"Inborn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from New York a few weeks previously, and was to accompany him, though the departure of this gentleman would cause no regrets in the household, for his true nature had been revealed during his stay amongst them. His bland and courteous manner was not inborn—it had but a surface character; and if "to know a man you must live in the house with him," then it took but a short time to become thoroughly acquainted with Mr. Plaisted. If he had not been so puffed ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... evasion, yes, if I had been certain that you possessed an immense fortune I should have acted differently. Why? I have searched for the reason; here it is. We have within us an inborn feeling, inordinately developed by social life, which drives us to the pursuit and to the possession of happiness. Most men confound happiness with the means that lead to it; money in their eyes is the chief element of happiness. I should, therefore, have endeavored to win you, prompted ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... child in Jericho. On the contrary, she would, if necessary, ask him to hold her baby for a moment, and the child would go to him unhesitatingly, so great was the mesmeric power he exercised over his fellow-creatures. This influence or power was inborn, and he could no more have helped it than he could have helped his heartbeats. But, added to this, was a constant effort on his part to make those with whom he came in contact happy, to sympathize with them in their griefs, to help them in their needs, to sacrifice his own feelings to ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... above his natural loves, and from that state of elevation of seeing them beneath him, and of judging of their quality, and also of amending, correcting, and removing them. No other animal can do this; for the loves of other animals are altogether united with their inborn knowledge; on which account this knowledge cannot be elevated into intelligence, and still less into wisdom; in consequence of which every other animal is led by the love implanted in his knowledge, as a blind ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... to the energizing life of Spirit, that this hard vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference to Reality, of transcending the world of succession and its values, can be cultivated by us; and this education of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times of recollection or of great emotion that this profound contact is fully present to consciousness. Yet, once fully achieved and its obligations ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Franklin. Fox thought that Oswald's presence in Paris indicated a desire on Shelburne's part to interfere with the negotiations with the French government; and indeed, the king, out of his hatred of Fox and his inborn love of intrigue, suggested to Shelburne that Oswald "might be a useful check on that part of the negotiation which was in other hands." But Shelburne paid no heed to this crooked advice, and there is nothing to show that he had the least desire to intrigue against Fox. If ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... thief, piously quoting—now it suits them—from those same commandments, that men "must not steal," in the same breath referring to the white man's crime (when it finds them out) as "getting into trouble over some shooting affair with blacks." Truly we British-born have reason to brag of our "inborn sense of justice." ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... leave your card at their doors. Others have assumed a significance somewhat ungen-like, though the relationship may be traced if you are not averse to trouble, Thus engine in its superficial aspects seems alien to the idea of born. But it is the child of ingenious (innate, inborn); ingenious is the inborn power to accomplish, and engine is the result of the application of that power. Whether you care to bother with such subtleties or not, enough gens are left to make the family one well ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher sensibility than the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Art; I mean if you are aiming at the right thing, and in some way or another understand what Art means, which you may well do without being able to express it, and if you are resolute to follow on the path which that inborn knowledge has shown to you; if it is otherwise with you than this, no system and no teachers will help you to produce real art of any kind, be it never so humble. Those of you who are real artists know well enough ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... up with an effort. "That way—to your left—you cannot miss the path. Addio, signorina," and he lifted his hat with the inborn grace of the peasantry ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... beautiful but worn by years of disappointment and the loss of that respect and admiration she once held for the man who had vowed at the altar to make her 'happy.' She had not wholly lost her love for him, but she was fast losing the best part of it, the love which has its daily source in an inborn respect. When respect is gone, love is not long in ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... me my cup of tea, laughing gaily. Her light flow of talk, and her lively familiarity of manner with a total stranger, were accompanied by an unaffected naturalness and an easy inborn confidence in herself and her position, which would have secured her the respect of the most audacious man breathing. While it was impossible to be formal and reserved in her company, it was more than impossible to take the faintest vestige of a liberty with her, even in thought. I felt ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... difficulty her displeasure against her friend. So this was Philip's famous temper, in which she had never quite believed! In truth, that sudden outburst of inexplicable rage on the part of the grave, quiet, young clergyman had appealed strongly to the love of brute force that is inborn in all women. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... should hardly have found courage to add another to the many studies of Hamlet had it not been for the hope of bringing out a characteristic of our great national poet that is rather unobtrusive than obscure. I mean a singular unworldliness of thought and feeling; a cherished idealism; an inborn magnanimity. Not the unworldliness of the study and the cloister, or the other-worldliness of such poets as Dante and Milton, but the unworldliness of a man of the world, the idealism that is closely allied with humour. And ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... tradition, as independence of thought was in their race a hereditary quality. To think that if he, Giovanni Saracinesca, chose to marry any woman whatsoever, any one, no matter how exalted in station, should dare to express approval or disapproval was a shock to every inborn and cultivated prejudice in his nature. He had nearly quarrelled with his own father for seeking to influence his matrimonial projects; it was not likely that he would suffer Cardinal Antonelli to interfere with them. If Giovanni had really made up his mind—had firmly determined ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings." And so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, oh, my masters, why not use this inborn passion for wandering abroad of which I write? Why not take that jaded band of youths out across yon fields, take them to the village church, and show them grinning gargoyle and curling finial, show them the deep-cut ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of the matter seems to be that consideration for others is not a primitive instinct like hunger or thirst; nor is it a simple, inborn quality or impulse, like affection or sympathy. It requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness, reflection and control of self, in order to transfer one's attention from one's own inclination and interest to the welfare of another, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... expression? Tell us, ye men of the nation, ay, ye wise law-makers and law-breakers of the nation, whether woman is not included in that great Declaration of Independence? And if she is, what right has man to deprive her of her natural and inalienable rights? It is natural, it is inherent, it is inborn, it is a thing of which no one can justly deprive her. Upon that just and eternal basis do we found our claims for our rights; political, civil, legal, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... him the instinctive clutch that may now and again—in an ungraceful, anyhow fashion—keep him from slipping down to perdition, and save his soul alive. There he shall find that whatever he has really learned by labour or grasped with inborn talent, will sooner or later come to the surface to his credit and for his good; but that what he swaggers will not even find fair play. There, in brief, he shall find his level—a great matter for most men. There, in fine, he will discover that there being a great ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... knowledge, or, more properly speaking, a rare instinct as to the most minute particularity of time and degree, which may aid in varying the efficacy of the acid on copper. It was not only practice, industry, and intelligence, but more especially this inborn, well-nigh infallible instinct which warned him of the exact instant at which the corrosion had proceeded far enough to give such and such a value to the shadows as, in the artist's intention, the engraving required. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... its mother; but, in order to do so, I must have made close and careful inquiry, which would, in all probability, have led to my own apprehension; and I clung to life, partly on my sister's account, and partly from that feeling of pride inborn in our hearts of desiring to come off untouched and victorious in the execution of our vengeance. Perhaps, too, the natural and instinctive love of life made me wish to avoid endangering my own. And then, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to be more than a reckless spender of other people's money and other people's lives. She was born to waste just as another is born to create. The way in which she was throwing herself at Larssen during his absence for a few weeks was typical of her inborn character, which ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... busily spreading his bed, while he assisted her with what she described to her husband afterward as "the most charming manner, just as if he enjoyed it." This charming manner, which was the outward expression of an inborn kindliness, won her entirely to his side before the bed-making was over. That any one so frank and pleasant, with such nice boyish eyes, and so rich a colour, should prove untrustworthy, was unbelievable to that part of her which ruled her judgment. And since this ruling part was ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... is no thing we cannot overcome; Say not thy evil instinct is inherited, Or that some trait inborn makes thy whole life forlorn, And calls down punishment ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... rush forward to save his friend, but he had an inborn instinct to stick to his camera—an instinct that probably every moving picture operator has, even though he does violence ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... tragi-comic attempts—these were the roots of his poetic tree—they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic—has that a merely evil root? No surely! It is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of "the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... youth was a born hunter. Every motion, every step expressed an inborn dignity and, at the same time, a depth of native caution. His moccasined foot fell like the velvet paw of a cat—noiselessly; his glittering black eyes scanned every object that appeared within their view. Not a bird, not even a chipmunk, escaped ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... not that with each fresh discovery we are so ready to fancy anew that now, at last, we know all about it. We have neither humility enough to be faithful, nor faith enough to be humble. Unfit to grasp any whole, yet with an inborn idea of wholeness which ought to be our safety in urging us ever on towards the Unity, we are constantly calling each new part the whole, saying we have found the idea, and casting ourselves on the couch of self-glorification. Thus the very need of unity is by our pride perverted to our ruin. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... consistent. It is adopted by statesmen and political philosophers; it is eagerly laid hold of by the multitude; those who govern and those who are governed agree to pursue it with equal ardor: it is the foremost notion of their minds, it seems inborn. It originates therefore in no caprice of the human intellect, but it is a necessary condition of the present ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... story, and the chief actor in the simple drama was George Edmonds. I mention this little event because it shows that the spirit of hostility to tyranny, and the scorn of oppression, cruelty, and persecution, which he manifested in his after life, were inborn, and a part of his nature. The same noble spirit which induced him, like the good Samaritan, to bind up the wounds, and to succour and defend the friendless soldier, gave his tongue the eloquence, and his soul the fire, to denounce, in the presence of assembled thousands, the malpractices of those ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... which places him above the rest of creation, and it is in the possession of this power that the possibility of his greatness, and also of his baseness, lies. Now, an instinct may be defined as an inborn and inherited system of means for the attainment of a definite end of such a nature that once the appropriate external stimulus is applied the system tends to work itself out in an automatic manner until ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... to the depredations of Oliver Leach, I will. But, so far as other matters go,—my walks in the Manor woods are ended! Yes, Nebbie!" and he gently patted the head of the faithful animal, who, with inborn sagacity instinctively guessing that his master was somewhat annoyed, was clambering with caressing forepaws against his knee. "Our rambles by the big elms and silvery birches and under the beautiful tall pines are over, Nebbie! and we shouldn't be human ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner, however aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by study. It is inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends Nature infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms. But although, being an Occidental, the true sense of the beauty of stones can be reached by you only through long familiarity with the Japanese use ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Clare's earliest efforts, exhibits a degree of refinement and elegant sensibility which many persons can hardly believe a poor uneducated clown could have possessed: the delicacy of one of the lover towards the object of his attachment is as perfectly inborn and unaffected as if he were a ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... native rights fare no better. Paul could appeal from Jewish tyrants to Caesar in accordance with his rights as a Roman citizen; but his Roman citizenship had nothing to do with any inborn rights as a man. Paul could appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen. For what? For protection, for the enjoyment of certain legal privileges which the Empire had conferred upon Roman citizenship, not for any ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... undefined ambitions of his own. He did not want the Police to know far enough ahead to nip the whole affair in the bud. Blue Pete loved a scrap; he had also certain definite debts to pay to Koppy, and the thought of a lot of bohunks within range of a licensed rifle made him smile happily. An inborn decency craved to teach these brutes decency in the only way ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... is inborn with you, for your lineage is such that no title, whether of queen or empress, could be an increase of nobility; yet your beauty, grace, and virtue are well deserving of pleasure, and she who robs you of what is yours does a greater wrong ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Concord was uneventful. As he was by nature averse to contests, he never took an extreme part in the antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such action. His gentleness and tenderness were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... was settled quietly down to my old life, clerking in my father's store. You would naturally suppose that my travels would have given me some confidence, and that I had worn out, as it were, the bashfulness of youth; but in my case this was an inborn quality which I could no more get rid of, than I could of my liver ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... can sow genius; no soil can grow it: its quality is inborn and defies both cultivation and extermination. To be surpassed is never pleasant; to feel your inferiority is to feel a pang. Seldom is there a person great enough to find satisfaction in the success of a friend. The pleasure that excellence gives is oft tainted by resentment; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... grown hopeless of saving him, he had met this fine, sensible Gabriella, who looked so strong, so competent, and there had come an end to the disturbing stories which reached her at intervals. Surely it was proof of her son's inborn fineness that from the pink perfection of girlhood he should have chosen the capable Gabriella! At first she had regretted his choice, hoping, as the worldly and the unworldly alike hope for their sons, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... magic and blood and bones had gone to build. For three years we tricked ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived) ... but we liked the ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of sentimentality), we liked the theory of inexhaustible numbers, we liked the picture of their pounding, steam-roller like, to Berlin... we tricked ourselves, and in the space of a night our trick ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... with an inborn fire, His brow with scorn be rung; He never should bow down to a domineering frown, Or the tang of a tyrant tongue. His foot should stamp and his throat should growl, His hair should twirl and his face should scowl: His eyes should ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... there is a certain inborn honorableness. You mustn't ascribe to religion what results from innate goodness of character, by which compassion for the man who would suffer by his crime keeps a man from committing it. This is the genuine moral motive, and as such it is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Peter's heart lurked an inborn conviction that his father's son was a very much more important personage than any Hewel, or relative ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... hardships, fitted. And then I thought of my host's weak health, continual pain (the signs of which were hardly repressed even while he was speaking), and probably also his secluded life. Was it fair to force him, by virtue of his inborn kindness and courtesy, to come out of his privileges and deal with me, who could not altogether be in any place a mere nobody? And so I refused ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the race of godlike men is to die out, or indeed if the result is not to be some nobler and better sort of man than the one with whom we have all along been familiar. Is not the yearning for divine men inborn? In the heroic ages such men were worshiped as gods, and one of the calamities of times of degeneracy is the dying out of faith in the worth of true manhood caused by the disappearance of superior men. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... influence may be detected in some of the greatest Christian poetry of our own country, especially in that of Wordsworth and Tennyson. For Plato believes, in common with the greatest of every age, in 'that inborn passion for perfection,' that innate though often unconscious yearning after the true, the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... before, his inborn pugnacity would only have amused itself with the situation. He was a rebel and a litigant by nature. Smooth ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inborn common sense, which only needed development. With that and the beauty which Heaven had given ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... purely passive when he receives (in accipiendo). But if that divinely bestowed willing or spark of faith kindled by the Spirit is considered, then this imparted willing and this spark is not purely passive. But the Adamic will does not only not operate or cooperate, but, according to the inborn malice of the heart, even operates contrarily (verum etiam pro nativa malitia cordis sui contra operatur)." (Planck 4, 697.) Thus Flacius clearly distinguished between cooperation before conversion (which he rejected absolutely) and cooperation after conversion ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... That the inborn sense of humour of the Dutch South African race should have been stunted in its growth, if not completely crushed, by the horrors of the war, would be small cause for surprise to most people who have ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... judgment, doubtful as to whether he was right or wrong, he had gone on with the work as though the machinery was to be recovered, yet all the time he was filled with sickening doubts. But it seemed as though his inborn tenacity of purpose, his mulish obstinacy, would not let him quit, driving him on to finish the flume and trestle 40 feet high with every green log and timber snaked in and put in place by hand; to finish the pressure box and penstock and the 200 feet of pipe-line riveted on the broiling ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... began long enough ago to have his early poetry refused by Poe, because it was too good to be the work of an obscure stripling, and to have had Hawthorne for his sponsor and friend. His youth showed again how much more inborn tendency has to do with one's life than any external forces—such as guardianship, means, and what we call education. The thrush takes to the bough, wheresoever hatched and fledged. Many waters cannot quench genius, neither can the floods drown it. The ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms. The existence of the Supreme Being might be, (probably was) so he feared, but "a fond thing vainly imagined". Yet such is the constitution of the human mind that ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... that we are devoting our best ability to the removal of oppression and injustice among men, to the complete emancipation of the enslaved, to the promotion of genuine temperance, and to the elevation of the toiling and down-trodden masses to the inborn rights of humanity. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... her I could not reckon on the same good-will as I could with her husband (Emperor Frederick). Her natural and inborn sympathy for her native country showed itself from the very beginning in the endeavour to shift the weight of Prussian-German influence on the European grouping of the Powers into the scale of England, which she never ceased to regard ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... neighbours know of this pride; and if they can but lay a finger on his evident defects they will glut their inborn hatred of the Church by hitting the Catholics on the sensitive nerve, by galling them by caricature and derision of the gauche manners of ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... about mixed up with canned goods and groceries—a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use, such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc. With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind to take a top-hat for his present, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... ever worrying about how to properly provide for their family, had—as nowadays so many other parents do—entirely overlooked the fact that growing boys should be permitted to travel, even if only upon an excursion, to curb within them the inborn and almost irresistible desire to roam, which all have inherited from ancestors, who attired in wooden shoes and coarse apparel, and carrying gunny sacks, had landed not so many years ago at Castle Garden, after having crossed the stormy Atlantic in the steerage of a sailing vessel, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... greatly. She purposed to yet become as unaffected and un-self-conscious as Patty, and, though she knew she could never acquire Patty's inborn gaiety of spirit, she resolved to come as near to it as she could with her naturally ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... sedentary habit, curiously enough, came up a second growth of old-world, mediaeval notions—a sort of aristocratic aftermath. It was natural, no doubt. His inborn feudal ideas had not been killed by ingratitude, exile, or his rough-and-ready existence on the edge of the wilderness, but only chilled to dormancy; they warmed now into life under the genial radiance of a civilized ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... these "little delicacies" which constitute the difference between politeness and etiquette. Politeness is that inborn regard for others which may dwell in the heart of the most ignorant boor, but etiquette is a code of outward laws which must be learned by the resident in good society, either from observation or the instruction ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... sympathy with one's author brings its own set of errors: the critic is so happy to explain everything, to show how this was the product of the age, how that was the product of environment, and how the other was the inevitable result of inborn qualities and tastes—that he sometimes forgets to mention whether the work in question has any value. It is then that one cannot help regretting the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... was a man who had traveled a great deal, and picked up western notions of hospitality to add to the inborn eastern sense of sacredness in the relation between host and guest. It seems that an hour or two later he came to take me down to a Gargantuan meal, but, feeling the chair against the door, and hearing snores, he decided it was better manners ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... women, and believed them entitled to all other rights, except the right to vote. He thought women were entitled to a hearing in the convention, and would aid them all he could to secure the privilege. Mr. Waite, with great kindness of nature, possesses an inborn conservatism which curbs his more generous impulses. He adhered to this position in his decision in the case of Minor vs. Happersett, declaring that "the constitution of the United States has no voters." Many of the most sanguine friends ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... There is an inborn love of the antique in most men, although some are fond of asserting that their interests are bound up in the modern, and that they have no time to devote to the study of the antiquities of past ages or the things that were fashionable in times long past. Yet most people, when their secret longings ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... and plants has the obvious merit that it prolongs the inborn curiosity of youth, that its subject-matter is universally at hand, accessible in holidays and in the absence of teachers or laboratories, and best of all that through biological study the significance of science appears immediately, disclosing the true story of man's relation to the world. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... peasants," I repeat, "they represent some of the greatest figures in the world's history with as simple a dignity and as grand a bearing as could ever have been expected from the originals themselves. There must be a natural inborn nobility in the character of these highlanders. They could never assume or act that manner au grand seigneur with which they ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... natural impulse crystal-clear: To service or command, to low and high Equal at once in magnanimity, The Great by right divine thou only art! Fair star, that crowns the front of England's morn, Royal with Nature's royalty inborn, And English to the very heart ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... on a clean calico, and she bore herself imperturbably. Nanny and Sammy kept close at her heels. Their eyes were large, and Nanny was full of nervous tremors. Still there was to them more pleasant excitement than anything else. An inborn confidence in their mother over ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... stability of purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... into which each one is born is his social heredity. "The heredity with which civilization is most supremely concerned," says Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, "is not that which is inborn in the individual. It is the SOCIAL inheritance which constitutes the dominant factor in human progress."[1] It is this social inheritance which shapes our characters, rough-hewn by nature. It is by the light of each person's social inheritance ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Californian works out his own inborn character. If he is greedy, malicious, intemperate, by nature, his bad qualities rise to the second degree in California, and sometimes to the third. The whole responsibility rests on himself. Society has no part of it, and he does not pretend to be what he ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... times since then, in Dublin, in London, in Galway, in Galway Workhouse, in Cornamona, Ballaghaderreen, Ballymoe, and other places. It has always given great delight, and its success is very natural; for the Irish-speakers, who are its audience, have an inborn love of drama, as is shown by their handing down of such long dramatic dialogues as those between Oisin and St. Patrick, from century to century. At country gatherings, those old dialogues, and the newer ones between Death and Raftery, or between the ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... most sympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so completely—even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them—that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... an orator born, and has developed this inborn power by the hardest of study and thought and practice. He is one of those rare men who always seize and hold the attention. When he speaks, men listen. It is quality, temperament, control—the word is immaterial, but the ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... book. It is not an arraignment of vocal teachers, although there are occasional hints, public and private, which lead me to believe that we are not altogether without sin. But if this be true we take refuge in the belief that our iniquity is not inborn, but rather is it the result of the educational methods of those immediately preceding us. This at ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... impatience for results, all foster intellectual insincerity; just as, in conduct, the wish to please, the spirit of accommodation and expediency, the fear of blame, the instinct of concealment, which is inborn in many girls, destroy frankness of character and make people untrue who would not willingly be untruthful. Yet even truthfulness is not such a matter of course as many would be willing to assume. To be inaccurate through thoughtless laziness in the use of words is extremely common, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... have unwittingly formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his bent for dominance made some action, one way or the other, necessary. The Parson sank more and more into the background, but there came over the rim of his world a new figure ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the dramatists of the period any person could be selected who in disposition was the opposite of Marston, it would be Thomas Dekkar,—a man whose inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him through vexations and miseries which would have crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He was probably born about the year 1575; commenced his career as player and playwright before 1598; and for forty years was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... from his headquarters at Rheims, exercised unlimited power over all the district. He, too, prided himself on having lived at Paris, and seized every occasion ostentatiously to show he was not ignorant of its pleasures and refinements; concealing beneath this film of varnish his inborn rusticity, he assumed as well as he was able the polish of one accustomed to good society. His tall, portly form was always tightly buttoned in a close-fitting uniform, and he lied outrageously about his age, never being able to bring himself to own up to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... his redeemers, higher than the stars, vast as the Immensities, ancient as the Eternities themselves, and in this incarnation man may see God. What is it? It is the moral law, the eternal sanction crowning the right, inborn in rational man, the very soul of reason within him, inborn in things—the law which no man ever invented, which never had beginning, which can know no end, because it is the Divine order revealed to earth. It is the necessary nature ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... he felt to be real; but his was one of those natures that burst into what is generally called recklessness and impiety the moment they feel that anything is being poured upon them for their good which does not come home to their inborn sense of right, or which appeals to anything like self-interest in them. Daring and honest by nature, and outspoken to an extent which alarmed all respectabilities, with a constant fund of animal health and spirits which he did not feel bound to curb in any way, he had gained ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... people say that they intend to take children travelling for their amusement and instruction. In our case we were put in the carriage because my mother would not leave us behind, and wanted to give our grandparents pleasure by our presence. She was right, but in spite of my inborn love of travel the month we spent on the journey seemed a period of very uncomfortable restlessness. A child realizes only a single detail of beauty—a flower, a radiant star, a human face. Any individual ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... colouring wears the sober hue of hard work and exacting calls of duty, things which in themselves are not much charged with a feeling of romance. If these things appeal strongly to me even in retrospect it is, I suppose, because the romantic feeling of reality was in me an inborn faculty, that in itself may be a curse but when disciplined by a sense of personal responsibility and a recognition of the hard facts of existence shared with the rest of mankind becomes but a point of view from which the very ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... inspiration. I would save the blanket-cover by drawing these brigands' attention to myself. At the same time I would satisfy my inborn taste for the ridiculous. "Have you a pencil?" I said. "Because I am an artist in my own country, and ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... getting round difficulties when you couldn't cut through them. Just as a river which cannot flow over a rock can glide about its feet and turn it into a picturesque promontory, so I recognised in myself an inborn human faculty for "sidestepping" that which blocked my way, when I couldn't ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... imperatively clamoured-for mysterious something, is neither conformity to an abstract idea, nor conformity to actual reality, nor conformity to the typical, nor conformity to the individual; it is, I take it, simply conformity to man's requirements, to man's inborn and peremptory demand for greater harmony, for more perfect co-ordination ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... could sell it, all right," said Harris. "Maybe not for that much cash, but we can get cash on the agreement, if we need it." He, too, found the inborn gaming instinct which cries out for money without labour welling within him and surging up against his long-established, sober judgment. But he was not a man to act precipitately, or risk all on a single throw unless he were very, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... provincial politics and the arts of declamation and debate, all of those intellectual energies which the Northerner applies to business, art, commerce, literature, and other solidly useful occupations. If the Southerner has an inborn superior talent for politics, why is it that, as in the case of British or French statesmen, he never develops the slightest talent for literature? So notoriously is this the case, that even the first writers of the South, especially for the press, are generally ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on, your Honor?"—Master Pothier shook his head to express disapproval, and smiled to express his inborn sympathy with feasting and good-fellowship—"that, your Honor, is the heel of the hunt, the hanging up of the antlers of the stag by the gay chasseurs who are visiting ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Romanus had an inborn aversion to Kings and diadems, and could not patiently bear their neighborhood, so the genuine American Democrat, one by principles and not by a party name or by a party organization, such a Democrat feels it to be death for ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... various scenes of London life which he knew so well. These were published as fast as they were written, over the pen name of "Boz." He was paid almost nothing for them, but he persevered, prompted by his inborn love of writing and the fun he had in describing curious types ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... any being uncontaminated already? Were not all vile, even as she was vile? My brain reeled. Surely to the eyes of any beholder, she was the incarnation of purity! That which animated me was not a personal sense of grievance so much as the inborn, natural desire one feels to exterminate a pest, to crush a reptile, the more dangerous that it crawls through flowers to kill. As I have said, I felt power for strategy, unknown to my nature before, rising in me. Certain ideas were suggested to me, on ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... education in England dates from 1870. But during the subsequent half century "education" has come to mean much more than mere instruction; it now covers a certain amount of provision for meals when necessary, the enforcement of cleanliness, the care of defective conditions, inborn or acquired, with special treatment for mentally defective children, an ever-increasing amount of medical inspection and supervision, while it is beginning to include arrangements for placing the child in work suited to his capacities ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... field or flood, Mighty alike to sing. Not mine such themes, Agrippa; no, nor mine To chant the wrath that fill'd Pelides' breast, Nor dark Ulysses' wanderings o'er the brine, Nor Pelops' house unblest. Vast were the task, I feeble; inborn shame, And she, who makes the peaceful lyre submit, Forbid me to impair great Caesar's fame And yours by my weak wit. But who may fitly sing of Mars array'd In adamant mail, or Merion, black with dust Of Troy, or Tydeus' son by Pallas' aid Strong against gods to thrust? Feasts are my theme, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... about man's evolution is the inborn upward impulse in some one low organism that rested not till it reached its goal in him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went out from the mollusk that begat the fish. The fish remains, but some impulse went out from the fish that begat the amphibian. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and fundamental difference in their whole nature. The belief that the two sexes would become like each other in character if given the same environment is, therefore, erroneous. That these differences are original, or inborn, and not acquired, may be readily seen by observing children of different sex. Even from their earliest years boys are more active, restless, energetic, destructive, untidy, and disobedient, while little girls are quieter, less restless, less ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Sumter did a wild work. Its voice of insult and of sacrilege roused the fire of a blood too brave to know its courage, too proud to boast its source. All the heroism inherited from an honored ancestry, all the inborn wrath of justice against iniquity, all that was true to truth sprang up instinctively to wrest our Holy Land from the clutch of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... "simple ideas" are obtained from without, and that these are the only material upon which reflection can be exercised. Thus the human mind has no criterion of truth within itself, no elements of knowledge which are connatural and inborn.] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven—no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer must ITSELF brim with a "purple light," intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... the whole tone of his mind, Chaucer could not but sympathise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination—though, as a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for endless blame and satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's academical ally had recognised the most formidable obstacles to the spread ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... almost black, for the pupils dilated when she was moved; her lips were the least thing parted, and the expression of those lips and eyes was of a rather touching gentleness, of a rather touching expectancy. And yet all this was not the "something"; that was rather the outward sign of an inborn sense that she had no need to ask for things, of an instinctive faith that she already had them. By that "something," and by her long, transparent hands, men could tell that she had been a Totteridge. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... older I acquired the faculty to curb the instinctive feeling of fear which is inborn in all creatures and undoubtedly is a wise provision of nature, necessary to the continuance of life and conducive to self-preservation. Knowing that all men who ever lived and all who now live must surely die, I failed to see anything particularly fearful in death. I may truthfully ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... never yet got an editor who cares to print any of them. The one I had in my mind when Godfrey left me was, however, likely to be particularly good. It was to be the autobiography of a murderer; not an ordinary murderer who slays through desire of gain or in obedience to an inborn criminal instinct. My murderer was to be a highly respectable, God-fearing man, a useful citizen, a good father, a man of blameless life and almost blameless thoughts, generous, high-principled, beloved. He was to slay his ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... that, so far as they exist, they show The absence of all mind; no impulses Save those of selfish passion moving it! And that, by nature desperately wicked,[1] The child learns good through evil; having no Innate ideas, no inborn will, no bias. Here, in this infant, is our confutation! O self-sufficing physiologist, Who, grubbing in the earth, hast missed the stars, We ask no other answer to thy creed Than this, the answer heaven and ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... back to the tent. His chicken was gone. He laid this loss on Peter, saying, "He always did bring me bad luck." Penhallow was still asleep. Ought he to tell him of Peter Lamb. He decided not to do so, or at least to wait. Inborn kindliness acted as it had done before, and conscious of his own helplessness, he was at a loss. Near to dusk he lighted a pipe and sat down outside of Penhallow's hut. Servants of engineer officers spoke ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Augustus Cracklethorpe, M.A., might possibly have been of service to his Church in, say, some East-end parish of unsavoury reputation, some mission station far advanced amid the hordes of heathendom. There his inborn instinct of antagonism to everybody and everything surrounding him, his unconquerable disregard for other people's views and feelings, his inspired conviction that everybody but himself was bound to be always wrong about ...
— The Cost of Kindness - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... comment of John Locke on "Paradise Lost," except to reveal the mental composition of John Locke? The critic should be what Locke was, a thinker, but to be a judge of the highest form of literature, poetry, he must moreover carry within him, inborn, some share of that whereby poetry is fledged, "creative imagination." He may "want the accomplishment of verse," or the constructive faculty, but more than the common allowance of sensibility to the beautiful he must have. But do not the presence of "vivacity of feeling ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... as little wish to reform, and just as much wish to abuse society as society has to be reformed and abused. He was a dark, bright-eyed young artist with a silky moustache. He had lived much in Paris, where he studied impressionism and perfected his natural talent for causerie and his inborn preference for the hedonistic view of life. Fortunately he had plenty of money, for he was a cousin of Raphael Leon on the mother's side, and the remotest twigs of the Leon genealogical tree bear apples of gold. His real name was ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and when an advantage is to be won, then I have a will, and it has grown firmer with years. I may tremble, I may fear; but I still do that which I consider the most proper to be done. I am not ashamed to confess my weakness; I hold that when out of our own true conviction we run counter to our inborn fear, we have done our duty. I had a strong desire to become acquainted with the interior of the country, and to traverse the Danube in its greatest expansion. I battled with myself; my imagination pointed ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... warmed the water, watching her, the thought was strong in his mind: what a woman her mother must have been! Each day he was with Leslie, he saw her do things that no amount of culture could instil. Instinct and tact are inborn; careful rearing may produce a good imitation, they are genuine only with blood. Leslie had always filled his ideal of a true woman. To ignore him for his gift would have piqued many a man; Douglas Bruce ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... irritation of which he was ashamed. He knew, despite his own undeniably handsome personality, which was set off to such advantage that night by the richness of the Florentine costume he had adopted, that there was a certain fascination about Gervase which was inborn, a trick of manner which made him seem picturesque at all times; and that even when the great French artist had stayed with him in Scotland and got himself up for the occasion in more or less baggy tweeds, people were fond of remarking that the only man ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... been one's own chattel; as if a Non-Austrian Kaiser mere impossible, and the Reich and its laws had, even Officially, become phantasmal! That, in fact, was Maria Theresa's inarticulate inborn notion; and gradually, as her successes on the field rose higher, it became ever more articulate: till this of "the SEYN-SOLLENDE Kaiser" put a crown on it. Justifiable, if the Reich with its Laws were a chattel, or rebellious ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the more distant hamlets, and bring it to the stations contemplated. This is the system pursued so successfully in Angola. If England had possessed that strip of land, by civilly declining to enrich her "frontier colonists" by "Caffre wars", the inborn energy of English colonists would have developed its resources, and the exports would not have been 100,000 Pounds as now, but one million at least. The establishment of the necessary agency must be a work of time, and greater difficulty will be experienced on the eastern than on the western ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... incomes, while at the base there is a large number with relatively small incomes. This inequality is explained by Professor Taussig on two grounds: First, it is likely that some individuals originally secured an economic advantage over their fellows because of inborn superiority of some kind. Second, the economic advantage thus secured has been maintained from generation to generation by inheritance. Where, for example, wealth is invested so that the principal remains intact while ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... E'en in untutored brutes, the female sex Is marked by inborn subtlety—much more In beings gifted with intelligence. The wily Koeil, ere towards the sky She wings her sportive flight, commits her eggs To other nests, and artfully consigns The rearing of her little ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... that lovers as young as the king and herself could never struggle successfully against the queen-mother. As the daughter of Jean Touchet, Sieur de Beauvais and Quillard, she was born between the burgher class and the lower nobility; she had none of the inborn ambitions of the Pisseleus and Saint-Valliers, girls of rank, who battled for their families with the hidden weapons of love. Marie Touchet, without family or friends, spared Catherine de' Medici all antagonism ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the gold and jewellery I could anywhere lay my hands on. Like the most experienced goldsmith I could distinguish by instinct false jewellery from real. The latter alone proved an attraction to me; objects made of imitated gold as well as gold coins I heeded not in the least. My inborn propensity had, however, to give way to the excessively cruel thrashings which I received ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... unaccountable to those unacquainted with his original disposition. He pronounced the most severe sentences upon Offenders, which, the moment after, Compassion induced him to mitigate: He undertook the most daring enterprizes, which the fear of their consequences soon obliged him to abandon: His inborn genius darted a brilliant light upon subjects the most obscure; and almost instantaneously his Superstition replunged them in darkness more profound than that from which they had just been rescued. His Brother ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... of us be if, in a simple straightforward manner, we frankly said and did the best that we knew, without fear or favor? Soon would be found gifts that none had dreamed of, powers that none had imagined, and heroism that was thought impossible. As Emerson well says, "He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles, just ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... gift—something to make good to them the want of language and mental concepts, and insure unity of action in the tribe. Their seasonal migrations from one part of the country to another are no doubt the promptings of an inborn instinct called into action in all by the recurrence of the same outward conditions; but the movements of the flock or the school seem to imply a common impulse that is awakened on the instant in each member of the flock. The animals have no systems or methods in the sense that ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... offered as a contribution to the art of justly appraising the eugenic values of different qualities. It may fairly be assumed that the presence of certain inborn traits is requisite before a claim to eugenic rank can be justified, because these qualities are needed to bring out the full values of such special faculties as broadly distinguish philosophers, artists, financiers, soldiers, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of active development or retrogression. Suffice to say, I was terribly cut up over the way my first serious affair of the heart turned out, and tried my best to hate myself for letting it worry me. Somehow I was able to attribute the fiasco to an inborn sense of shyness that has always made me faint-hearted, dilatory and unaggressive. No doubt if I had gone about it roughshod and fiery I could have played hob with the excellent jeweller's peace of mind, ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... ideal is a matter of higher realization. We have the lower instincts in common with the animals but we have also something higher. There is inborn in us a conception that man transcends ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... whose good looks did not appeal to her. So the spark of his new aspirations was trampled out beneath her merciless heel, and there remained only the acquired savagery and superstition mixed with the inborn ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... Police under men like Aulain, can, and do, good service. The blacks in this part of the colony are bad enough, but on Cape York Peninsula, they are worse—daring and ferocious cannibals. The instinct to slay all strangers is inborn with them. Some of the tribes on the Batavia River district I ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... human workers seemed mere automatic appendages, she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too, that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... always convents of my order to afford me shelter. But your being abandoned mattered; and I felt that if I went, abandoned you would be to the influences that drove and moulded you without consideration for your nature and your inborn inclinations. Therefore I remained, and left Falcone's cause unchampioned. Later I was to learn that he had found a friend, and that he was... that he was ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... accidental or shadowy merit may be proud: but inborn worth must be always as much above conceit ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... The inborn wisdom which Providence gives animals for their good is clearly shown by something very like forethought about food supplies, an instinct which tells creatures to lay by 'for a rainy day.' It is less strongly marked among the winged races, because they prefer ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers"; and in matters medical the ordinary citizen of to-day has not one whit more sense than the Romans of old, whom the witty Greek writer Lucian scourged for a credulity which made them fall easy victims to the quacks of the second century. Man has an inborn craving for medicine. Heroic dosing for several generations has given his tissues a thirst for drugs; and now that the pharmacists have cloaked even the most nauseous remedies, the temptation is to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... service to the community. If all our educational expenditure did nothing but pick one man of scientific or inventive genius, each year, from amidst the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and give him the chance of making the best of his inborn faculties, it would be a very good investment. If there is one such child among the hundreds of thousands of our annual increase, it would be worth any money to drag him either from the slough of misery, or from the hotbed of wealth, and teach ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... money yet?" A sneer which vastly amused his chums, for Ikey's inborn love for the root of ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... was much to be done before the actual outbreak of hostilities. England's history is the story of her struggles for nationality, for religious, civil, and political liberty, and for mercantile ascendancy. Her inborn longings for the highest civilization were not inconsistent with her grim determination to resist a system that stood on the Continent for progress, but which she had come to believe meant national ruin for her. Prussia, with a new vigor born ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... even though overwhelmed by misfortune, loses never his inborn greatness of soul. Camphor-wood burnt in the fire ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... way. He talked severely to Abdiel as they went; but though the dog could understand much, I doubt if he understood that lecture. For Abdiel was one of the few, even among dogs, with whom the defence of master or friend is an inborn, instinctive duty; and strong temptation even has but a poor chance against the sense of duty in ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... some boards, shingles and nails and builds a hut. Just as soon as he gets a knife, do you have to show him how to use it? He instinctively begins to make a boat or an arrow or perhaps something he has never seen. Why? Because in his soul is a natural desire to produce and an inborn joy in production. But what happens to most of these ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... trinkets, decorates herself with wild flowers, and is permitted to do no manner of drudgery. Some of these gypsy maidens are really quite beautiful in spite of their very dark complexions. Their eyes glisten with inborn avarice as I sweep past on my "silver" bicycle, and in their astonishment at my strange appearance and my evidently enormous wealth they almost forget their plaintive wail of "kreuzer! kreuzer!" a cry which readily bespeaks their origin, and is easily recognized as an echo from the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... utmost the rascals could accomplish was to annoy and torment the object of their attack. It was quite another matter when the young ones began to arrive. Among this small game the enterprising hunters could easily satisfy their inborn craving for murder, for the scoundrels only killed for the sake of killing; they were not at all hungry, as they had as much food as they liked. Of course, we did all we could to put a stop to this state of things, and so long as there were several ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... the real Day of Judgment. And each is his own judge. Now all his and her past life and inborn nature is being put to the test in a fierce ordeal—and the fiery ordeal of love is more searching even than the ordeal of war. Every smallest blot and blemish, every slightest impurity is shown up ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Washington was thin and tall (above six feet high), in countenance grave, unimpassioned, and benign. An inborn worth, an unaffected dignity, beamed forth in every look as in every word and deed. His first appearance and address might not convey the idea of superior talents; such at least was the remark of his accomplished ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... an exuberantly leaved maple, she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family "the grounds" (Mrs. Emery's name) and "the yard." Lydia always clung to her father's name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer shades of her mother's vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... brain-power of either would surely be greater if the eclaircissement were left to haphazard, than if she were controlling it with a previous knowledge of all the facts. Perhaps Gwen was not aware how much her inborn temperament had to do with her conclusions. Had she been a soldier, she would have volunteered to go on every forlorn hope, on principle. No doubt an "hysterical" temperament, as it is so common among women! But it is a form of hysteria ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is not confined to pussies. We are all inclined to adopt a similar standard of merit in our estimate of other people. A good man is a man who is good to us, and a bad man is a man who doesn't do what we want him to. The truth is, we each of us have an inborn conviction that the whole world, with everybody and everything in it, was created as a sort of necessary appendage to ourselves. Our fellow men and women were made to admire us and to minister to our various requirements. You and I, dear reader, are each the center of the universe in our respective ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte. This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... conceded to the most abject in other countries, that of selecting their own wives. The imperative spirit of despotism would not allow them to be happy or miserable in any way but that established by law. The power of free agency—the inestimable and inborn right of every human being—was annihilated ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... glanced about him; a tall man of trim lines and distinctness and a quick, decided step and bearing. In the shuffle of descending passengers he was outstanding, with a certain inborn grace that without the blood will never come from training. Men noticed and women out of instinct cast curious furtive glances and then turned away; which was natural, inasmuch as the man was plainly old. But for all that many ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... group of secret anarchists and born marauders hoped to bring about general disorder during the strike and to have an occasion either to derive some personal profit or to destroy the whole plant. Though Victor did not belong to them and by his inborn middle-class honesty was separated from those wild rebels, still there was a bridge leading from the shores of youthful discontent and ignorance to the camp of those law-breakers, and there was always intercourse through the medium of deserters ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... clear, on which, supposing a well-organized and healthy body, most will depend—upon the native endowment, or upon the labor of developing and applying the inborn power. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... CHARTERIS appeared a man with an inborn sense of the supreme interest and the overwhelming emotional and spiritual relevancy of human life as it is actually and obscurely lived; a man with unmistakable creative impulses and potentialities; a man who, had he lived in a more mature and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... But for an inborn conviction that a frugal race like the French would not invest in a plethora of mourning garb only to cast it aside after a few months' wear, and that therefore the period of wearing the willow must be greatly protracted, we would have been haunted by the idea that the adult male mortality ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... shy of women, although he had a very tender heart, and was captivated by beauty.... He even acquired the luxury of an English keepsake, and (Oh, for shame!) admired the portraits of divers, bewitching Gulnares and Medoras which "adorned" it.... But his inborn modesty constantly restrained him. At home he occupied his late father's study, which had also been his bedroom; and his bed was the same on which his father ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of the Telegraph alien and distasteful. There all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly made fun of the Telegraph, of its editors and owners; they had no belief in its cause; and its pretensions to respectability, its parade of virtue, excited only their derision. And slowly ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the disconsolate appearance of a gallows body, in one of those rapid flashes of spontaneous veri-similitude which spring of an inborn horror painting itself on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nobler instincts are disregarded; but its validity cannot be questioned. Whether those who practice "birth control" are influenced by economic, selfishly personal or other reasons, they are offending in a threefold manner: against the inborn wish and desire which is a priceless possession of even the least of God's creatures, that of living anew in its offspring; against the law of the state, which after all, stands for the crystallization of the best feeling of the community; ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... The branch of the Aryans which settled in it may have brought scanty acquirements with them, but they brought great capacities. The Greeks had an unrivalled talent for doing what they saw others do, in a much better way, and so making it their own. They had an inborn disposition to what is reasonable. That they had a deep-seated inclination to what is harmonious and beautiful is proved by their first great work of art, their language. Of that language there were ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... office: the body had gone to thank him; his Majesty desired that the dauphin should be witness of what passed on an occasion so honorable to literature; after the speech of M. Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and the man in France with most inborn talent for speaking, the king, appearing somewhat touched, gave the Academicians very great marks of esteem, inquired the names, one after another, of those whose faces were not familiar to him, and said aside to M. Colbert, who was there in his capacity of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... requiring, without at all repaying, the trouble of some attention. He was not tall, nor handsome, nor of striking appearance in any way; and although he was clearly a gentleman, to her judgment he was not an accomplished, or even a clever one. His inborn modesty and shyness placed him at great disadvantage, until well known; and the simple truth of his nature forbade any of the large talk and bold utterance which pleased her as yet among ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... a little frightened, but eagerly willing to make friends with a world which she still insisted on believing was friendly. It is hard to shake a collie pup's inborn faith in the friendliness of mankind, but once shaken, it is more than shaken. It is shattered beyond hope ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune |
