Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Pervasive   /pərvˈeɪsɪv/   Listen
Pervasive

adjective
1.
Spreading or spread throughout.  Synonyms: permeant, permeating, permeative.  "The pervasive odor of garlic" , "An error is pervasive if it is material to more than one conclusion"



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Pervasive" Quotes from Famous Books



... through a window near her. It was not funny, this thing, she reminded herself sternly; it was too ghastly to be funny, but there was no question that the selection of Ivan Ivanovitch as the joyous, all-pervasive sunbeam of the community at Locust Hall was slightly incongruous. When she could trust herself she glanced at him. He stood as he had stood before, his small, old, unchildish face turned up to the German, his black eyes fixed unwaveringly ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... in his armchair by the stove he contrasted his pretty, healthy, buxom Ida with the woman next door, and would be seized with a veritable horror of the all-pervasive odour ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... and the charm of it subtly pervasive. The words as she uttered them seemed to have all the quality of a prayer and there were tears in all eyes, excepting those of Michael Korsakoff, the second orderly, whom Rouletabille appraised as a man with a rough heart not much open ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... wanderings over the inhabited earth. Melkarth completed the task of the gods by discovering and subjugating those countries which had escaped the notice of his predecessors. Hundreds of local traditions, to be found on all the shores of the Mediterranean down to Roman times, bore witness to the pervasive influence of the old Canaanite colonisation. At Cyprus, for instance, wo find traces of the cultus of Kinyras, King of Byblos and father of Adonis; again, at Crete, it is the daughter of a Prince of Sidon, Buropa, who is carried off by Zeus under the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... come from north, or east, or west, or south, or from any known horizon; it had no sensible direction; it was there. Out of the portentous hush (not into it) there came first a whisper, something low and malevolent; then a singular moaning sound, incomparably dismal and hollow and pervasive. Haig moved his head from side to side, endeavoring to trace it—before, behind, above—he knew not where. The moaning murmur grew, and still there was no perceptible movement in the air; it rose ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... discussion here. It is enough to note that it took place, and that Caucasian materialism was thus deprived of a counteragent in Hebrew spiritual wisdom. Had this corrective maintained its place it is possible that religion might now be a pervasive element in the Caucasian's ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though it is less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, is perhaps more universal than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions which came in their train. It runs right through the literature of Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... community; and 3) the relationship between these two very distinct but interrelated trends. The investment in understanding this relationship being made by information providers, technologists, and public policy developers, as well as by scholars themselves, seems to be pervasive and growing, MICHELSON contended. She drew on collaborative work with Jeff Rothenberg on the scholarly use ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly

... Christ by the creature, then we have fallen beneath the sweet level of our lofty privilege, and have won for ourselves the misery due to distracted and idolatrous hearts. Love to one who has done what He has done for us is in its very nature exclusive, and its exclusiveness is all-pervasive exclusiveness. The centre diamond makes the little stones set round it all the more lustrous. We must love Jesus Christ all in all or not at all. Divided love incurs the condemnation that falls heavily upon the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... with something more than a woodland murmur. These fountains touch one of the purest notes in nature. In cool, high, bare-walled alcoves the water falls in sheets from terrace to terrace, at last into a dark pool below. The sound is steady, gently reinforced by echo from the clean walls behind, and pervasive. It is a very perfect imitation of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... there sounds walking in the wood, And all the spruces shiver and tremble, And the stars move a little in their courses. The ancient disturber of solitude Breathes a pervasive sigh, And the soul seems to hear The gathering of the waters at their sources; Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark; The region-spirit murmurs in meditation, The heart replies in exaltation And echoes faintly like an inland shell Ghost tremors of the spell; Thought reawakens and ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott

... moment some perception of the pervasive misery of the situation enters her mind and begins ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin

... garden, and the air was redolent of jasmine and orange-blossoms. On the pier-table was a little sleeping Cupid, from whose torch rose the fragrant incense of a nearly extinguished pastille. The pervasive spirit of beauty in the room, manifested in forms, colors, tones, and motions, affected the soul as perfume did the senses. The visitors felt they had stayed too long, and yet they lingered. Alfred examined the reclining Cupid, and praised ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... his mode of expression: it was unique. He spoke as none other in my experience ever spoke. His thoughts were weighed in a delicate balance of discrimination before he permitted them an outward garb. The essence of truth, all-pervasive with even a physiological aspect, came from him like a fragrant exudation of the soul. I was conscious always that I was in the presence of a living manifestation of God. The weight of his divinity automatically ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... though they like one another, do not seem to be able to work together very well. The Serbs are a smaller people, more intense and less adaptable than the Russians. The difference between the two races as one sees and hears them on the streets of Belgrade is very remarkable. The soft pervasive accents of Russian speech are pregnant with a great race-consciousness and a feeling ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... written, and displays in remarkable perfection one quality that became so characteristic of his work that he has no rival in it except Poe; it has that harmony of tone which is known as keeping a unity of design and development so pervasive that the heavens above and the earth below are seen from the little steeple as from a centre, and nature and life seem to revolve around the eye at that altitude with complete breadth as well as smallness of proportion. It is the simplest of trifles, as a ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... With his pervasive friendliness, and seeking solace for the absence of Toby and Captain Ephraim, the Pup proved a most privileged and popular passenger. All went well till the ship came off Cape Race, Newfoundland. Then that treacherous and implacable promontory made haste to justify its reputation; ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... addressed ten words to him—nibbling at the hard English consonants like nuts—he owned the justice of the epithet. She was a beauty, if beauty, instead of being restricted to the cast of the face, is a pervasive attribute informing the hands, the voice, the gestures, the very fall of a flounce and tilt of a feather. In this impalpable aura of grace Madame de Treymes' dark meagre presence unmistakably moved, like a thin flame in a wide quiver of ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton

... where you glide, the summer's pensioned guest, and my chains were the past and the future, darkness and blowing sand. There, very weary, I received from the distance a sweet emblem of an incorruptible, lofty and pervasive nature, but was I less weary? I was a prisoner, and you, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... but as a rough statement, it may be said that if the head of the admiralty of either fleet is more skilful than the other, his officers will probably be more skilful than the officers of the other; so pervasive is the influence ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... are now facing is not slavery,—an institution that may be abolished by statute—but its offspring, Caste—a spirit pervasive, subtle, sophistical, tyrannic. It can be overcome only by a spirit more pervasive, persistent and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... roof. Here, as in the grave, was there not eternal silence, deep peace—the sense of the Infinite? And besides this there was the quiet and the fixed thought of the cloister—a thought which you felt like a subtle presence in the air, and in the dim dusk of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere definitely expressed, and looming the larger in the imagination; for in the cloister the great saying, "Peace in the Lord," enters the least religious ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... community that could barely support one parish church, boasting its one-half dozen religious organizations, all together claiming the adherence of only a minority of the population, but in the Middle Ages, religion was not only the most important and pervasive thing, it was a moral obligation on every man, woman and child, and rejection or even indifference was unthinkable. If once we grasp this fact," continues Cram, "we can understand how in the eleventh century, the whole ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... been watching her blue car, the advance of which was temporarily obstructed. At this, she transferred her eyes to him, gazing at him solemnly out of the pervasive window of her spectacles. "Well, I shouldn't wonder if she did! Yes, that will be a good thing. I don't see how you can help being a good deal shaken by her. She has acted on ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... apart from the obvious economies in the cost of administration, common to all business on a large scale, there is, in British banking practice, a special advantage in a bank being as extensive and all-pervasive as possible. Where distinct banks co-exist, there can be no assurance that the periodical shifting of business, the perpetual transformations in industrial organisation, the rise and fall of industries, localities or firms, the changes of fashion and the ebb and flow ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... twilight. The flurry of snow has passed. The earth is penetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue. Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light, are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeply luminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itself into the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down and touches it. Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit of the landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones I am ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... prevailing luck was "Acceptable to the Fair Sex, so extremely charming as makes 'em fond of being in his Company. However he is a virtuous person and deserved all the Respect they shewed him." Nor can I doubt, from the pervasive spirit of his books, that Dunton too found favor ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... inventions and discoveries and our inordinately pervasive commerce have come two other novel elements in our environment—what we vaguely call "democracy" and "nationality". These also are to be traced to applied ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson

... 1895, a series of representations of "Christus" was begun in Bremen, largely through the instrumentality of Professor Bulthaupt, a potent and pervasive personage in the old Hanseatic town. He was not only a poet and the author of the book of this opera and of some of Bruch's works, but also a painter, and his mural decorations in the Bremen Chamber of Commerce are proudly displayed ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... latch-key. Turning straight into the dining-room, he was just in time to see his own father walking into lunch arm in arm with Lady Hilda Tregellis. As Mrs. Hallis had graphically expressed it, he felt as if you might have knocked him down with a feather! Was she absolutely ubiquitous, then, this pervasive Lady Hilda? and was he destined wherever he went to come upon her suddenly in the most ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... are in human nature. It is a fact as central and all-pervasive in the social realm as gravitation is in the physical realm. It is no more likely to become antiquated or obsolete than oxygen or sunshine. It is an interest which no intelligent ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... scriptural statement to that effect. A scriptural statement may be expected with regard to what is possible; but what is impossible—as e.g. the origination of a sky-flower or of Ether—cannot possibly be taught by Scripture. For the origination of Ether, which is not made up of parts and is all pervasive, cannot be imagined in any way. For this very reason, i.e. the impossibility of the thing, the Chandogya, in its account of creation, mentions the origination of fire, water, &c. only (but not of Ether)—'It thought, may I be many, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy words were like so many darts goading her ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... for between four and five hundred years. The unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual fabric ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... therefore in the various symbols. And as our King has divers representative Viceroys and Governors to rule over his dominions in his name, so the Supreme has these sub-deities, less in power and only existing by force of Himself, and He, being all-pervasive, can be worshipped under ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... pantheistic feeling for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams around him. Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... neglected the graceful art, he takes him up on the third floor and teaches him the step. He is fitting in, you see. Then he hears the crowd surging into the lobby and picks up the chorus of "We'll rush the ball along," and before this first day is over he catches the contagion of that intangible, pervasive, never ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... results. He was struck on the foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year. His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New England—the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, near Lake ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... visibly or invisibly, determined the course of events. We have before us not a simple political or racial entity, but, to an eminent degree, "a spiritual people." The national development is based upon an all-pervasive religious tradition, which lives in the soul of the people as the Sinaitic Revelation, the Law of Moses. With this holy tradition, embracing a luminous theory of life and an explicit code of morality and social converse, was associated the idea of ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... occurrence in many of our American colleges. These religious awakenings are strong and pervasive, and not only show the deep religious interest, but give a Christian tone to the body of students. The extent and intensity of these revivals in some colleges is so manifest that from three-fourths to nine-tenths of the graduates go out from ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... small and poor, but they have stood steadfastly for human rights, for Christian equality and freedom of church membership, and for moral and religious education. While their work has been slow, their influence has been deep and pervasive, as has been that of ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 49, No. 5, May 1895 • Various

... clear, would not of itself involve this immediate impulse to end a sequence of notes on one rather than on another. Nor is tonality, in the all- pervasive sense in which we understand it, a characteristic of ancient, or of mediaeval music, while the tendency to end on a certain tone, which we should to-day call the tonic, was always felt. Thus, since complete tonality was developed ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... beseech you, that this love of God is explained by our Apostle to be 'in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Love illimitable, all-pervasive, eternal; yes, but a love which has a channel and a course; love which has a method and a process by which it pours itself over the world. It is not, as some representations would make it, a vague, nebulous light diffused ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... alluded to this experience as his first pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life he was fain, like his "wise thrush," to "recapture that first fine careless rapture." It ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... an open hatchway from which a ladder descends, several hundred fugitives spend their nights and the best parts of their days in the iron hold, forever covered with moisture, leaky when rain comes, with the floor never dry, and pervasive with a perpetual smell like the smell of a cave which never gets the light of day. Here men, women, and children were huddled together in a promiscuous communion of misery, made infinitely more pathetic and heartrending because ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning is conspicuous. In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere apparent whenever a community passes ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that Clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... pervasive. In her it took the place of wit. It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire. The odd thing was that it ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... the course of discussion and legislation in America, is traceable to origins long antedating Marshall's chief justiceship. On the other hand, there is no public career in American history which ever built so largely upon this pervasive trait of the national outlook as did Marshall's, or which has contributed so much to render it effective in ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... sentiment to be found in literature make its presence influential everywhere and always. In reading there is comfort for the sorrowing, companionship for the lonely, encouragement for the downcast, entertainment for the leisurely, inspiration for the sluggish. Gentle, pervasive, almost unnoticed, yet stronger than iron bands, is the power of literature over us. We are what ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... understand the exigencies of the stock-market, and the probable effect of certain classes of news upon approaching political situations, and who have made themselves familiar with the methods by which the pervasive power of the press is ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... was right, and that the critic was wrong—if such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... difference may, if one chooses, be regarded as only a difference of degree. But when a difference of degree goes to such a point that what is minor, incidental, exceptional in the one case, is paramount, essential, pervasive in the other, the difference is, for all the purposes of thinking, equivalent to a difference of kind. Socialism is in its very essence opposed to individualism. It makes the collective welfare not an incidental ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin

... such a subtly pervasive thing, this Comstockery, it steals in wherever it can and puts the taint of its own uncleanness on whatever it touches. Clothing becomes a matter of Comstockery. We do not always see it, but such is the fact. We ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... striking characteristic of his manner. Indeed, so permanent and pervasive did his smile appear, that it seemed almost to be a fixed ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should be forever banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... now very generally recognized as fragments of a once widespread Nature Cult. These beliefs and observances, while dating from remotest antiquity, have, in their modern survivals, of recent years, attracted the attention of scholars by their persistent and pervasive character, and ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... roots of a felled tree a thousand verdant offshoots spring, tiny in stature, but fresh and vivid in foliage, so out of this beheaded love arose a crowd of sweet affections and tender services that made the fraternity of man seem possible, and illustrated the pervasive care of God. He went out into life, and from a heart wrung with all man can endure, and a brain tested in the fire, spoke burning and fluent words of strength and consolation to hundreds who, like him, had suffered, but were sinking under what he had borne. And these words ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... whispering trees, Made loneliness more lone. Some Panic fear Would seize him then, as they who seemed to hear In Tracian valleys or Thessalian woods The god's hallooing wake the leafy solitudes; I think it was the same: some piercing sense Of Deity's pervasive immanence, The Life that visible Nature doth indwell Grown great and near and all but palpable . . . He might not linger, but with winged strides Like one pursued, fled down the mountain-sides ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... has unusual humor, which is as delightful and as pervasive as the odor of his clover fields. Humor drives home to us the application of the optimistic ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... eliminated from our Divine Ideal. He must not be made an angry and jealous God as men count these. He must not be thought of as a vindictive personality, never so well pleased as when scaring His children into panic. In the thought of the Church He will be an all-pervasive Spirit whose nature is unfolded by the universe He has made. In that universe He will be felt to be immanent as the power of development, order, and destiny. All ages show Him to be "the power which makes for righteousness." The commandments are not only ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell

... and comfortable obscurity, a kind of drowsy dusk, stabbed here and there by bright cones of yellow light from green-shaded electrics. There was an all-pervasive drift of tobacco smoke, which eddied and fumed under the glass lamp shades. Passing down a narrow aisle between the alcoves the visitor noticed that some of the compartments were wholly in darkness; in others where lamps were glowing he could see a table and chairs. In one corner, under a sign lettered ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... pervasive enough in the upper estuary that during periods of even normal flow their decay pulls oxygen levels down. Under usual conditions this B.O.D. grows worse and worse downstream and reaches a peak in the neighborhood ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... light and love and worship. Their voices, blending with the child's voice, reached me with a vague sense of a caress. The three figures, charming in themselves, composed a lovely scene in a glorious landscape, filling it with a pervasive unimaginable grace. A delicately fair woman, radiant with smiles, a child of love, a young man with the irresistible charm of youth, a cloudless sky; nothing was wanting in nature to complete a perfect harmony for the delight of the soul. I found myself smiling ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... sight of its physiological basis. And, having hidden it from sight, we, not unnaturally, fail to give it due consideration. This is, in its way, a fatal blunder. The sex life of man and woman is too large a fact and too pervasive a force to be ignored with safety. Ignorance combined with prudery conspires to perpetuate what ignorance alone began; and the sex life, in both its normal and abnormal manifestations, has been perpetually exploited in the interests ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... are to conceive it as consisting of the contents of finite minds, or "centers of experience," subjected to "an all-pervasive transfusion with a reblending of all material." In the Absolute, finite things are "transmuted" ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... him is not only to be mentally stimulated, it is to be purified and ennobled; for though he never wrote a sermon in disguise, or attempted the didactic, the ethical element in his tragedies is so pervasive that one cannot read him without hating sin and loving virtue. Thus the works of the man who is perhaps the greatest novelist in history are in harmony with what we recognise as the deepest and most eternal truth, both in life ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... extensive,—most directly to those whom I have cited in foot-notes to the text, but also to others whose influence is too indirect or pervasive to make citation profitable, or too obvious to make it necessary. For the broader philosophy of art, my debt is heaviest, I believe, to the artists and philosophers during the period from Herder to Hegel, who gave ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room; tables set with all the wares of leisurely and pleasurable feeding speak a new state of affairs. The people so clothed and so fed begin to produce in every family some members of cultured ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... force, and the child, like its father, is full of power. We dowered our created world with but a single quality—a force of attraction. It not only had attraction for its own material substance, but sent out an all-pervasive attraction into space. By the force of condensation it flamed like a sun, and not only lighted its own substance, but it filled all space with the luminous outgoings of its power. A world may be limited, but its influence cannot; its ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... and deep and long—the little ones are faithfully trained by the parents in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (dear, quaint old phraseology, fine, subtle and pervasive as lavender scent!), if sacred songs and Bible stories and tender talk of the Saviour's love and the beautiful life of which this may be made a type and a foretaste, keep in the minds of the little ones ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... disciplined hours and careful hands—cabinets with initialed drawers, shelves filled with books. There is no more impressive and revealing moment with man or woman than when you stand in a room empty of their actual presence, but having, in every inch of it, the pervasive influences of the absent personality. A strange, almost solemn quietness stole over Al'mah's senses. She had been admitted to the inner court, not of the man's house, but of his life. Her eyes travelled on with the gratified reflection that she had been admitted here. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of your painting of landscape; but you cannot paint a daylight picture without in some way making it obvious that luminosity is a fundamental characteristic of day light. There is no other quality so universally present and pervasive. In sunlight it is the most vital quality. You might as well paint water without recognizing the fact that water is wet, as to paint daylight without recognizing the fact that diffused sunlight ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... said Mr Le ffacase had softened his brutality toward me, but his favor did not extend—so pervasive is literary jealousy—to printing my own reports. He continued to subject me to the indignity of being "ghosted," a thoroughly expressive term, which by a combination of bad conjugation and the suggestion of insubstantiality defines the sort of prose produced, by ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... Josef now; look, Mrs. Ravenel!" Mrs. Lennox cried, pointing to a man who had just entered the stage box. "The man with the iron-gray hair. And the eyes! Did you ever see such eyes? And who is that with him? Great Heavens," she exclaimed, "it is that pervasive Irishman who was down in North ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... literature. Mr. Yeats studied painting for years; A. E. is a painter of distinction; Synge an accomplished musician before he became a of letters. There is not the slightest doubt the effect of these sister arts upon the literary work of the Great Three is pervasive and powerful. The books of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are full of word-pictures; and the rhythm of Synge's strange prose, which Mr. Ernest Boyd ingeniously compares with Dr. Hyde's translations, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... said to have resolved itself into a protest against their presence. This hatred was the heritage of children from their parents, the bond between friends, the basis of social faith; it was a thread even in the tie between lovers; it was so intense and so pervasive ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... consolations with an unpropitiated grunt. His large face, with its broad cheeks and heavy double-chins, that was usually of a sanguine and all pervasive beefy-red, now hung in pallid purple folds, on which dark bristles, that were as stiff as those on the barrel of a musical box, told that the luxury of shaving had hitherto been withheld. There are some professions that tend more than others to grade the men that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... his way around the Doge's bungalow on the journey he had made so many times in the growing ardor of the love that had mastered his senses. The quiet of the garden seemed a part of the pervasive stillness that stretched away to the pass from the broad path of the palms under the blazonry of the sun. As he proceeded he heard the crunching of gravel under a heavy tread. The Doge was pacing back and forth in the cross path, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... romping optimism which frightens away both thought and passion. From The Wide, Wide World to Pollyanna, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... Moral Motive,' Philosophical Review, vol. i, 593; 'Self-realization as the Moral Ideal,' ibid; ii, 652; 'The Psychology of Effort,' ibid; vi, 43; 'The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality,' ibid; xi, 107,353; 'Evolution and Ethics,' Monist, vol. viii, 321; to mention only a few.] If such pervasive consequences be involved in humanism, it is clear that no pains which philosophers may take, first in defining it, and then in furthering, checking, or steering its ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... character has its own marked and distinctive peculiarities. It is tropical. It has passion deep and pervasive, slumbering within a rounded form and in deep dreamy eyes. It is ductile and plastic, ready to receive impressions and to be shapen by them. It does not posses the hard, aggressive features of the character of the tribes of Northern Europe; it does not seek ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman

... gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this higher form of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work the dignity and permanence of a classic; for it results in that exquisite something called Style, which, like the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere pervasive and nowhere emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with which it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense of indefinable completeness. On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of a sentence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought; but it is only ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... recoil; hence, the word is applied by extension to such feelings even when they have no such outward manifestation; as, one says, "I shudder at the thought." To quiver is to have slight and often spasmodic contractile motions, as the flesh under the surgeon's knife. Thrill is applied to a pervasive movement felt rather than seen; as, the nerves thrill with delight; quiver is similarly used, but suggests somewhat more of outward manifestation. To agitate in its literal use is nearly the same as to shake, tho we speak of the sea as agitated ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... poetry seems marred by the rude touch of the actual. Its delicious mountain scenes lose their woodland fragrance. Its motive, bluntly disclosed in the wager scene, seems coarse, unnatural, and offensive. Its plot, really simple, moves heavily and perplexes attention. It is a piece that lacks pervasive concentration and enthralling point. It might be defined as Othello with a difference—the difference being in favour of Othello. Jealousy is the pivot of both: but in Othello jealousy is treated with profound and searching truth, with terrible intensity of feeling, and with irresistible ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... the most lasting influence of his life—the influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and thought—is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... Savina. And then increasingly he got what he called a hold on himself. All that troubled him seemed to lift, to melt into a state where the hopeless was irradiated with tender memories. His mood changed to a pervasive melancholy in which he recalled the lost possibilities of his early ambitions, the ambitions that, without form or encouragement, had gone down before definite developments. When he spoke of these, tentatively, to Fanny, she always replied serenely that she ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... the side of each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the long sticks of bread tied with pink ribbon, the silver dishes and the sea-colored champagne glasses, with the flakes of gold congealed in their stems—all these details, together with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves, contributed to her exhilaration, which must be repressed, however, because she was grown up, and the world held no more for her to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... was believed, would cause a spear to enter his body;[1538] a hostile glance of the eye, indicating desire to inflict injury, might carry ill luck.[1539] In such cases the fundamental conceptions are the sympathy that comes from unity and the activity of the pervasive mana. These conceptions are visible in procedures in which action on a part of the human body, or on an image or picture of it, was supposed to reach the body itself. The possession of a piece of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... Truth" and "The Girl With Green Eyes" with Clara Bloodgood—to mention a few instances. Those who recall happy hours spent with Fitch at his country homes—either at "Quiet Corner," Greenwich, Connecticut, or at "The Other House," Katonah, New York, have vivid memory of his pervasive cordiality. His players, likewise, those whose identifying talent caught his fancy, had the same care and attention paid them in his playwriting. Sometimes, it may be, this graciousness of his made him cut his cloth to suit the figure. "Beau Brummell" ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch

... the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon's father had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon, heard them ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... swim to reach it! And out there, in the infinitudes, amid the silence and the loneness, with all the still music of the universe lulling him to sleep, should his being gently merge into the all-pervasive essence; there, in the large freedom of the airs, under the full spread of Heaven's stars, and in the soft embrace of the velvet waters, should he feel his blood beat to an end; there, in the heart of those mysterious spaces, were fitting place for ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... feature was the cordial friendliness that seemed all-pervasive. Troops of women we had never seen came to shake hands.... A bevy of bright girls stood below the platform on the last evening and, looking up, they said: "We are school-girls now, but we are bound to help." The ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive, imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex, innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent unmistakably grave and sincere; yet it spoke without emphasis: indirectly, flexibly, with fluid and unpredictable expression. ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman

... trumpet and drum," chest puffed out with self-importance, gold braid enough on the red-coated regalia to overawe the simple habitants. Though the companies holding monopoly over trade yearly change, monopoly is still all-powerful in New France,—so all pervasive that in 1741, in order to prevent smuggling to defraud the Company of the Indies, it is enacted that "people using chintz-covered furniture" must upholster their chairs so that the stamp "La Cie des Indes" will be visible to the inspector. The matter of money is a great trouble ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... the social and ceremonial life of the camp, for balls, dinners, receptions, conferences, concerts without number; and it has been the scene of a military wedding—the daughter of a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president. To these events the unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity new to our social life. In our army camps social life is truly democratic, as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told. Not alone have the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but there is a manifest will-to-democracy—the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... to tell it, and by theatrical gestures to illustrate its verities, became more and more indistinct. The soothsayers of the long past had been forbidden by Nature to doubt that which was the lore of the camp. Was it that Nature re-asserted her influence—that the essences of the scene, subtle and pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but a casual and deceptive glimpse ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... by mass, and we are forgetful of spirit. Mere size affrights us. We are dismayed by numbers. We forget the quiet, pervasive, all-powerful ministry of the Spirit of God. We are overwhelmed by the phenomena of tempest and earthquake and fire, and we forget that almightiness hides in the "still, small voice," in "the sound ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... major Caribbean transshipment point for cocaine en route to the US and Europe; substantial money-laundering activity; Colombian narcotics traffickers favor Haiti for illicit financial transactions; pervasive corruption ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... excellent sermon in the Harvard College Chapel one Sunday evening not many years ago, and asked me, as we walked away together, how I liked it. I replied: "Very much; it was all straight out of Channing." "That is strange," he said, "for I have never read Channing." It is great testimony to the pervasive quality of a prophet's teachings when they become within fifty years a component of the intellectual atmosphere of the new times. At a dinner of Harvard graduates I once complained that, although I heard in ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot

... "'Tis the most pervasive country that ever yet was seen. I acquired several pounds of your country coming up from Karachi. The air is heavy with it, and for miles and miles along that distressful eternity of rail there's no horizon to show where ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling



Words linked to "Pervasive" :   pervade, distributive, permeant



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com