"Vivify" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It has been common to all, from the Chaldean shepherds—"the lonely herdsman stretched on the soft grass through half a summer's day"—the solitary monk—to all whose impressions from without have had time to grow and vivify in the imagination, till they have been received as actual personifications, or supernatural visions, to doubt which ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Dante's poem is not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them with the breath ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... who desires to understand well that which I now saw (and let him retain the image like a firm rock, while I am speaking), fifteen stars which in different regions vivify the heaven with brightness so great that it overcomes all thickness of the air; let him imagine that Wain[2] for which the bosom of our heaven suffices both night and day, so that in the turning of its pole it disappears not; let him imagine ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... in a circle of these modern "Unsurprised ones." Their vacant self-possession would put down all the Grattans and Currans and Jeffreys and Sydney Smiths in the world. I defy the most brilliant, the readiest, the most genial of talkers to vivify the mass of inert dulness he will find now at every dinner and in ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... cried Yoomy, "it evermore causes it so to sparkle, vivify, and irradiate, that no son of man can repeat it without tingling himself. This very song of mine ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... invention prove to mankind a blessing or a curse?—like the fire which Prometheus stole from heaven to vivify his statue, may it not be followed by the evils ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... power with time to act, and material in abundance and of kinds to suit. Thus all things else may be in place in ample quantities and fail because the power is withheld and no action for want of brain fluids with its power to vivify all animated nature which have followed any fluid found in the body, and followed it from formation to use and exhaustion step by step until he knows what form a union with one or many kinds. Thus we can do ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... towns. The sun bathed the whole landscape in its full, warm light. The Seine wound like an endless serpent through the plain, flowed round the villages and along the slopes. Parent inhaled the warm breeze, which seemed to make his heart young again, to enliven his spirits, and to vivify his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... loftiest stars they touch'd. But with his darted bolt all-powerful Jove, Olympus shatter'd, and from Pelion's top Dash'd Ossa. There with huge unwieldy bulk Oppress'd, their dreadful corses lay, and soak'd Their parent earth with blood; their parent earth The warm blood vivify'd, and caus'd assume An human form,—a monumental type Of fierce progenitors. Heaven they despise, Violent, of slaughter greedy; and their race From ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... life so large an abode as this, and impart social warmth to such a wide world within doors. The sculptor confessed to himself, that Donatello could allege reason enough for growing melancholy, having only his own personality to vivify it all. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... power to present. Pick out from life some incident, character, temperament—whatever you will—and flash upon it the glare of the vaudeville spot-light; breathe into it the breath of life; show its every aspect and effect; dissect away the needless; vivify the series of actions you have chosen for your brief and trenchant crisis; lift it all with laughter or touch it all with tears. Like a searchlight your playlet must flash over the landscape of human hearts and rest upon some phase of passion, ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... in it the vital spirit is bred, which is the heat of life; and therefore the heart having two receptacles, viz., the right and the left the right hath more blood than spirits; which spirit is engendered to give life and vivify the body. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... of practical Christianity, sap daily, more and more, the walls in which blind Indolence would protect itself from restless Misery and rampant Hunger. For it is not till Art has told the unthinking that nothing (rightly treated) is too low for its breath to vivify and its wings to raise, that the Herd awaken from their chronic lethargy of contempt, and the Lawgiver is compelled to redress what the Poet has lifted into esteem. In thus enlarging the boundaries of the Novelist, from trite and conventional ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... prematurely, and a month later put forth their leaves to weep over them. By the time May has arrived, the last rude easterly gale, so prevalent here during the winter months, has swept by, and there is to be no more cold weather; tepid showers vivify the ground, an exuberant botany begins and continues to make daily claims both on your notice and on your memory; and so on till the swallows are gone, till the solitary tree aster has announced October, and till ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... left now but the final message from the Lord Himself; the invocation of that "grace" which means in fact no abstract somewhat but His living Self, present in His people's inmost being, to vivify and to bless. ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he cannot vivify he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not be blockaded with a dank, dripping mass of shrubbery set plumb against the windows, keeping out light and air. There shall be room all round it for breezes to sweep, and sunshine to sweeten and dry and vivify; and I would warn all good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees within a foot of each of their front-windows, that these trees will grow and increase till their front-rooms will be brooded over by a sombre, stifling shadow ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fore-fathers, but that, from existing unfinished beginnings, they try to represent, in pictures at least, the original design, so as thus to make us acquainted with the thought, which is ever the beginning and end of all undertakings; and that they strive with considerate zeal to clear up and vivify what seems to be a confused past. Here I especially applaud the brave Sulpiz Boisseree, who is indefatigably employed in a magnificent series of copper-plates to exhibit the cathedral of Cologne as the model of those vast conceptions, the spirit of which, like that of Babel, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... to the imagination in its essence rather than in a definite form, and then our image-building faculty gives it a clear and definite form which it presents before the mental vision, and which we then vivify by letting our thought dwell upon it, thus infusing our own personality into it, and so providing that personal element through which the specific action of the universal law relatively to the ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... learned from the Egyptians many technical rules in painting and in sculpture; they learned how to cut the marble and to blend the colours, but their own genius taught them how to animate the block and vivify the image. We have seen already, that before this event, art had attained to a certain eminence among the Greeks—fortunately, therefore, what they now acquired was not the foundation of their lore. Grafted on a Grecian stock, every ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sand. And I then exclaimed: "It is not these useless monuments that we ought to admire, but rather this magnificent river, which, in obedience to the laws of all-powerful wisdom, overflows every year, at a fixed period, its limits, and spreads itself, like a vast sea, to water and to vivify these immense plains, which are afterwards covered with rich harvests. If this immutable and beneficent order of Nature did not endure, all these fertile districts would be but a desert waste, where ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... familiar. The tears that have been dried, the fears that have been dissipated, by this old song; the love and thankfulness which have found in them their best expression, prove the worth of its simple words. It lives in most of our memories. Let us try to vivify it in our hearts, by pondering it for a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was a void, dark, shapeless, in which thought framed no image; mind, not a wish. Insensibility it was not, alas! no, that void was woe, all woe, which folded up heart and brain as with a cloak of fire, scorching up thought, memory, hope—all that could recall the past, vivify the present, or vision forth the future. She breathed indeed and spoke, and clung to that aged man with all the clinging helplessness of her sex, but scarce could she be said to live; all that was real of life ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... that Alice's marriage was quite a different thing from what hers was,—something to glorify all the petty, sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares. By multiplying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. The assiduous merchant, the laborious husbandman, the active mechanic, and the industrious manufacturer,—all ...
— The Federalist Papers
... evil spirit of envy came into my heart and threw a shadow upon my feelings. I was troubled because I had not their gifts. I wished to shine with a stronger light. To dazzle, as well as to warm and vivify. ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... apprehend the imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... perhaps. He went on—he went in—and there he saw Annie, leaning against the white wall, with her white face turned up to the frozen ceiling. She might have been the frost-queen, the spirit that made the snow, and built the hut, and dwelt in it; for all the powers that vivify nature must be children. The popular imagination seems to have caught this truth, for all the fairies and gnomes and goblins, yes, the great giants too, are only different sizes, shapes, and characters of children. But I have wandered ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... upon the astral plane after death. He would make it a rule to watch his emotions and control them, knowing that each time he indulged a gross one the vibration set up in his astral body would strengthen and vivify the grossest grade of matter in it, while pure and exalted emotions would strengthen the higher grades. Ultimately, the grossest grade, becoming atrophied for the lack of activity, would drop ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... seed I sowed in fragrant spring The summer's sun to vivify With his warm kisses, ripening To golden harvest by and by, Got caught by drought, like all the rest— There are no birds ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... on Cornwall, to have grown out of these notes, was advertised; but it was never written. Perhaps he found it hard to vivify or integrate his notes. In any case there could hardly have been any backbone to the book, and it would have been tourist's work, however good. He was not a man who wrote about everything; the impulse was lacking and he went on with the furious ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... any protoplasm or the substance of any organism should have been brought into existence in the first instance, life plainly must have been already existent. It must at one time have been possible for life, without being previously embodied, to mould and vivify inert matter; and it must needs have been by unembodied life that inorganic matter was first organised and animated. There is no possible alternative to this conclusion, except that of supposing that death may have given birth to life—that absolutely lifeless and inert ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... reconcile them. Oppositions are divinely appointed. I do believe that their distance can not be increased with safety to the economy of the world. But love is the tropical equator. His fiery currents are able to quicken and vivify the whole globe. They circulate equally at the arctic and antarctic extremities. The work that we are doing in common is not unfavorably affected by oppositions. The poles are God's anointed and stand firm; but opposition has quickened the currents of love until it has melted the social ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the All-Creating Spirit. Here are some specimens of the way in which we limit the creative working of the Spirit. We say, I am too old now to start this or that new sort of work. This is to deny the power of the Spirit to vivify our physical or mental faculties, which is illogical if we consider that it is the same Spirit that brought us into any existence at all. It is like saying that when a lamp is beginning to burn low the same person who first filled it with oil cannot replenish it and make it burn brightly ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward |
