evident that a few hours' sleep and the beauty of the morning had completely changed her mental attitude, and he no longer felt the suspicion of responsibility which had persisted in attaching itself to him. Only a fool, he assured himself, could possibly see a note of tragedy in her appearance now. Nor was she different at luncheon or at dinner. During the day he saw nothing of her, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... that, all her life, Eunice had been accustomed to the homage of men. From the time she had put her hair up every man she had met had grovelled before her, and she had acquired a mental attitude toward the other sex which was a blend of indifference and contempt. For the cringing specimens who curled up and died all over the hearthrug if she spoke a cold word to them she had nothing but scorn. She dreamed wistfully ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... in the previous chapter it directly follows that the political conduct of the State, while affecting the mental attitude of the people, exercises an indirect but indispensable influence on the preparation for war, and is to some degree ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the mediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that out of ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... wonderful. I shall never attain his mental attitude of philosophic tolerance. I do not feel that Gorman is in any way right about the Irish landlords. I felt, though I like the man personally, that he and his friends are ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of 'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... species of monomania. No mental attitude is more disastrous to personal achievement, personal happiness, and personal usefulness in the world, than worry and its twin brother, despondency. The remedy for the evil lies in training the will to cast off cares and seek a change of occupation, when the first warning is sounded by Nature ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... mental. Although in fact, the new mental attitude does result in certain physical modifications. For instance, a person who in his normal condition may be most punctilious and neat in his dress is likely to become unkempt and slovenly in the new character ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... Herold's idea. His, also, the amplifying apparatus. The mental attitude was Miss Clarke's, modified by Dr. Malloy. The lead bracelets were Mme. Le Fabre's suggestion; they work fine. Sir Henry was the one who pointed out the advantage of the microphone I am using. If my hands become paralysed I can ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... a mental attitude which the typical Don, full of the public- school spirit and its dislikes, could never forgive. Except for the few intimate friends who were devoted to me—Nettleship and Warren, T. H. Green and, later, curiously enough, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... with the attributes of human beings should figure in these tales involves, from the standpoint of primeval man, only a very slight divergence from probability. In nothing, perhaps, has civilization so changed us as in our mental attitude toward animals. It has fixed a great gulf between us and them—a gulf far greater than that which divided them from our first ancestors. In the early ages of the world, when men lived by the chase, and gnawed the raw flesh of their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the first four months in the school I thought I saw a general improvement in him. He held himself better for one thing—with his head higher and his shoulders well back. This wasn't due to his physical training either. It meant a changed mental attitude. Ruth says she didn't notice any difference and she thinks this is nothing but my imagination. But she's wrong. I was looking for something she couldn't see that the boy lacked before. Dick to her was always all right. Of course I knew myself that the ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... floor, that he might have relaxed, but would not allow any further liberty about it. And as he marched away, not proudly, yet with a very nice firmness, I was almost afraid to say any thing to him to disturb his high mental attitude. For Mrs. Hockin must have exclaimed that ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... by reason of the largeness and darkness of their aspect, acquired thereby a softness of expression that was in part womanly. His mouth as far as it could be seen reproduced this characteristic, which might have been called weakness, or goodness, according to the mental attitude of the observer. It was large but well formed, and showed an unimpaired line of teeth within. His dress at present was a heather-coloured rural suit, cut close to ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... doubt, due to mental influence. The whole of the alimentary process is under the control of the nervous system, which has its seat in the brain, consequently, a cheerful mental attitude favors digestion. It is well known that a fit of anger may temporarily stop digestion. The mind exerts such a vast influence over every function that it is impossible to set bounds to it. We are the creatures ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... that every man can be taught to lead. In the majority of men, success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity. Many are unwilling to face the ordeal of thinking for themselves and of accepting responsibility for others. But the man determined to excel at his own work has already climbed the first rung of the ladder; ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Dale's mind was like a country pup walking stiff-legged into a crowd of city dogs, its hair belligerently on end and the tip of its tail wagging a friendly compromise. Not that he was at all defiant, and of course not afraid, but his whole mental attitude had become one of alert watchfulness, ready to spring this way or that, to follow this new custom or that new custom, and not intending to lag if the others made a move. So it was that when the Colonel held a chair back for Miss Liz, and Bob was seating Jane, Dale, ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... Parisians, will sport with matters of heaviest import. The poorer classes treat the universal subject lightly, as beseems men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The prevailing trait in their mental attitude is incredulousness. You cannot make them believe that the bill will pass. "We'll get Home Rule when a pair o' white wings sprouts out o' me shoulders an' I fly away like a blackbird," said an old market woman with great emphasis; and a Dublin jackeen, piloting an American over the city, said: ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Old Man so long as you are explaining in undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude, that he is a curmudgeon and his system dead wrong. You are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up discontent and warming envy into strife, 5 but you are doing this: You are getting yourself upon a well-greased chute that will give you a quick ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... made me sorrier than ever for the old man. Dimly I began to realize, I think, what his own mental attitude toward his position must be. Here he was, a mere cub reporter—and a remarkably bad one, a proven failure—skirmishing round for small, inconsequential items, running errands really, at an age when most of the men he knew were getting ready to retire from business. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... than his clothes during the two minutes he was left to himself in the reekind dark of the schooner's fo'castle. It was more than a change—it was a revolution. What he made up his mind to do—precisely what mental attitude he decided to adopt, just what new niche he elected wherein to set his feet, it is difficult to say. Only by results could the change be guessed at. He went down the forward hatch at the toe of Kitchell's boot—silk-hatted, melton-overcoated, patent-booted, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... what they would do, of course—that is, so far as their reception of the man who had befriended her, and whose mother had befriended her was concerned. They were gentlewomen. And she knew quite certainly about her father. But she wondered as to their real attitude, their mental attitude, and she wondered still more with regard to Anderson. Would he expect to be invited in? In what fashion did he read his own social status in the village. Anderson also was considering, during the last of the way, if he should enter the Carroll ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... question of prize-fight moving-picture shows and won out or when a Parkhurst fought bravely for a clean police force. Even if the world today does not vex itself so much as formerly about predestination, original sin, the "actual presence," or even the correct mental attitude to insure heaven hereafter, the churches may surely count it as a product of their work that the people do trust God more simply for the past and future, and are more in earnest about securing justice for the downtrodden and the square deal in ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... imperilled. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... mental attitude, which was formed at the time, may have been too harsh. It is possible that the shortness of time in which to complete the drafting of the report of the Commission on the League of Nations, upon which he had set his heart, caused him to be impatient of any criticism ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... then? What then? What would the Rangars do to her? Had she sufficient courage to face that? It was not fear now that swept over her so much as wonder at herself. Jaimihr detected something different in her mental attitude, and, since almost any change means weakness to the Oriental mind, he was quick to try to take advantage of it. He guessed right at the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... which defiance, reproach, determination, and a certain cruelty shone like iron under water. He made a movement toward her. The strength of his more emotional nature might have made a final assault—not uselessly—on her assumed "reasonableness." No appeal, no threat could have moved her from the mental attitude she had decided on—the duty of keeping her word to Lord Reckage. But she might have been urged to the more candid course of ascertaining how far his lordship's true happiness was really involved in the question. At that moment, however, Mrs. Rennes ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... for some time had been in a state of chaos with regard to such matters. But gradually, by means of a kind of spiritual chemistry, the original elements of her peculiar system came together, and crystallised again in the old form. Her mental attitude was not like that of the downright and doggedly-conservative Jan Coggan, who scorned to turn his back on "his own old ancient doctrines merely for the sake of getting to heaven." There was nothing stubborn or downright ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... that I was insulting my readers by making this explanation; but for their benefit be it said that in a society based economically upon the institution of private property social life is impossible without respect (respect here refers to acts, not to mental attitude) for private property. Crimes against property are distinctly unsocial. But respect for the rights of property is rapidly disintegrating both among trust magnates and proletarians. The Natural Rights Philosophy[6] still has much vitality in ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor sees fit to let ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... lobsters—please to look at them, and see if you can so much as guess their age, their capabilities, or their intentions. I fancy that the difference between the feelings with which they and the fishes inspire us is much the same as that between our mental attitude towards hill-men or house-elves, and ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... I understood the mental attitude which induced him to prefer that the information should ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... was so struck with the unique and convincing nature of these arguments that he could scarcely restrain his admiration, and he confessed to himself afterward, that unless Simpson's mental attitude could be changed he was perhaps a fitter subject for medical science than the ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... confession that she had not been ignorant. Her right to explanation was gone. All she had to do now was to adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude. There had been a little pause, during which she had not turned away her eyes; and with a sudden break into a smile, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... and my Aunt Amanda may both be right. I strongly suspect they are. I also strongly suspect that Sir Christopher himself has much to do with my change of mental attitude: He is well-mannered, good to look upon, quite adorable, independent and patient. (Indeed, if people were half as patient as my cat this would be a different world to live in.) More: He has taught me many things, he talks without ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... two errors in the play; and they are all due to the primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about seeking for "an archangel with purple ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... She was often so when discussions arose. They were apt to plunge her into deep thought. To those who knew her history, guarded from close contact with anything but the world of ideas, it was very interesting to watch her mental attitude as she was day by day emerging into a knowledge of the actual world and encountering its crosscurrents. To Philip, who was getting a good idea of what her education had been, an understanding promoted by his knowledge of the character and attainments of her governess, her ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... repeated Cap Pike standing in amazed incredulity with the forgotten skillet at an awkward angle dripping grease into the camp fire, but his amazement regarding personality did not at all change his mental attitude as to the probable social situation. "Some collector, Brother, but hell in Sonora isn't the only hell you can blaze the trail to ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... being made to systematise these organisations. The Department of Agriculture wanted a farmer at the head of each society, the War Office an ex-soldier. There can be no doubt that the militarists have been doing their best to give the societies the mental attitude of the army. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... enough, never having had the experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental attitude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic—or, indeed, her husband himself—would have assured ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... a plainly formulated purpose of deceiving another; an implicit intention, a disposition to allow our words to run their natural course, is sufficient to give such utterances a character of mendacity. For, independently of our mental attitude, it is in the nature of a lie to deceive; an intention, or rather a pretense to the contrary, does not affect that nature. The fact of lying presupposes that we intend in some manner to practise deception; if we did not have such a purpose we would not resort to lying. If you ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... first exercise and creep, then sit up and move backward again. These will take a month to perfect. Begin by exercising five minutes and gradually work up to half an hour, rest between, always. The patient must have the right mental attitude, must think that she is trying to replace the uterus by lifting it to its natural position. The exercises must not ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... to think so, but pray do not flatter yourself that your mental attitude has the very smallest fragment of an original line, curve or angle. Thus, and not otherwise, do all youthful equestrians feel, excepting those doubly-dyed in conceit, who fancy that they have mastered a whole art in ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... primitive types of house structures are quite rare. It is also thought to be of interest to the archeologist and ethnologist as well as to the general reader, for it is well known that no one product of a people's art exhibits so clearly their mental attitude and their industrial status as ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's Tractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats's poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... wrought in his appearance. Not only did his countenance bear traces of the illness and exhaustion that might not unnaturally be expected in such a case of bereavement, but it faithfully reflected the change that had taken place in his mental attitude. His eyes had lost the frank boldness that had made them very pleasing to some people, they looked scared; the mouth too was rendered conspicuous by the absence of the firm lines that once gave it character; indeed the man's whole appearance ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... so named in remembrance of the time when its owner had "sat down by the wayside like a man under enchantment." It characterized well, too, his mental attitude in maturity; though the spell that held him now was charged with happiness. The house itself was small, but the proprietor might have carved on his lintel the legend over Ariosto's door, Parva, sed apta mihi. In October, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop |
