"Living thing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place of the breeder and selector in nature is Death. In a most remarkable chapter, 'On the Struggle for Existence', Mr. Darwin draws attention to the marvellous destruction of life which is constantly going on in nature. For every species of living thing, as for man, "Eine Bresche ist ein jeder Tag."—Every species has its enemies; every species has to compete with others for the necessaries of existence; the weakest goes to the wall, and death is the penalty inflicted on all laggards ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... "No living thing could get through that wall of fire, Professor," announced the guide impressively. "We'll shout and perhaps, if alive, they'll ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological principles!—one of which is ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... action of a powerful co-agent in the evaporative process, such as is assumed in this hypothesis, is a fact of history. 'And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged'. Gen. viii. 1. I do not recollect the Hebrew word rendered 'assuaged;' but I will consult my learned friend Hyman Hurwitz on its radical, and its ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... when he thought he heard the sound of dry wood snapping. He listened intently; and the next moment it came again, some way off, but plainly to be heard in the intense stillness of the morning. Some living thing was moving down the stream. Another moment's listening and he was convinced that the sound came from a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... no living thing save a few fur-clad animals and a little gray robin chirping cheerily as it picked away at an ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... lit up the faces of the two foremost. One face wore a black half-mask, and under it the mouth was twisting about in such a madness of nerves that the black tuft of beard wriggled round and round like a restless, living thing. The other was the red face and white moustache of Colonel Ducroix. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across. The entire member seems a dense ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Lion. "I suppose I was born that way. All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I've met a man I've been awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as he could go. If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever ...
— The Wonderful Wizard of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Mary had not the heart to veto its purchase, though it was a sad extravagance, costing them more than a week's living expenses. The stuff was of oriental silk, shot with a changing sheen, of colors like a fire burning over water, which made it seem a living thing in their hands. The night they took it home Stefan lit ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... living thing in the cold, illimitable night. A thick horror brooded over me. The sky was a mighty pall, sweeping down with heavy cloud-fringes, the earth a wide grave. I did not fear, that is, I feared not man, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... fell in love with her at once, and the wedding ceremony was celebrated with great splendor. Every living thing in the sea, from the great whales down to the little shrimps, came in shoals to offer their congratulations to the bride and bridegroom and to wish them a long and prosperous life. Never had there been such an assemblage or such gay festivities in the Fish-World ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... authentic word I bring Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no fiend with name divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine It is to satiate ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the third dragged a good deal; but when it came to the fourth; with light beginning to fail and no word of rescue, matters looked serious. The cold was becoming intense—a chill, damp cold that struck every living thing through and through. What could be keeping the men? Had they lost their way, or what could possibly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... of Balthasar were carried to the guest-chamber. All the servants hastened weeping to see him; for he had the love of every living thing with which he had in anywise to do; but when they beheld his face, and the smile upon it, they dried their tears, saying, "It is well. He is happier this evening than when he went ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... his pall upon the plain, And crowned the mountain-peaks like monarchs dead; The vault of heaven was glaring overhead With pitiless light that filled my eyes with pain; And while I vainly longed, and looked in vain For sign or trace of life, my spirit said, "Shall any living thing that dares to tread This royal lair ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or sound except the tinkling of tiny bells all about me that were set to swinging as I moved along. The crusted snow was strewn with them; every twig was hung, and every ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... hawthorn-tree, Four-centuried, and o'erthrown, is but of thee A type, majestic ruin: there it lies, And annually puts on its May-flower bloom, To fill thy lonely courts with bland perfume, Yet lifts no more its green head to the skies;[10] The last lone living thing around that knew Thy glory, when the dizziness and din Of thronging life o'erflow'd thy halls within, And o'er thy top ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... "Every living thing emits a characteristic pattern of electrical nerve impulses. We have ways of recording those impulses, and we have had you and Cargill under observation for a long time. We've had plenty of opportunity to key ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of that uninhabited valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion which had burned in the hearts of ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the worn trunk at the foot of the bed, the dingy wall-paper, the shaded white glass lamp on the rickety table, all seemed invested with a nobility alien to their everyday common appearance, inasmuch as they assisted at the turning of a living thing, who had rejoiced, and toiled, and suffered, into unresponsive clay. Even the American clock on the mantelpiece acquired a fine distinction by reason of its measuring the last moments of a human being, with all its miserable sensibility to pain ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... commonplaces of a mere bread-winning existence. She was one of those fair and flower-like natures, which sometimes spring up even beside the most dusty highways of life. Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic,—of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man and beast and tree, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... in France. In former times, when the value of the lagoons was not understood, the hollows and gorges in the mountains where they are situated were regarded by the superstitious peasantry as the entrance to hell. Experience taught them that it was in many respects a region of death. Whatever living thing fell into the lagoons inevitably perished, for the devouring acid almost in a moment separated the flesh from the bones. Cattle were frequently thus lost, and the peasants themselves or their children sometimes encountered a similar fate. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... simple, majestic appearance. It was full of music, irregular, wild, yearning, trembling. His violin lay upon his arm tenderly as a living thing; and such rich, mellow, silver, shining tones followed his motion that one seemed to catch echoes of that eternal melody whereof music itself is but the shadow and presentment. The adagios reminded me of Beethoven, not as they were imitated, but as all the great ones, in their appearing, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... mourning above an ancient grief. For once the restless Mother of all the weary lands Went down to him in beauty, with trouble in her hands, And gave to him forever all memory to keep, But to her wayward children oblivion and sleep, That no immortal burden might plague one living thing, But death should sweetly visit us vagabonds of spring. And so his heart forever goes inland with the tide, Searching with many voices among the marshes wide. Under the quiet starlight, up through the stirring reeds, With whispering and lamenting it rises and recedes. All night ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... personal existence to a divine act, the act was done when we began to be, and the life was given as a gift that could be separated from the Bestower. But that is not the state of the case at all. The real fact is that life is only continued because of the continued operation on every living thing, just as being is only continued by reason of the continued operation on every existing thing, of the Divine Power. 'In Him we live,' and the life is the result of the perpetual impartation from Himself 'in whom all things consist,' according to the profound ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... would be incomplete without you. From the beginning God made you ruler over every living thing. Do you properly appreciate the kingdom over which you reign? We know that these thoughts do not take hold of you in boyhood, but there is a time when they are fully realized and yet neglected. God has called you because you are strong. Then exercise that ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... he saw the whole object move. He watched it closely. It did stir! It was some living thing, then. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... pricking ears and the brave trust of the eyes, he was blinded by a mist and could not aim. He had to place the muzzle of the gun against the roan's temple and pull the trigger. When he turned his back he was the only living thing within the ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... only it had not yet reached the glen, a terrible story was going about the country, of a beast in the hills, that went biting every living thing he could get at, and whatever he bit went raving-mad. He never ate any creature he attacked, never staid to kill it, but just came up with a rush, bit it, and was out of sight in a moment. It was generally in the twilight he came. He appeared—nobody ever saw from ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... one hand with as much care as if it had been a young child, he descended with the other. It was a bird as large as a pigeon, but without a single feather on any part of its body. It was wonderfully plump and soft, with a skin almost transparent, so that it looked more like a bag of jelly than any living thing, with a head and feet and commencement of wings stuck on to it. The little creature seemed in no way frightened, but opened its mouth as if expecting to be fed. We brought it to its mother, who immediately recognised it, and when we handed her a piece ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... were locked," Denby interrupted, "and no one could have got out of the grounds without a ladder and someone to assist him. But there was so sign of a living thing about. Edwards ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... rocked to and fro, and a tall flame leaped at the organ like a living thing ready to seize and devour. Still the knocking and hammering continued, and still Ambrosio played wild music—till all at once the chapel door was broken open and a group of pale spectral faces in monk's cowls peered through the smoke, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... body. To examine into the disposition to sport in the progeny, even when there is only one parent as in many vegetables, and to investigate how much variation is modified by the mind or nervous sensation of the parents, or of the living thing itself during its progress to maturity; how far it depends upon external circumstance, and how far on the will, irritability, and muscular exertion, is open to examination and experiment. In the first place, we ought to examine its dependency upon the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... sunny reeds. And so the hours went by, and there were no villages, or even houses, to be seen, but the little rough mills beside the slowly toiling wheel, which in most cases seemed to be the only living thing there. Once, however, there was a naked child, very brown, and as round as a spider between the hips and the waist, playing upon a flowery bank above the mother, who wore a brilliant-coloured kerchief on her head, and who knelt beside the water as she rinsed the little elfs shirt. I thought ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... installations. The fighting ships of Kandar were allowed to use the planet's spaceport only for special reasons. Emergency rocket take-offs and landings were necessary training for war conditions anyhow. So the take-off ground was pitted and scarred with burnt-over circles, where no living thing grew and where very often the clay beneath the humus top-layer was vitrified ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to shoot, they say," defended Aunt Martha. "I don't believe he would harm a living thing except in defense of his own life. Defending themselves is their way out here, girl—they know no other way. And he is a man, dear. I don't know when I have met a man ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Close to us lies this great mystery, incomprehensible, and yet our very breath depends upon it. Why should not the sweet tides of soft moist air cease to stream in upon us? No reason could be given why every green herb and living thing should not perish; no reason, save a faith which was blind. For aught we KNEW, the ocean-begotten aerial current might forsake the land and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... black against a background of burning flame. The flying foxes shot from tree to tree, and moths as big as sparrows whirred about the trunks, one moment black against the glare beyond, and vanishing the next, like imps of darkness, into their native gloom. There was no sound of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill. Was there one among them all who cared ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... harm me," it seemed to say, "who never harmed any living thing—who claimed only the right to live my frugal life in the forest, digging up the frozen mosses under the snow, which no mortal ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a living thing, However weak or small; The beasts that graze, the birds that sing, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... recognition and success are liars and that only. What I have created is no longer my property: it longs to reach the world; it is a part of the world; and I must give it to the world, provided, do you hear? provided it is a living thing." ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Not a living thing was in sight. The buildings were silent, seemingly deserted. And the atmosphere of the place seemed to be pregnant with a lurking threat, a hint ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... eastern and northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles and oranges. Strange effects are produced by suffering any living thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not intended for it. A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under water in the dark, removed from the natural stimulus of light, they did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth, and so become frogs; they swelled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... The life-giving sap turns to water with specks of the one-time nourishment floating uselessly through it. Most plant cells, like the cells in the man, turn to water, with fibers and dust flecks making it cloudy. Within a few seconds there is not a living thing left in the world, and the saltless waves dash up on ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... had met no living thing save some wild game trekking to the water, and heard no sound save the distant roar of some beast of prey. Ramah was before them. The moon shone on the roofs of the Mission-house and the little church and the clusters of Kaffir huts beyond. But, oh! it was silent: no cattle ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... an imperative, inward urge. And if we ask those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul towards its Source;[133] which impels every living thing to pursue the most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God. Love is for them much more than its emotional manifestations. It is "the ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things"—no less. This ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... producing the sword, which, as he raised it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like a living thing, "first, we have four right and four left cuts; four right and four left thrusts. Infantry cuts and guards are more interesting than ours, to my mind; but they are not so swashing. They have seven cuts and three thrusts. So much as a preliminary. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... came beyond my fence or wall: and so I came in and out this way. But I was not perfectly easy at lying so open: for as I had managed myself before, I was in a perfect enclosure; whereas now, I thought I lay exposed; and yet I could not perceive that there was any living thing to fear, the biggest creature that I had yet seen upon ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... "But I guess it's life. I see it here on the prairies with every living thing. Everything is a victim, some way or other. Even the wolves 'at tore this little beast 'll go down to some rancher's rifle, maybe, although they were only doing what nature said . . . I guess it's the same way in the cities; the innocent bein' hunted, an' the ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... yard, was peace; at least for the moment. The only living thing in it was a cat the twins had acquired, through the services of one of the experts, as an indispensable object in a really homey home. The first thing this cat had done had been to eat the canary, which gave the twins much unacknowledged relief. It was, they thought ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... of thought oppressed the priest, and he got up from his chair and paced back and forth before the house. But still his searching mind burrowed incessantly, as if it would unearth a living thing that had been ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of being recognized she veiled herself, and slipped out of the house quickly. The sun was resting on the hill like a drop of blood on an eyelid by the time she had got up the road opposite the amphitheatre, which she speedily entered. The interior was shadowy, and emphatic of the absence of every living thing. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... main camp on July 27, and those we left behind did not expect ever to see us again. The first day we did not see a living thing, and the second day we rode twenty-five miles farther without hindrance. Our camp that day was situated on open ground beside two lakes, and to the south-east stood some small hills, in the neighbourhood of which ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... night so cloudless and so still! Not a voice of living thing,—not a whisper of leaf or waving bough,—not a breath of wind,—not a sound upon the earth nor in the air! And overhead bends the blue sky, dewy and soft, and radiant with innumerable stars, like the inverted bellof some blue flower, sprinkled with golden dust, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to the window, threw it widely open and leant out, looking down into the court below. It was deserted. In no other window visible to me was any light to be seen, and no living thing moved in the shadows beneath. The clamor of Fleet Street's diminishing traffic came dimly to my ears; the last stroke from St. Paul's quivered ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... with heath, but lonely bare, Nor tree, nor bush, nor brake, is there, Save where of land yon slender line Bears thwart the lake the scattered pine. Yet even this nakedness has power, And aids the feeling of the hour: Nor thicket, dell, nor copse you spy, Where living thing concealed might lie; Nor point, retiring, hides a dell, Where swain, or woodman lone, might dwell; There's nothing left to fancy's guess, You see that all is loneliness: And silence aids—though the steep hills Send to the lake a thousand rills; In summer tide, so soft they weep, The sound ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... and I saw thy face through a mist red as thy blood and his, which I wished to shed. But thou art so young—so white—so beautiful. Thou hast come so far with me, and thou hast been so sweet. There is a strange pity for thee in my breast, such as I have never known for any living thing. I think it must be that thou hast magic in thine eyes. It is as if thy soul looked out at me through two blue windows, and I could fall down and worship, Allah forgive me! I knew no man had kissed ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of stone, but when a tuft of hepatica, blooming late where the shade was deepest, fell crushed near my hand, I reached out. As luck would have it I was too conscious, too much ashamed at my own folly to act decisively. I did not grasp, I reached out—and touched a living thing. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... could see the expression on the admiral's face, they turned loose with everything they had, grape, canister, solid shot, chain-shot, bar-shot, stove-lids, muffin-irons, newspaper cuts, etc., etc., so that the decks were swept of every living thing ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... distance, ending in a spasmodic jerk. It was like nothing human. Yet strangely it suggested something human. As if some unearthly ghoul were trying to simulate the wailing of human anguish.... Then again it was quite grotesque, bearing no resemblance to the cry of a living thing. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... tread, and armour's clang, The sullen march was dumb. There breathed no wind their crests to shake, Or wave their flags abroad; Scarce the frail aspen seem'd to quake, That shadow'd o'er their road. Their vanward scouts no tidings bring, Can rouse no lurking foe, Nor spy a trace of living thing Save when they stirr'd the roe; The host moves like a deep-sea wave, Where rise no rocks its power to brave, High-swelling, dark, and slow. The lake is pass'd, and now they gain A narrow and a broken plain, Before the Trosach's rugged jaws, And here the horse ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... it was a heartrending sight. The women, with children in their arms, pleaded in vain to the Boers to leave them something or they would starve, but the latter only jeered at them. What these poor people will do God only knows, for the Boers stripped them of every living thing they possessed, and with the proceeds of this robbery the Boer Government intend to replenish ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... one more possibility of disaster from lightning. Ordinary wire fencing mounted on wooden posts can become so highly charged with electricity during a thunder storm that no living thing is safe within thirty feet of it. Proper grounding is again the remedy and is relatively simple. At every fifth post an iron stake should be driven deep enough to reach permanent moisture. Connect this to the fencing by a wire tightly wrapped around the stake and each strand ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... holsters in their places, and set out with Henry Chatillon in search of the game. Henry, not intending to take part in the chase, but merely conducting us, carried his rifle with him, while we left ours behind as incumbrances. We rode for some five or six miles, and saw no living thing but wolves, snakes, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was outspread beneath us; here and there the Platte, divided into a dozen threadlike sluices, was traversing it, and an occasional clump of wood, rising in the midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste. No living thing was moving throughout the vast landscape, except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass and prickly-pear just at our feet. And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... masses of sticky earth at his feet, to the chicken coop, into which he cast an eye; he even took the kitchen pails and tramped down to the spring and back. In the gulch he did not see or hear a living thing. A newly-born and dirty little stream was trickling destructively through all manner of shivering grasses and flowers. The water from Bennington's sleeves ran down over the harsh canvas cuffs and turned his hands purple with the cold. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Off-her-Chump, and all the honourable Misses Off-their-Chumps. The witticisms convulsed Paul's neighbours and left him saturnine. He conceived a loathing and despite for the creature on the stage which he had never felt before for any living thing. The popular laughter and applause fed his personal hatred and disdain. He made an involuntary sound of contempt as the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... hands, shaking uncontrollably. "Do you see how I show this, say this anywhere, tell this to you here, now, where anyone could hear me? I am not ashamed of it. It is not a thing to hide. It is a thing to glory in. It is the only honestly living thing in all our miserable human life, the passion of a man and a woman for each other. It is the only thing that moves us out of our cowardly lethargy of dead-and-alive egotism. The thing that is really base and false is to pretend that what is dead is still alive. Your marriage is dead. Your children ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of the minister included every living thing, and the man himself interested Doctor Dexter in much the same way that a new slide for his microscope might interest him. They exchanged visits frequently when the duties of both permitted, and the Doctor reflected that, when Ralph ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... hands during the course of years, holds that he must put his shoes from off his feet because the place whereon he treads is holy ground, the faith will not be propagated, for it will lack the vital spark which alone can make it a living thing. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... should be announced in the opening chapter of the Holy Bible. It was clothed in the form of an ordinance, as became it: "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth, after his kind." From that day to this, every living thing—beast, bird and insect, tree, shrub and plant—has produced after its kind. It is a law that runs through all animal and vegetable life. Each family in the great world of living forms was created for a special purpose, and was intended to remain pure and ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Further, whenever there is "before" and "after" there must be several instants. But according to the Philosopher (De Gener. Animal. ii) in the generation of a man there must needs be "before" and "after": for he is first of all a living thing, and afterwards, an animal, and after that, a man. Therefore the animation of Christ could not be effected in the first instant ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the Lahn opened out it presented a picture of quiet sylvan beauty, apparently uninhabited by any living thing. The Archbishop of Cologne rose, and, shading his eyes from the still radiant sun, gazed intently up the little river. No floating craft was anywhere in sight. He turned ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... Beauvoir asked me to ride in to tell you that we find the farmhouses completely deserted, and the whole of the cattle and horses have disappeared, as well as the inhabitants. Save for some pigs and poultry, we have not seen a living thing." ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... I watched the flickering flame dropping nearer and nearer to the window-ledge, and listened to the pipes. Donald was inspired. He and the pipes were one. In his hands they became a living thing. What he felt, they felt. They wept as he wept, they gloried as he gloried, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... dozen yards away. Slowly, as he advanced, he made out the dim shadow of life in the white gloom—a bit of smoke climbing weakly in the storm, the black opening of a brush shelter—and then, between the opening and the spiral of smoke, a living thing that came creeping toward him on ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... menace reared its ugly head in the foothills, striking not at coyotes alone but at every living thing. There were many coyotes such as Cripp, with the hair slipped from their hides,—the ones that had survived a dose of poison but were unable to shake off its devastating after effects. Hydrophobia broke out among ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... The mammals disappear, then the birds vanish, then the reptiles of the secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated beings. Then the zoophytes of the transition period also return to nothing. I am the only living thing in the world: all life is concentrated in my beating heart alone. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralises that of the sun. Vegetation becomes accelerated. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... that if we venture into them we may die of thirst. The solid land on which we make our homes is not all of the same value. Thousands of square miles are so rocky or so cold or so dry that they support no living thing. Other thousands of miles of the earth have been so favored by Nature that they are fairly alive ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... was already night; The church was empty, and there was no light, Save where the lamps, that glimmered few and faint, Lighted a little space before some saint. He started from his seat and gazed around, But saw no living thing and heard no sound. He groped towards the door, but it was locked; He cried aloud, and listened, and then knocked, And uttered awful threatenings and complaints, And imprecations upon men and saints. The sounds re-echoed from the roof and walls As if dead priests ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Ippolito passed down the long narrow calle or footway leading from the Campo San Stefano to the Grand Canal in Venice, he peered anxiously about him: now turning for a backward look up the calle, where there was no living thing in sight but a cat on a garden gate; now running a quick eye along the palace walls that rose vast on either hand and notched the slender strip of blue sky visible overhead with the lines of their jutting ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... fabric. Going full speed ahead, Mayo had called for full speed astern. Then he sounded three whistles, signaling as the rules of the road provide. The yacht's twin screws churned a yeasty riot under her counter, and while she was laboring thus in her own wallow, trembling like some living thing in the extremity of terror, the big steamer swept past. Froth from the creamy surges at her bows flicked spray contemptuously upon Julius Marston and his guests on the Olenia's quarter-deck. Men grinned down upon them from the high ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... showing our revolution certain as that of the rolling suns in the material heavens. Only Liberty can be our watchword henceforth! To this standard alone will the country, both North and South, rally when a few more days of leadership are over. God saw to this in the frame-work of every living thing, when He made his wants to be a blessing with freedom and a curse without it. Open the cage-door to the pining fox, loathing his master's beef and pudding, and see if his instincts are not true as the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... like a child deprived of its candy. He ached with fatigue, his feet were blistered, his throat dry as a kiln. Throwing off his hat, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and cursed the marsh as if it were a living thing, cursed it with a slow, unctuous zest, spat out upon it the venom and wrath that ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... of Sophonisba. You are no longer a pupil, but a rising artist. Moor is a peerless portrait-painter, and you have profited greatly by his teaching. But Art has still higher aims. Every living thing belongs to her. The Venus, the horse . . . which of those two pictures won Apelles the greater fame? Not only copying, but creating original ideas, leads to the pinnacle of art. Moor praised your vivid ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he had nothing better to encounter than a nest of parrots. We found grapes in every direction. Benjie also showed us the Banana tree, gave us a perfect volume of his discovering yams, and danced with glee before a small plantation of sugar canes. Yet all this time we saw no living thing but birds. We were enchanted with the flowers, their size and colour were beyond all description, at last we came to an open glade, and through this ran the stream, which fell over the cliffs into the sea. The trees were gigantic, and Benjie in his broken English, endeavoured to ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the country world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has painted with pure art—with art which describes what is a race perhaps more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor—the 'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in like manner—the ideal of the natural sailor we mean—the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has endeavoured ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... living thing on earth, you and I, Yellow-hair.... I believed that man for awhile. But I tell you whatever is living within this forest is our enemy—and if any man comes in the shape of my dearest friend I shall kill him before ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... living thing capable of growth and development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights, liberties, and respective institutions. The Polish State offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... interesting instance of life and mind among the Rhizopods, a very low form of living thing. He relates that the Difflugia ampula, a creature occupying a tiny shell formed of minute particles of sand, has a long projection of its substance, like a feeler or tendril, with which it searches on the bottom of the sea for ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... upward expression of her eyes, as she turned her head to listen to him, and left upon the canvas the very smile he had seen upon her lips. Those dark eyes of hers had haunted his memory forever after. To his imagination that picture had become almost a living thing. It was as a voice of his own that returned to his ear as the voice of Amelie. In the painting of that portrait Pierre had the first revelation of a consciousness of his deep love which became in the end the master passion ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... me I distinctly heard a sigh,—a compassionate, mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat, looked round, amazed to discover no one,—no living thing! The windows were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness, vaguely shaped as a human form, receding, fading, gone! Why, I know not—for no face was ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that instead of making him grateful, it inspires him with a lively desire to wring the dwarf's neck. Only, he admits that he always comes back to his Mimmy, though he loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filial instinct. He explains that he is Siegfried's father, and that this is why Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has learned from his forest companions, the birds and foxes and wolves, that mothers as well ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... long centred and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was practised beyond doubt in simple ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is needed for a city man or woman to support a family on the proceeds of a little bit of land; it shows how in truth, as the old Book prophesied, the earth brings forth abundantly after its kind to satisfy the desire of every living thing. It is not necessary to bury oneself in the country, nor, with the new facilities of transportation, need we, unless we wish to, pay the extravagant rents and enormous cost of living in the city. A little bit of land near the town or the city can be rented or bought on easy terms; and ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... "No living thing," said Leroux, monotonously, "left this flat from the time that the three of us, Exel, Cumberly, and I, entered, up to the time that Miss Cumberly came, and, with the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... stretch of sand—a small, dark man with a shaggy, speckled beard and quick, twinkling eyes. He was at work upon a tangled length of tarred rope, pulling and twisting with much energy and deftness to straighten out the coil, so that it leaped and writhed in his hands like a living thing. ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... the hushed vales and gulfy hills of Greece Night brooded on her darkly jewelled wing, Binding in drowsy chains of dewy peace Sweet birds, white flocks and every living thing, And lapsing streams which to the forest sing. Beneath that pillared fane which guards the place Where spirits twain sleep in the charmed ring, I slept after the banquet, and the rays Of a past heaven flashed ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... and tiara of an unremembered pope. But now it lies a mere tract of scorched grass, insufferably hot and dry and sandy, intersected by dirty paths, and covered with the loathliest offal of a foul Italian town. Should you cross this ground at mid-day, under the blinding sun, when no living thing, except perhaps some poisonous reptile, is about, you would declare that Orvieto had been stricken for its sins by Heaven. Your mind would dwell mechanically on all that you have read of Papal crimes, of fratricidal wars, of Pagan abominations ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... moment, was glorifying his Creator and his race at the same time, by addressing Him as "Thou who hast given unto us, Thy servants, dominion over the beasts of the field and over every living thing, that they may serve us and minister ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... cyanide will come up through the plaster to poison the air in the bottle and to kill any living thing that attempts to breathe it. As you capture your specimens of moths, bugs or butterflies afield you place them into the bottle, and as soon as they are dead, you remove them; fold them carefully in stiff paper and store them in a paper box or a carrying case until you get home. They should then ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... that he had never known her to fail in sympathy for any living thing; had never detected in her an indifference to either the happiness or the sorrow of others. In his life he had never before believed that the command to love one's neighbour had in it anything more significant than the beauty of an immortal theory. He believed it now because, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... that does not fit the world that he is in, and that is man, chief and foremost of all. Other beings perfectly correspond to what we now call their 'environment.' Just as the soft mollusc fits every convolution of its shell, and the hard shell fits every curve of the soft mollusc, so every living thing corresponds to its place and its place to it, and with them all things go smoothly. But man, the crown of creation, is an exception to this else universal complete adaptation. 'The earth, O Lord! is full of Thy mercy,' but the only creature who sees and says that is the only one ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... light haze of the ionized air below them glowed out in a huge cone, the water of the lake heaved and seemed to move in its depths, but there was no great movement of the waters; they lost only a fraction of their weight. But every living thing in ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... something in the force and suddenness of the storm that aroused all her courage. The vexed trees were bent and torn by the winds. The river was lashed into a sea of foam, over which her frail boat leaped and quivered like a living thing; but she sat steady in the midst, pale and firm, taking advantage of each gleam of lightning to fix her course, and facing the storm with a steady bravery which had ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... wreaths and letters of sympathy arrived. The girls went upstairs where the dead lay, and when they returned they told me how beautiful their mother looked. And during those dreadful days, how many times did I refuse to look on her dead! My memory of her was an intensely living thing, and I could not be persuaded to sacrifice it. We thought the day would never come, but it came. There was a copious lunch, cigars were smoked, the crops, the price of lambs, and the hunting, which the frost had ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... character portrayal was very much more true to life. The best impressions I had brought with me of Danish art were supremely romantic, Michael Wiehe as Henrik in The Fairies, as the Chevalier in Ninon, as Mortimer in Schiller's Mary Stuart. But this was the real, living thing. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... see of what use any weapons are just at present," I responded, "nor, for the matter of that, the gems which we have hidden about our persons. For the whole five days during which we have been driven on by this fierce, howling wind I have not seen a living thing except ourselves—not even a bird of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... be," she answered, "but if so it must have changed, since, save for a jackal creeping among the columns and a dog that barks in some distant village, I neither see nor hear a living thing. What now, Olaf?" ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... see the khaki-clad figures of the Gurkhas, some kneeling, some standing, their rifles raised to their dark faces, waiting like statues for the enemy that never came. A dead, petrified world, the only living thing the sunshine, which played in peaceful indifference upon the scene of an old and a new tragedy! Lois thought of her mother. By the power of an overwrought imagination she looked back through a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... of Literature.— We must not suppose that literature has always existed in the form of printed books. Literature is a living thing— a living outcome of the living mind; and there are many ways in which it has been distributed to other human beings. The oldest way is, of course, by one person repeating a poem or other literary composition he has made to another; and ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... form of the body, and, like that animal, it frequently sits up on the hinder legs, and in this position carries its food to its mouth. If left at liberty in a state of tameness, it will pursue poultry, and destroy every living thing that it has strength to conquer. When it sleeps it rolls itself into a lump, and remains immovable for fifteen hours together. His eyes are small, but full of life; and when domesticated, this creature is very playful ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... his personality to master hers. And under the sting of this humiliation she felt hard and pitiless. Dimly she was aware that a curious change had come over her to-night. Normally, the sight of any living thing in distress was enough to stir her quick sympathy: but Gerald mourning over the prospect of having to go back to regular work made no appeal to her—a fact which the sufferer noted ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... there in the night; and looking straight before him, his eyes upon the spot where a speaker should be, Jervis Whitney saw never a living thing; saw nothing but the moss-grown trunk of a tree, where it lay on the ground, not ten paces distant, with the moonlight shining full ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... of nine, and, at the first stroke, a great ball of light is seen ascending the cross to its pinnacle. This is the signal for thousands of assistants, who are concealed over its vast extent, to light the great lamps, and in an instant all is motion, the whole mass is like a living thing, fire whirling and flashing over it in all directions, till the vast pile blazes as if lighted with a thousand suns. The effect is truly magical, for the agents by whom this change is wrought ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... grand, even to awfulness, in the thought of utter helplessness which you feel at sea. Sky and water—with no living thing visible over the vast expanse—for days together just your own vessel with its human freight—and God! To a thoughtful mind there is no surer teaching both ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... actual case before us, the child was after quick and easy results, the only kind she could comprehend; she was unable to look upon the garden as a living thing whose life and health must be preserved to-day in order that it may yield returns to-morrow and next week. Analyzed with adult understanding, her essential fault was a failure to get beyond immediate results and to view the garden from a long-time angle. We ought not to expect her to do this now, ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... may thy gladness Take from me all taint of sadness; Fill my soul with trust unshaken In that Being who has taken Care for every living thing, In Summer, Winter, Fall, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... evening towards the end of June, when his mother had been dead little more than a fortnight, Cynthia, Mrs. Delane's indefatigable pupil, was all at once conscious of a certain spring in the child's hand, as though it became—faintly—self-moved, a living thing. She cried out. Buntingford was there looking on; and all three hung over the child. Cynthia again placed the brick in his hand, and withdrew her own. Slowly the child moved it forward—dropped it—then, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... once had a "fight" with a captive Japanese wild boar, under conditions both absurd and tragic, and from it I learned the courage and fury of such animals. The animal was large, powerful, fearfully savage toward every living thing, and insanely courageous. It was confined in a yard enclosed by a strong wire fence, and while we were all very sure that the fence would hold it, I became uneasy. In mid-afternoon I went alone to the spot, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... there is a whistling language!" chuckled Zeph—"and I'm now about to demonstrate it to you. You see these two boys? Well, they are natives of Gomera, the smallest of the Canary Islands. They were raised in a district where at times there is no living thing within sight, and the vast wilderness in the winding mountains is broken only by the crimson flower of the cactus growing in the clifts of ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... value of trees for the preservation of wild life, but how do trees affect the life of man and how does man affect tree life? Man is the builder or destroyer of tree life; although the tree is the oldest living thing in plant or animal life, man is master over trees. A man came into my farm office one day and said, "Everything in this room either grew from the earth or was mined from the earth." How about everything in this room? The furniture, the clothing you wear, the ring on your ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... hat and went out. She took the path by the hillside over the little harbor, and eventually she reached the face of the black cliff, at the foot of which a gray-green sea was dashing in white masses of foam: there was not a living thing around her but the choughs and daws, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... perfect stillness of the cove. The gulls were all asleep upon the ledges. Over all was a true autumn silence; a silence which may be heard. She stood awed, and listened in hope of a sound which might tell her that any living thing beside herself existed. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... in semblance a living thing, but all men know it has no life, and already the diplomats who have no other way are using it as a shield for their methods that cannot ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... companionship in the presence of trout, especially when you can feel them flopping in your fish basket; but it became evident that there were no trout in this wilderness, and a sense of isolation for the first time came over me. There was no living thing near. The river had by this time entered a deeper gorge; walls of rocks rose perpendicularly on either side, —picturesque rocks, painted many colors by the oxide of iron. It was not possible to climb out of the gorge; it was impossible to find a way by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... somewhere in my brain. To escape from it at the time, I went out upon the front steps, closed the door, and walked, restless as a caged tiger, up and down the deserted pavement. A homeless dog or two, panting from thirst, lay in the gutter; otherwise there was not a sound, not a living thing, from end to end of the long ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... then cast its waters across the dykes, deep into the forts, and far over the land. The earth shook as with the throb of a volcano. A wild glare lighted up the scene for one moment, and was then succeeded by pitchy darkness. Houses were toppled down miles away, and not a living thing, even in remote places, could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of plough-shares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs, and bodies, of what had been human beings. Slabs ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There was no living thing around them, not a fly, not a moss upon the rocks. Neither seal nor sea gull dare come near, lest the ice should clutch them in its claws. The surge broke up in foam, but it fell again in flakes of snow; and it frosted the hair of ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie |
