"Prone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arms, he leaped from the quaking staircase, falling awkwardly, prone beneath the burden of the other's helpless body, as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the will. An inexplicable distress relaxes to their very centre the cords of vitality; the soul no longer performs its functions; the sufferer becomes indifferent to everything; the mother forgets her child, the lover his mistress, the strongest man lies prone, like an inert mass. Paul was carried to his cabin, where he stayed three days, lying on his back, gorged with grog by the sailors, or vomiting; thinking of nothing, and sleeping much. Then he revived into a species of convalescence, and returned by degrees ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... share is taken by men who render the world no proportionate service. This is partly due to existing laws, which the public is not yet wise enough to better; partly to the inertia of public opinion, which is still prone to cling in many points to the idea of past generations that the workman was necessarily a slave; and partly to the narrow selfishness and grasping ambition of many men in the business world. This is not arguing for the reduction of all to a dead level, as is so often absurdly claimed. ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... illimitable gold. There is a magic in the mere idea of the yellow metal, apart from such practical or luxurious uses as it may subserve; it stood for power and splendor —whatever good the men of that age were prone to appreciate. Howbeit, the strongest and bravest of all lands were drawn together in the search; and inevitably they met and clashed. Foremost among the antagonists were Spain and England. The ambition of Spain was measureless; she desired not only the mastery of America and its riches, but ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... animals find substitutes for laughter. The proneness of man to laughter is modified by age, sex, training, mental state, health, and by many other factors. Healthy, happy children are especially prone to laughter, while disease, strong emotions, fatigue, and age diminish laughter. Women laugh more than do men. The healthy, happy maturing young woman perhaps laughs most, especially when she is slightly embarrassed. What causes laughter? Good news, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... apartment in which the nurses should be obliged to walk half upon four and half upon two legs, that the younglings, being bred without the prejudice of example, might have no other guide than nature, and might at last come forth into the world as genius should direct, erect or prone, on two legs ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the Lupercalia flogging themselves. And the married women used to shove in, and try and get a blow from the monkeys' scourges; for these blows conferred fruitfulness in those days. A foolish trick this flagellation; but interesting to the bystander; reminds him of the grand old heathen. We are so prone to forget ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... that if more trade is done in England than anywhere else, if personal independence is without a check, and newspaper publicity unbounded, that is, by the nature of things, to be great; misled every morning by the magnificent Times or the 'rowdy' Telegraph; desperately prone to preaching to other nations, proud of being able to say what it likes, whilst wholly indifferent to the fact that it ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... person's features were seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what they were—all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... fastens the blades, a circle of iron through which the hands would be placed, into the lower circles the feet, and into the center circle the head would be pushed, and in that position he would be thrown prone upon the earth, and kept there until the strain upon the muscles produced such agony that insanity and death would end his pain. And that was done in the name of "Whosoever smiteth thee upon one cheek, turn him the other also." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; water-borne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... which lie the dust of Confucius, his son and his grandson. That of the Sage, we estimated to be twenty-five feet high and 250 feet in circumference. In front of it is a stone monument about fifteen feet high, four feet wide and sixteen inches thick. Lying prone before that is another stone of nearly the same size supported by a heavy stone pedestal. There is no name, but on the upright monument are Chinese characters which Dr. Charles Johnson, my travelling companion, translated: "The ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... cold comfort shall you finde: My manly shape hath yet a womans minde, Prone to reveale what secret she doth know. God pardon me, I was about to show My ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... in the woman's hand contained potions to intoxicate her victims. It was the custom at that time for public women to have their names on their foreheads, and as they represented the abominations of social life, they were often named after cities. The writers of the Bible are prone to make woman the standard for all kinds of abominations; and even motherhood, which should be held most sacred, is used to illustrate the most revolting crimes. What picture can be more horrible than the mother, in her hour of mortal ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... who so magnetised me from the pulpit, and I am by no means prone to admire sermons. There was a sort of mesmerism in the very eloquence of Magee which kept my eyes riveted on his lips—rather big, bulgy lips in an expressive, sensitive face. An hour beneath him sped marvellously fast, and more than once in Cork I have heard him preach for that length. The impression ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... time, one of the horses stumbled and fell and rolled completely over, pitching his rider headlong upon the prairie. Before he could regain his horse, father's rifle cracked and the unlucky equestrian rolled prone upon the ground with a bullet ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... never known anything but trouble to come out of learning. It unsettles a man. It complicates his views of life, destroys the simplicity which makes for peace of mind and happiness. Let this miserable affair be a warning to you, Andre. You are, yourself, too prone to these new-fashioned speculations upon a different constitution of the social order. You see what comes of it. A fine, estimable young man, the only prop of his widowed mother too, forgets himself, his position, his duty to that mother—everything; ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... when through communication was regularly established, at least as far south as Elephantine. Possibly in an earlier period the long narrow valley, or even a section of it, may have suggested the figure of a man lying prone upon his back. Such was Keb, the Earth-god, whose counterpart in the sky was the goddess Nut, her feet and hands resting at the limits of the world and her curved body forming the vault of heaven. Perhaps still more primitive, and dating from ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... good. Personally Annie was fastidiously tidy, which Rosemary ungenerously set down to youthful vanity rather than to innate cleanliness. When it came to washing dishes, however, Annie-Many-Ponies left much to be desired. She was prone to disappear about the time she reached the biscuit-basin and the frying-pan stage of the thrice-daily performance. She was prone to fancy she heard Wagalexa Conka calling her, or Shunka Chistala barking in pursuit of the cat, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... There was enough of maternity about her to have enabled her to undertake the duty for a dozen sons' wives,—if the wives were women with whom she could feel sympathy. And she could feel sympathy very easily; and was a woman not at all prone to inquire too curiously as to the merits of a son's wife. But what was she to do after the caution she had received from Mrs. Hittaway? How was she to promise maternal tenderness to a vixen and a liar? By nature she was ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of the warriors caused Nicko's almost indestructible hide to ring like a great bell. The handle of one warrior's lethal bludgeon snapped and the attacker stared at it in amazement. The rest beat down again upon the prone Nicko, their clubs bouncing off and resounding in a sort ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... of consequence that ladies are apt to grow most angry; and he stood confirmed in his belief that those who in theory professed to have such a humble opinion of their own abilities that they cannot do or understand any thing useful, are often, in practice, the most prone to insist upon the infallibility of their taste and judgment. Mrs. Beaumont, who saw with one glance of her quick eye what passed at this moment in her son's mind, sighed, and said to herself—"How impossible to manage a fool, who ravels, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... Many girls as pretty and as intelligent looking as Miss Dalton she had seen before, without their having inspired a spark of the tenderness she felt towards this unknown stranger. She could not comprehend it herself. She was not prone "to take fancies," as the phrase is; and yet, whatever might be the case, certain it was that there was a nameless something about this girl, which seemed to touch one of the deepest chords of her nature, and to cause her heart ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Lady Holchester into the carriage; and re-entered, leaving Geoffrey to lock the gate. The brothers returned in silence to the cottage. Julius had concealed it from his mother—but he was seriously uneasy in secret. Naturally prone to look at all things on their brighter side, he could place no hopeful interpretation on what Geoffrey had said and done that night. The conviction that he was deliberately acting a part, in his present relations ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... the temptation to throw stones? Is it generous, or even just, in scoffers who are safely hidden behind bricks and mortar, to take advantage of the glass? Could they show a nobler record if subjected to equally close scrutiny? Worshippers, too, at the shrines of inspiration are prone to look for ideal lives in their elect, forgetting that the divine afflatus is, after all, a gift,—that great thoughts are not the daily food of even the finest intellects. It is a necessity of nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Dowst's prone form, and then along Rip's. When Dominico had reached the shelter of the crystals, Dowst crawled along with Rip's body for his guide, passed over him, and reached ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... in many social circles. He displayed a lively, but not a vigorous intellect, and his literary attainments were inconsiderable. Of his own character as a man of letters, he had evidently formed a high estimate. He was prone to satire, but did not unduly indulge in it. He was especially impatient of indifferent versification; and, among his friends, rather discouraged than commended poetical composition. Though long unsettled himself, he was ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... gentlemanly wish to keep as close to the truth as was compatible with that condition, his answers had not appeared to Paula to be particularly evasive, the conjuncture being one in which a handsome heiress's shrewdness was prone to overleap itself by setting down embarrassment on the part of the man she questioned to a mere lover's difficulty in steering between ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... man leaves the coarsest forms of slaughter to a professional class, and, if he kills at all, elevates his pastime to the rank of sport by the refining element of skill and the excitement of uncertainty and personal risk. But civilized man is still only too prone to prey upon his fellows, though hardly in the brutal manner of his ancestors. He preys upon inferior intelligence, upon weakness of character, upon the greed and upon the gambling instinct of mankind. In the grandest scale he is called a ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... objections to the extensive dietetic use of nuts might be overcome by mechanical preparation of the nut before serving so as to reduce it to a smooth paste and thus insure the preparation for digestion which the average eater is prone to neglect. My first experiments were with the peanut. The result was a product which I called peanut butter. I was much surprised at the readiness with which the product sprang into public favor. Several years ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... understanding pure, Imparted to thee memory, Free will is thine, That so thou mayest e'er endure With purpose sure, Knowing that He has fashioned thee To be divine. 17 And since God knew the mortal frame Wherein He placed thee to distil, (So to win His praise) Was metal weak and prone to shame, Therefore I came Thee to protect—it was His will— And to upraise. 18 Let us go forth upon our way. Turn not thou back, for then indeed The enemy Upon thy glorious life straightway Will make assay. But unto ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... convalescence, and the more he measured with his eye the distance to the house the more convinced he became that it was beyond his power to accomplish. It would be ignominious, indeed, to have to give in half-way, and be discovered by his tormentor sitting prone upon the ground ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... slaves, the most ignorant people on the globe, the political equals of the American people. A great man in such a crisis would have resisted popular clamor and have refused them suffrage until they had been prepared to receive it by at least some education. Americans are prone to call their great politicians statesmen. Blaine, Reed, Conkling, Harrison were types of statesmen; Hanna, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors the effects of superstition; for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The truth is that he was writing about ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... handkerchief on the end of his ramrod. As soon as the antelope saw it, it gradually walked toward him until so near that he was assured that his piece would carry that far. It actually came within thirty yards of him, and he shot it while lying prone on the ground, the graceful animal noticing nothing but the white rag that ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... on the fore-sight very gently, careful not to let it explode, and succeeded in making the little projection so luminous that he could align it with the back-sight and the Arab's body. Then he pulled the trigger, and saw the dark figure leap forward and fall prone. Saw it, indeed, but only in a fraction of a second, for he stole back to the sand ridge, slipping in another ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... its shining surface unless his fingers were clean—a desirable state of neatness which, alas! did not often adorn the luckless Peter. For though tidy and careful enough when appearing before his guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Verplanck, it must be confessed that going to and from school Peter was prone to lay down both books and hat, oftentimes in the mud, and square himself pugnaciously if he chanced to meet one of the boys of the "Vly Market," who were wont to scoff and tease the Broadway boys unmercifully; and fierce battles ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... to her god-like guest: 'This shows thee, friend, by old experience taught, And learn'd in all the wiles of human thought, How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise! Thus wilt thou leave me? Are we thus to part? Is Portlaw's Park the passion of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their minds likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,—those of them, I mean, who are quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower, and from all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what manner of persons they should be and in what way they should walk if they would make the best of life? Probably the youth will say to himself in the words ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Prone on the lawn in merry mobs, They note the polished art of Trumper, The Surrey Lobster bowling lobs, The anxious wriggles of the Stumper. 'Tis not (believe me) theirs to sneer At what the modern mortal loves, But theirs to copy ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... pernicious or hurtful than Sophistry; every one knoweth it not; moreover, we are by nature prone and willing to believe lies rather than the truth. Few people do know what an evil sophistry is. Plato, the Heathen writer, made thereof a wonderful definition. For my part, said Luther, I compare it with a lie, which is like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... charm of writing, and in the vivacity of the scenes the reader disregards the slenderness of the connecting thread, or perhaps forgets to look for it. The style is easy and pleasant, while free from the slips to which "easy writers" are so prone. Of bright, witty sayings a number could easily be gathered as samples, but the readers would still have to be referred to the book for many more. Perhaps the main charm of Like unto Like lies in its description of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... too prone to judge a man by his appearance, so that the very men who need the money most have the hardest work to get it. They are apt, especially at the City Bank, to discriminate against the "feller" who looks rocky, in favor of the Rockafeller. Clothes do not make the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... love and gallantry, were so entirely to the major's then degenerate taste, that if not the whole business, at least the whole happiness of his life, consisted in them; and he had now too much leisure for one who was so prone to abuse it. His fine constitution, than which perhaps there was hardly ever a better, gave him great opportunities of indulging himself in these excesses; and his good spirits enabled him to pursue his pleasures of every kind in so alert and sprightly a manner, ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... good works, that is, gold, silver, and precious stones, will without injury go through that fire of which the Apostle spoke: "Because it will be revealed by fire." But those who, although they do not commit capital sins, yet are prone to commit very little sins and are negligent in redeeming them, will attain to eternal life because they believed in Christ, but first either in this life they are purified by bitter tribulation, or certainly in that fire of which the Apostle speaks they are to be tormented, that they may come ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... by the attentions of "Old Q." and others, his poems are full of growls at patrons. These cannot be mere echoes of Oldham and Johnson, but their exact reason is unknown. His son's reference to it is so extremely cautious that it has been read as a confession that Crabbe was prone to his cups, and quarrelsome in them—a signal instance of the unwisdom ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... lay wrapt in delicious repose, Most harmoniously playing a tune with his nose, In a dream there appeared the adorable Venus, Who said, "To be sure there's no likeness between us; Yet to show a celestial to kindness so prone is, Your looks shall soon rival the handsome Adonis." Liston woke in a fright, and cried, "Heaven preserve me! If my face you improve, zounds! madam, you'll ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle, the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had passed, the young Helvia and her horse were seen prone upon the ground. The force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... talking about the philosopher and his vagaries and whimsicalities,—"God bless you for exalting me in my beloved grandpa's good graces. You can't think how dearly I do love him, legislation and all that apart; and yet, if there ever was a woman peculiarly prone to love and admire a man for his public affections and public usefulness, I do say I am that she, and that I could not love a paragon of beauty, wit, and private kindness, if he looked on the good or ill being of mankind with indifference or scorn, or with anti-social ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... to his own bunk and lay prone, his forehead resting on his folded arms and his face hidden. "Very well, sir; I'll do my best. We have to accept each other for the best there is in us, I take it. You've saved my life and the life of those two women, and we all ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... my despairing rhymes That I am prone to sigh. Poets, like children, weep and laugh at ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with them. With an inarticulate cry of rage Smellie sprang upon the man nearest him and brought his stick down upon the fellow's head with such tremendous force that the stout cudgel shivered to pieces in his hand, whilst the recipient of the blow dropped prone without a groan or cry of any kind upon the pathway. The other meanwhile had dropped his share of their joint burden and seemed inclined to resume hostilities, but a well-aimed sweep of the butt-end of my gun took all the ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... bending lower with set teeth, white cheeks, and panic-stricken heart. Paler and paler grew her lips, wilder and wilder her eyes, fainter and fainter her breath, till, with a long sigh, a vain effort to save herself, she sank prone upon the threshold of the door, as ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... had gained, or the debates he had adorned. Never could you have supposed that this man, still in the prime of public life, had been the theme of journals and the boast of party. Neither did he ever, as men who talk easily at their own hearths are prone to do, speak of projects in the future, even though the projects be no vaster than the planting of a tree or the alteration of a parterre,—projects with which rural life so copiously and so innocently teems. The past seemed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfully trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's damning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. The Elder Brother is one of those many variations on cedant arma togae which men of letters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent comedy of The Spanish Curate is not impaired by the fact that Dryden chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The Spanish Friar. In Wit Without Money, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... grow weak, his bare ribs bleed; And though he groaning quickens at command, Their extra shilling in the rider's hand Becomes his bitter scourge:... 'tis he must feel The double efforts of the lash and steel; Till when, up hill, the destin'd inn he gains, And trembling under complicated pains, Prone from his nostrils, darting on the ground, His breath emitted floats in clouds around: Drops chase each other down his chest and sides, And spatter'd mud his native colour hides: Thro' his swoln veins the boiling torrent flows, And every nerve a separate torture ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Lord, this day's work shall cost you dear!" and then, indulging that ready profuseness of threats in which the less educated of his countrymen are so prone to indulge, he returned within the gateway of the avenue, and proceeded a short way towards the house. Here he reached a felled tree, lying somewhat across the path, on which he sat down; for he felt that he could not go to the house before he had ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... friends and keep the semblance of strength with a brave face. Pity directed toward oneself as the object is self-pity,—a quality found in children and in a certain amiable, weak, egoistic type, whose eyes are always full of tears as they talk of themselves. Of course, at times, we are all prone to this vice of character, but ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent. The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,[1355] and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... recollections at his command, made him extremely popular in society, so that his opponents used to say that it was dangerous to meet him, because one might be forced to leave off hating him. He was, perhaps, too prone to go on talking upon one subject which happened to fill his mind at the moment; nor was it easy to divert his attention to something else which others might deem more important. Those who stayed with him in the same country house sometimes complained ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... visions are a dream of dawn, my love the radiant day." A knife he thrust into his heart, to seal the holy rite. "My visions all resplendent glow, my love is like the night." And on the altar falling prone, he then gave up his soul. "My visions are the lightning's flash, my love the thunder's roll." Upon the altar poured his blood, it formed a crimson pall. "As his deliriums are my dreams, as ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... appear white, flat, and ribbon-like in the mirror, when viewed directly assume a reddish color, and reveal their true shelf-like formation. In the subglottic area the tissues are vascular, and, in children especially, they are prone to swell when traumatized, a fact which should be always in mind to emphasize the importance of gentleness in bronchoscopy, and furthermore, the necessity of avoiding this region in tracheotomy because of the danger of producing chronic laryngeal stenosis by the reaction of these tissues ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... to you is not the same to her. You must be forbearing, Ethel. Remember that dependence is prone to morbid sensitiveness, especially in those who have a ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... very nice person, not at all mad as people are prone to say. He is tall and gaunt and slightly wall-eyed, and he seems to live in a great, flopping laboratory smock, and his hair is always wild, and he seems to look around you rather than at you, but ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... steadily onward, while the Texan searched the trail with keen eyes that missed nothing. Suddenly he drew up his horse. Blizzard had shied at something lying prone ahead of them, and The Kid's eyes had seen ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... country, which Hartog named Staten Land, in honour of the States of Holland, with an unfavourable impression of its inhabitants, who appeared to be bloodthirsty savages, prone to hostility ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... prone to the social life, Joe was able to find interest in this due to its newness. The citizen of the West-world, when exiled by duty to a foreign land, evidently did his utmost to take his native soil with him. Even house furnishings had been brought ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... perturbation and disapproval. They disapproved, seriously so, at the first instant's glimpse of her. They thought—such ardent self-deceivers were they—that they were shocked by her swimming suit. But Freud has pointed out how persons, where sex is involved, are prone sincerely to substitute one thing for another thing, and to agonize over the substituted thing as strenuously as if it ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the day which was passing while the sun performed the last twelve degrees of his daily journey. Other portions of the twenty-four hours did not appear to excite even ordinary interest; and whenever conversation involved consideration of scenery under other than the favorite character, he was prone to silence, or to attempts to change the subject. Yet he has been known to speak in terms of commendation of certain sunrises, and once was actually caught by a friend making a sketch of Pilatus at sunrise across the Lake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... she had a hot, strong temper—very like her father's, if she had but known it—and a will that was prone to dominate, not to submit itself to others. These were facts that she ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... what are they? To-day the tree stands full of blossoms, to-morrow it lies prone on the ground, cut down to ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... implores their promised aid, And sees their favour like a vision fade! 190 Is this, ye faithless Syrens!—this the joy To which your smiles the unwary wretch decoy? Naked and shackled, on the pavement prone, His mangled flesh devouring from the bone; Rage in his heart, distraction in his eye, Behold, inhuman hags! your minion lie! Behold his gay career to ruin run, By you seduced, abandon'd, and undone! Rather in garret ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... dear land she had left. But Dominic, seeing that the Swabian was preferred, hated Cuno, and bore the lady scant goodwill, and in a little set his brain to some device by which he might vent his malice on both. This was no difficult task, for the Count was as prone to jealousy as he was quick to wrath, and with crafty hint and wily jest and seemingly aimless chatter the Italian sowed the seeds of suspicion and watchfulness in ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... an accident!" In general the midshipmen behaved with marked respect and attention to Bonaparte, and often by signs or words directed the sailors to avoid incommoding him: He sometimes noticed this conduct, and remarked that youthful hearts were always prone to generous instincts. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... preparation for prairie traveling that has yet been discovered. A single ration weighs, before being boiled, only an ounce, and a cubic yard contains 16,000 rations. In making up their outfit for the plains, men are very prone to overload their teams with a great variety of useless articles. It is a good rule to carry nothing more than is absolutely necessary for use upon the journey. One can not expect, with the limited allowance of transportation that emigrants usually have, to indulge in ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much too occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... his eyes and gnashing his teeth, looking huge and awful in those shadows, looking like a devil from hell. Suddenly a thought seemed to take him, and leaping at the litter he tore aside its curtains and dragged out Quilla, who fell prone ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... before they began to keep exact accounts of Time, have been prone to raise their Antiquities; and this humour has been promoted, by the Contentions between Nations about their Originals. Herodotus [3] tells us, that the Priests of Egypt reckoned from the Reign of Menes to that of ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... actual world, but the child who loiters too long in the realm of fancy may ever after find it hard to keep away from its borders. His natural interest in sex, if artificially repressed, is especially prone to satisfy itself ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... which seemed singularly out of keeping with his rather heavy build, Tom shinnied down the side of the tree farthest from the brook, and lying almost prone upon the ground began wriggling his way through the sparse brush, quickening his progress now and again whenever the diverting roar of distant artillery or the closer report of rifles and machine guns enabled him to advance ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... enjoy happiness and contentment for the remainder of your lives; but, my friends, would you not act wisely to look beyond all this? As our voyage in this ship must come to an end, so must our voyage through life, and what then? Again I repeat, that though by nature depraved, prone to evil, full of sin, with hearts desperately wicked, God says to all who desire to enter the kingdom of heaven, to become heirs of eternal life, to be prepared to go and dwell with Him, to enjoy eternal happiness ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... doctor had small cause for complaint, for there are few regions more richly endowed with birds than the valley of the Hudson. As has been seen, it is the winter resort of not a few, and is, moreover, a great highway of migration, for birds are ever prone to follow the watercourses that run north and south. The region also affords so wide a choice of locality and condition that the tastes of very many birds are suited. There are numerous gardens and a profusion of fruit for those that are half domesticated; ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... simple and homely than the veriest yokel. Seventy-one years his father was, and had never slept a night out of his own bed in his own house on Island McGill. That was the life ideal, so Captain MacElrath considered, and he was prone to marvel that any man, not under compulsion, should leave a farm to go to sea. To this much-travelled man the whole world was as familiar as the village to the cobbler sitting in his shop. To Captain MacElrath the world ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... of first cousins was removed in England by the Marriage Act of 1540,[4] but by this time the idea of the harmfulness of kinship marriage was so thoroughly impressed upon the people that they were very prone to look askance at such unions, and if they were followed by any defective progeny, the fact would be noted, and looked upon as a chastisement visited upon the parents for their sin. Naturally the idea became proverbial, and in some places it ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design. Again, was there ever city rebelling that did not believe that it possessed either in itself or in its alliances resources adequate to the enterprise? All, states and individuals, are alike prone to err, and there is no law that will prevent them; or why should men have exhausted the list of punishments in search of enactments to protect them from evildoers? It is probable that in early times the penalties ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... bitterness, and the charges were referred to a committee. It appeared, on investigation, that Mr. Webster had been extremely careless in his accounts, and had delayed in making them up and in rendering vouchers, faults to which he was naturally prone; but it also appeared that the money had been properly spent, that the accounts had ultimately been made up, and that there was no evidence of improper use. The committee's report was laid upon the table, the charges came to nothing, and Mr. Ingersoll was left in ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... this fashion and lying prone and motionless on the ground whenever a star shell threw its greenish radiance over the field, the scouts were reasonably safe from detection and sniping. They would seem, if seen at all, to be just so many more objects added to the hundreds ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... feet from stair to stair, I entreated him to stop; but he only laughed and held on his course the more rapidly, while I, hurrying after, often stumbled and recovered myself, then stumbled again and lay prone. ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... Hemisphere; controls Suez Canal, a sea link between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea; size, and juxtaposition to Israel, establish its major role in Middle Eastern geopolitics; dependence on upstream neighbors; dominance of Nile basin issues; prone ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... which becomes of great importance in the progress of the piece; for Johanna's reverse of fortune is brought about by the strange intervention of this dark and sinister parent. He believes his child more prone to ally herself with evil spirits, through a vain and sinful ambition, than, inspired by piety, to emulate the lives of saints. Raimond combats this gloomy notion. He thinks that the love of Johanna, like the most costly fruits, is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... she said to her mother, "a poet, defenceless against disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no prospects. His talent would perish ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... everyone; but in it the distinguished author has drawn an instructive picture of the effect of Determinism as a theory upon a self-indulgent man's practice. As Mr. Baring-Gould aptly says, "Human nature is ever prone to find an excuse for getting the shoulder from ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... yesterday. Thus you get two hot dishes; our particular sirloin has given us three. The parts of this joint vary greatly in flavour, and in texture as well, and by accentuating this variation by treatment in the kitchen, you escape that monotony which is prone to pervade the table so long as the sirloin remains in the house. Mrs. Sinclair is sufficiently experienced as a housekeeper to know that the dish of fillets we had for dinner last night was not made from the under cut of one sirloin. It was by borrowing a little from the upper part that I ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... find amongst them a fully-armed warrior whose arms flashed in the morning sun, as, advancing his shield ready for a blow, he darted his spear forward at another, who avoided the thrust by a backward leap, and, once started, dashed away as hard as they could go. Fighting men are prone to follow their leader, sometimes to victory, sometimes in panic flight. This latter was the case here. Marcus' next thrust, delivered with all his might, coming too late, for it was at a flying foe, three ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... those who follow the sea are probably the most prone to superstition. Afloat upon the black waste of waters, at the mercy of wind and sea, with vast depths and strange creatures below them, a belief in the supernatural is easier than ashore, under the cheerful gas-lamps. Strange stories of the sea ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... what I had done, as his arm relaxed and he fell prone, while, freed now from one adversary whose axe would the next moment have brained him, Hannibal grasped his remaining enemy with both hands, raised him up, and dashed ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the laws of nature and ran away, howling with surprise and terror. The Dog-State is too sure of its own fangs to feel afraid of a few mutinous sheep; but the lamb Clerambault no longer calculated the danger; he simply put his head down and butted. Generous and weak natures are prone to pass without transition from one extreme to another; so from an intensely gregarious feeling Clerambault had jumped at one bound to the extreme of individual isolation. Because he knew it so well, he could ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... hands and knees. Suddenly he encountered a figure lying prone in his path, and had touched it before aware of its proximity. Instantly he, too, lay flat on the ground, and, with heavy breathing, so feigned sleep that the aroused savage was deceived into believing the form beside him to be that of some restless comrade. So he turned over with a ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... for his playmates to act attracted the notice of the king, who engaged teachers to instruct him thoroughly in the ancient literature of India and Persia. But he seems to have boldly opened a way for himself, instead of following (as modern Orientals, timid or servile, are so prone to do) the well-worn path of the old Hindoo writers. In his tragedy (which I saw acted) of Manda-thi-Nung, "The First Mother," there are passages of noble thought and true passion, expressed with a power ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... preaching is of first importance. This must be recognised by the preacher, but not by him alone. It must be recognised by the Church as well. The preacher is prone to put upon the place and work of his pulpit much the same estimate as is put upon them by his people. There is one Church in this land in which the people think little of preaching. In some great sanctuaries of that Church ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... coming breeze lifting his hair. After a while, I saw that the father took hold of the daughter's hand, and so, they holding each other, went along towards home. We had to cross a lane. In it were two little children, one lying prone on the grass in a passion of crying, the other standing stock still, with its finger in its mouth, the large tears slowly rolling down its cheeks for sympathy. The cause of their distress was evident; there was a broken brown pitcher, ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... self-respect. She knew what she would really have done had he been less delicate, less in love, and more "practical." And she found a small and poor consolation in reflecting, "I wonder how many women there are who take high ground because it costs nothing." We are prone to suspect everybody of any weakness we find in ourselves—and perhaps we are not so far wrong as are those who accept without question the noisy protestations ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... name the fact that I was in boyhood extremely prone to castle-building—a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature life: finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or less practicable. In early days the habit was such that on going to bed it was a source of satisfaction to me to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... more important; namely, to imprint deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all things. Nor must it be forgotten that this vision of creation was given to people ignorant of natural science, and prone to fall back into surrounding idolatry. The comparison of the creation narratives in Genesis with the cuneiform tablets, with which they evidently are most closely connected, has for its most important result the demonstration of the infinite elevation above ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... injury on the health of the people using them, and this will gradually result in the abandonment of gas as a fuel, instead of, as should be the case, its coming into general use. The English householder is far too prone to accept what is offered to him, without using his own common sense, and will buy the article which tickles his eye the most and his pocket the least, on the bare assurance of the shopkeeper, who is only anxious ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... think that the life of certain neighbour girls was a pleasanter life than her own. When she was twenty, she had studied the subject more deeply, and had told herself that though her spirit was prone to rebel against her aunt, that though she would fain have been allowed to do as did other girls of twenty, yet she knew her aunt to be a good woman, and knew that it behoved her to obey. Had not her aunt come all the way from Cologne, from the distant city of Rhenish Prussia, to live in Nuremberg ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... looked at her queerly. She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes. She had lived up to it, or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of the life, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... call it!" whispered Nort. He was impulsive, and much more prone, than was his brother, to ascribe motives to others. "Maybe, after all, they have gold ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... military ideals no less than peaceful ideals. The exaltation of Nogi's career, set forth so strikingly in Stanley Washburn's little volume on the great Japanese warrior, contains much that is especially needed for us of America, prone as we are to regard the exigencies of a purely commercial and industrial civilization as excusing us from the need of admiring and practicing the heroic and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the next room a cry, a fall! Well, were it Lucas's victory, he might kill me as well as another. I walked into the back room. But it was Lucas who lay prone. ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the stranger still passed on, Till he reached the altar stone, And with body white and prone Sunk his forehead to the floor; And I saw in my despair, Standing like a spirit there, How his head was bruised and bare, And his ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... call. He had just returned from Washington, where he had seen his old friend Seward, Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State, and felt able to give us a forecast of the future. This uncle of mine was a thoughtful man of affairs; successful in business, excellent in judgment, not at all prone to sanguine or flighty views, and on our asking him how matters looked in Washington he said, "Depend upon it, it is all right: Seward says that they have decided to end the trouble at once, even if it is necessary to raise an army of fifty thousand men;—that ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... in her eyes, for she was certain her long-time friend was headed for the highroad of destruction. But instead I turned into the dim solitude of Shiba Park. I had something to think about. To-day's experiences had painted anew in naming colors the difference in husbands. How prone a woman is, who is free and dearly beloved, to fall into the habit of taking things for granted, forgetting how one drop of the full measure of happiness, that a good husband gives her, would turn to rosy tints the gray lives of hundreds of her kind who are wives ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... our vulnerability—and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... And ere the spasm of fear was broke, The men who had borne him homeward spoke Soothingly: "Some assassin's knife Had taken the innocent artist's life— Wherefore, 'twere hard to say: all men Were prone to have troubles now and then The world knew naught of. Toward his friend Florence stood waiting to extend Tenderest dole." Then came my tears, And I've ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... and frolic seems to be a heritage of mankind. In infancy and early childhood this joy and exuberance of spirit is given full sway. In youth, that effervescent stage of human existence, "joy is unconfined." But in middle age and later life we are prone to stifle this wholesome atmosphere of happiness, with care and worry and perhaps, when a vexed or worried feeling has been allowed to control us, even forbid the children to play at that time. Why not reverse things and drown care and strife in the well-spring of joy given and received ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... popular cry, the justice of which it has never paused to examine. There are also such things as a factious opposition to the Government, a selfish desertion from it, or a slavish obedience to it; which things, the people in general, are not slow to note, and often prone to attribute, even when there is no sufficient cause for attributing them. But of all the things which tend to separate the operatives from the governing classes, the most effectual, perhaps, is the suspicion (oh, that we could say ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... wounded fortress straightway lieth prone, Not so the Temple dies; its roof may fall, The sky its covering vault, an azure pall, Doth droop to crown its wealth ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... she was sure that she could never have that same feeling towards Henry Gilmore. And yet it might come; or something might come which would do almost as well. It was likely that Janet's nature was softer and sweeter than her own,—more prone to adapt itself, like ivy to a strong tree. For herself, it might be, that she could never become as the ivy; but that, nevertheless, she might be the true wife of a true husband. But if ever she was to be the true wife of Harry Gilmore, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's. Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Club-carrier's, and threw him heavily to the ground. Then the two wrestled together among the trees, but not long, for Sinis was no match for his lithe young foe; and Theseus knelt upon the robber's back as he lay prone among the leaves, and tied him with his own cord to the two pine trees which were already bent down. "As you would have done unto me, so will I ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... explored it. The wild and half-desert region through which the travellers were passing, is wandered over by hordes of Shoshokoes, or Root Diggers, the forlorn branch of the Snake tribe. They are a shy people, prone to keep aloof from the stranger. The travellers frequently met with their trails, and saw the smoke of their fires rising in various parts of the vast landscape, so that they knew there were great numbers in the neighborhood, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... scholar out of you. But that's not what they want. They want so many firsts, and the Hertford, and the Ireland, and all the rest of it. It's all pot-hunting," Mr. Brunson said. But this did not lessen the effect of the disenchantment, the first disappointment of life. Poor Theo became prone to suspect everybody after that first proof that no one was above suspicion,—not even the greatly respected head of one of the ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... prone upon the bed as if the announcement was too much for her, but was up again in an instant ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... with a single spring, but Laverick, without the slightest hesitation, knocked him prone upon the floor, where he lay, for a moment, motionless. Then he slowly picked himself up. His spectacles were broken—he blinked as he ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... propagation of a religion more mischievous than irreligion itself, of a religion which demanded from its followers services directly opposed to the first principles of morality. His temper, he truly said, was prone to lenity; but his duty to he community forced him to be, in this one instance, severe. He declared that, in his judgment, Pagans who had never heard the name of Christ, and who were guided only by the light of nature, were more trustworthy members of civil society than men who ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... very apt to eat too much, with the result of producing more or less dyspepsia and diminishing the normal appetite. Alcohol in every form should be absolutely excluded. If given during early youth, it is particularly prone to develop a taste which may become uncontrollable in later years. (Children should not ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... troublesome to manage. She is so unusually timid, poor creature, so prone to give way to despair when things look bad, yet so sweetly apt to bound into high spirits when things are looking ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... meetings where all eat. When a few persons, easy and unconstrained, unincumbered with cares, and of dispositions addicted to enjoyment, get together at past midnight, it is extraordinary what an appetite they evince. Singers also are proverbially prone to gormandize; and though the Bird of Paradise unfortunately possessed the smallest mouth in all Singingland, it is astonishing how she pecked! But they talked as well as feasted, and were really gay. It was amusing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... had light thrown on their strange path, and were encouraged and helped to plunge into the mysterious road, by the ruddy gleam which disclosed it. So every revelation is either light or darkness to men, according to the use they make of it. The ark, which slew Philistines, and flung Dagon prone on his own threshold, brought blessing to the house of Obededom. The Child who was to be 'set for the fall,' was also for 'the rising of many.' The stone laid in Zion is 'a sure foundation,' and 'a stone of stumbling.' The Gospel is the savour ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... to be persuaded into quaffing a mug of delicious, creamy stout at the canteen with a genial old sergeant, a bronzed veteran who has seen active service in several of the tough expeditions that England seems ever prone to undertake in various uncivilized quarters of the world; after which I wheel away over old Roman military roads, through Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, reaching Fenny Stratford just in time to find shelter against the machinations of the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Thornton was a jolly young Englishman, very prone to mirth, and this was too much for him. He turned traitor and laughed aloud. Lawyer Ed glared angrily at him; but Jock's face underwent a peculiar twist. He had had no notion of saying anything witty, he had been too angry for that; but he had learned by experience ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... those two winds that share the dominions of the great oceans are fundamentally different. It is strange that the winds which men are prone to style capricious remain true to their character in all the various regions of the earth. To us here, for instance, the East Wind comes across a great continent, sweeping over the greatest body of solid land upon this earth. For ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... dog, a wolf, or a snake, or lose your eyesight, or are in danger of losing your lover, you run to the shrine of some saint for help. The religious feeling really runs no deeper. In his outburst of grief upon seeing Mireio prone upon the floor of the chapel, the unhappy boy asks what he has done to merit such a blow. "Has he lit his pipe in a church at the lamp? or dragged the crucifix among thistles, like the Jews?" Of the deeper, nobler consolations of religion, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... for I will tell you: yet, if you were not dunces, you would never ask me such a question; for is he not corpus naturale? and is not that mobile? then wherefore should you ask me such a question? But that I am by nature phlegmatic, slow to wrath, and prone to lechery (to love, I would say), it were not for you to come within forty foot of the place of execution, although I do not doubt but to see you both hanged the next sessions. Thus having triumphed over you, I will set my countenance like a precisian, ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... throwing a strong silvery light across the open ground, and showing plainly the German wire entanglements and the black-and-white patchwork of their barricade. There were no visible signs of the rescue party, for the good reason that they had slipped into and lay prone in the wide shell crater that held the wounded Frenchman. Far spent the man was when they found him, for he had lain there three nights and two days with a bullet-smashed thigh and the scrape across his skull that had led the rest of his night patrol to count ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... subject are people so prone to become panegyrists of the past as in this matter of the weather. "Ah," they say, "we never now have the lovely summers we used to have." Reading the other day Walpole's Letters, I discovered that so far from the summers in his day being "lovely," they were not uniformly better than ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... was very hot. He took off his coat, rolled it into a pillow, and placed it beneath his head as he lay down on the grass. I stretched myself prone on a velvety carpet of moss, and gave myself up to a profound investigation of the one square foot of ground which lay beneath my eyes. The number of blades of grass was prodigious. A few, already awned, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Chopin's habitual neglect of the sonata form, instead of being a defect, reveals his rare artistic subtlety and grandeur. It was natural that a Pole should vindicate for music this emotional freedom of movement, for the Slavic mind is especially prone to constant changes of mood. Nevertheless, as soon as Chopin had shown the way, other composers followed eagerly in the new path, and in the present day the sonata may be regarded as obsolete. Few contemporary composers ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... earth returned dully to its former resting-place. Dusk came on, but Rankin did not look about him until the mound was neatly rounded; then he turned to where he had left the little boy so bravely erect. But the small figure was not standing now; instead, it was prone on the ground amid the dust ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... great a temptation to ease and self-indulgence, to which men are by nature prone, that the glory is all the greater of those who, born to ample fortunes, nevertheless take an active part in the work of their generation—who "scorn ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... men, omitting the watchman; and afterwhile they assembled in a group near the fire, some sitting, some lying prone. As they went bareheaded habitually, their hair stood out in thick, coarse, sunburnt shocks; their beard covered their throats, and fell in mats down the breast; mantles of the skin of kids and lambs, with the fleece on, wrapped them from neck to knee, leaving ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the purpose, and a heavily-loaded whip in my hand. I knew that it would be impossible to saddle him; and, indeed, I should be safer on his bare back, in the event of his throwing himself down. I opened the stable-door gently, and there he was prone on his side, his legs and neck stretched out, as I have often seen horses lying after sore fatigue. I clapped my knee upon his head, loosed the collar that bound him, slipped the bit into his mouth, buckled the throat-band, raised him to his feet, backed him out, and leaped upon his back before ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... when a rushing rattle sounded above them. The boulder he had twice used to turn his own weight upon was charging down the hillside! Just in time he caught Sylvie, threw her to one side and fell prone, helpless, in the path of the slide. He cried out, flinging up his arm, and, as though his cry had been of magic, the boulder faltered and stopped. A root half buried just above his body had made a hollow and a ledge; it had ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... persons whom she in every way respected—with whom there was not the least temptation to exhibit her mere dexterities. In London, during this past season, she had sometimes talked as a young, clever and admired girl is prone to do; always to the mockery of her sager self when looking back on such easy triumphs. How very easy it was to shine in London drawing-rooms, no one knew better. Here, in the country stillness, in this beautiful old house sacred to sincerity of heart and mind, to aim ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... find in Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois) that can give truth and interest to reflections of this order. One Reflective history, therefore, supersedes another. The materials are patent to every writer; each is prone to believe himself capable of arranging and manipulating them, and we may expect that each will insist upon his own spirit as that of the age in question. Disgusted by such reflective histories, readers have often returned with pleasure to narratives adopting no particular point of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... out. Ah, Martin, you are a dreamer and look at the world through a veil of cloud, while I am a woman prone to trust too easily. We are easy to deceive, you ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... those of a strumous bodily habit, Strawberries will often disagree. The late Dr. Armstrong held a very strong opinion that the seed grains which lie sprinkled allover the outer surface of each pulpy berry are prone to excite much intestinal irritation, and he advised his patients to suck their Strawberries through muslin, in order to prevent these diminutive seeds from ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... married, the other one a young girl with scant knowledge of the world. Yet she knows enough to know what she is doing, and she has sufficient strength of mind to rise above a sense of guilt, though she is more prone to be the victim of fear. Then the married woman's husband challenges the young man, who is killed. And the girl takes her own life, not because her lover is dead, not because of anything she has done, but because ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler |
