"Meditative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wintry time, Her heavens all dark with doubt and crime, Why lifts the Church her drooping head, As though her evil hour were fled? Is she less wise than leaves of spring, Or birds that cower with folded wing? What sees she in this lowering sky To tempt her meditative eye? ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... Sim Gage after a time, taking a meditative but wholly unagitated tobacco shot at the cook stove, "I ain't saying she is and I ain't saying she ain't. But I never did say I was a perfessional housekeeper, ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... scattering flocks of scampering sheep, past meditative cows who started up, puffing out snorts of perfume; scrambling through hedges, over gate and stile and ditch, with eyes upon the distant woods full of the purple gloom of evening, and, in my ears, the muffled thud! thud! thud! thud! of the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... death of his young wife; he loved her memory with steady constancy. If—and I think we may—if we allow that every author has some especial quality with which, in more or less degree, he endows all his children—if we grant that Shakespeare's people are all meditative, even the sprightly Rosalind and the clownish Dogberry—if we allow that all our acquaintances in Dickens are a trifle self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that even Tito Melema feels remorse for conduct which, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... prompts them to imposture. A symbolical religion is a proof of a certain refinement in civilization—the refinement of sages in the midst of a subservient people; and it absorbs to itself those meditative and imaginative minds which, did it not exist, would be devoted to philosophy. Now, even allowing full belief to the legends which bring the Egyptian colonists into Greece, it is probable that few among them ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strengthened his intellect by hard though irregular study, his meditative and impassioned nature, feeling in the highest degree the necessity of confirming its impressions, experienced more imperatively than a youth of fifteen generally does, the want of examining the traditional teachings which had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the day; and most of what strikes one as unsatisfactory in the discussion is probably due to a want of that close observation of facts which was hardly possible to a student on the shores of Windermere. On the other hand, it is still more certain that it was in these meditative scenes that the germs were ripened of those grave, ingenious, and affecting speculations which afterwards came to their full growth in the Enigmas of Life—to most of us by so much the most interesting of all its author's performances. His note-book shows that the thoughts that are suggested ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... eyed them somewhat wistfully as their white apparelled figures went by—ten had already left the chapel. Two more passed, then other two, and last of all came one alone—one who walked slowly, with a dreamy, meditative air, as though he were deeply absorbed in thought. The light from the open door streamed fully upon him as he advanced—it was the monk who had recited the Seven Glorias. The stranger no sooner beheld him than he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... meagre possessions in their proper receptacles, which was the girls after-breakfast occupation, she came upon an unfinished silk purse, and this served to bring an end for a time to the restoration of order, while she sat upon the floor in a meditative attitude. Presently she laid it on the bureau with a little sigh and returned to her task. Once this was completed, she again took the purse, and seating herself, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... miserable soldiers and hungry mechanics, and half-starved paupers and whole-starved labourers; and turn, with feelings of a very different kind, to the contemplation of virtue rewarded, and modesty well fed, in the persons of the two meditative gentlemen whose appearance at the front door in Harley Street has given rise to these reflections. The elder of them, who kept the post of honour on the right hand side, just opposite the bell-handle, and whose superiority over the other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... great sense, but more fit to be a scholar than a king; for whilst he studied the heavens and the stars, he lost the earth and his kingdom." Certainly it is for his services to letters, and not for political or military successes, that the meditative son of the valorous Ferdinand the Saint and the beautiful Beatrice of Swabia will be remembered. The father conquered Seville, and displaced the enterprising and infidel Moors with orthodox and indolent ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... suppose Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely bring himself to pay these public visits) went to see the child in the infirmary, and accidentally discovered that he was exactly the same age that I was. This, and the fact that he was a meditative and sober little boy, attracted us all still further to George, who became converted under one of my Father's sermons. He attended my public baptism, and was so much moved by this ceremony that he passionately desired to be baptized also, and was in fact so immersed, a few months later, slightly ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... side the governor took in so delicate a matter. On one side he was pressed by the archbishop; on the other he was solicited by the Jesuits and the friars. During these contests I found him one evening when I went to see him, meditative and thoughtful. He had two letters in his hand, which the archbishop had written to him, successively, that same day. He told me, with demonstrations of feeling which showed his embarrassment, that the archbishop was writing to him letter ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... of the city as he understood it. He labored painstakingly to make his meaning clear while Denham blew meditative smoke rings and Smithers listened quietly. But when Tommy had finished, Smithers said ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily-pointed ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... that her soul felt bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness of Sin; Sidney was trusting me; uncle and aunt were trusting me; and between them I was getting into a narrow corner. After a meditative silence ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... you, indeed!" Renard replied As the floating fowl he slyly eyed; "I hardly know what 'tis best to say, Let's think about it a moment, pray, I may help you yet, my dear, who knows?" So he struck a meditative pose, And thoughtfully laid his small, red toes, Up by the side ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... age of steam it seems almost idle to speak of Dante, the most profound, the most meditative, the most prophetic of all poets, in whose epic the panorama of medieval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... of money, it must often have struck the meditative mind—particularly that class of meditative mind whose wealth consists chiefly in meditation—to what thoroughly commonplace uses the modern millionaire applies the power that is his: in brief, with what little originality, with ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in "As You Like It," had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency of the Classical ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... one of those evenings, in a word, which calls up, we know not why, a train of thought not altogether sad, nor wholly tender, but calm and meditative and averse to action. I had been wandering along thus for nearly an hour, musing deeply all the while, yet perfectly unconscious that I was musing, much more what was the subject of my meditations, when coming suddenly to the turn of the lane, the old summer-house met my eyes, and almost ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... to Seventy-sixth Street and walked through the old neighborhood to the printery. The familiar streets, which secretly bore the print of every size shoe he had worn since he was a tiny toddling fellow, made him meditative, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... delivered his great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt." The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for it in England. In England there is ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... peaks of the cloudland in the skies, that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead, dwelt upon all meditative minds, even those that could not distinguish the altitudes nor decipher the forms. It was, therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon Joanna's mind; but her own age, as ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow; and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... little, necessary details. Our planting and reaping, building and buying, all the half-mechanical operations that absorb our thought and time, seem sometimes little better than the bustle of a colony of ants. When we look down upon it all from the height of some quiet, meditative hour, are we not at times oppressed with a sense of its triviality and worthlessness? Trivial and worthless it is, except as amidst it all we are working out something higher. But to a man whose heart is set on noble ends; one whose great aim is, not to ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Meditative reflection, when aptly associated with circumstance or occasion, may become a pleasing source of beauty. When employed by way of introduction, it may, as frequently in Irving and Hawthorne, strike the keynote of what follows. Sometimes ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... a boy of delicate constitution, not addicted to the active sports or any of the more vigorous habits of boys of his age. His only companions were a few intimate friends, and, thus secluded, his character naturally took a sensitive, meditative cast, and his growing disrelish for severer tasks was confirmed. As has been intimated, he entered as a pupil at Athens; but as the course of instruction in that institution was not in harmony with his tastes, he soon withdrew, applying himself afterwards to the study of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and wore a very meditative look. She did not say a word till they got to some little distance from the workshop. Then she half turned her head toward Walter, who was behind her, and said, "I suppose you know we ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... in strange contrast with the meditative quiet and lowly duties of these first years, came the crowded vicissitudes of the tempestuous course through which he reached his throne—court minstrel, companion and friend of a king, idol of the people, champion of the armies of God—and in his sudden elevation ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... like a bullet, we rushed through the gloaming with those blinding white beams cleaving the quiet gloom ahead of us and throwing preternaturally sharp shadows that reeled into oblivion like drunken goblins. It seemed to me, after my quiet meditative stroll, a monstrous invasion. We would flash round a curve with a whoop of the horn, and those pitiless rays would suddenly reveal in stark loneliness a man and a girl, clasped in each other's arms. Or they would loom up ahead, walking and lovemaking, and the sound ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... fault, it is that the fox-terrier lacks balance of character. The ejaculation "Cats!" causes him to behave in a way which is devoid of well-bred repose, and his conduct when in presence of rabbits is enough to make a meditative lurcher or retriever grieve. When a lurcher sees a rabbit in the daytime, he leers at him from his villainous oblique eye, and seems to say, "Shan't follow you just now—may have the pleasure of looking you up this evening." But the fox-terrier converts himself ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... had warbled on the night of his father's death began its song in a tree near by. As he listened, meditative, he saw Mrs. Sprockett glide across the street to the Sprockett house, returning from one of her unceasing visits to other homes ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... illustrations. The occasional observations which he throws in are always ingenious and sometimes profound. He shows himself at every turn to be an acute observer, a comprehensive thinker, and deeply imbued with the meditative spirit. The defects incidental to his peculiar training are more than compensated by the freshness of his manner and the directness of his language. More interesting still is the imaginative tendency which gives to many of his passages the charm of poetic feeling, and elevates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl up, boy fashion, under ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... intelligibility through the suppression of the dialogue. Sardou, as represented by the biograph, is no longer a man of letters; but he remains, scarcely less evidently than in the ordinary theatre, a skilful and effective playwright. Hamlet, that masterpiece of meditative poetry, would still be a good play if it were shown in moving pictures. Much, of course, would be sacrificed through the subversion of its literary element; but its essential interest as a play would yet remain ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Dominican striding back and forth, ascetic and serene of face, two nuns buried in their hoods, telling their beads on long rosaries which measured their time of waiting, priests from the diocese of Lyon, recognizable from the shape of their hats, and other persons of stern and meditative mien seated by the great table of black wood which stood in the centre of the room, and turning the leaves of some of those edifying periodicals which are printed on the hill of Fourvieres, the Echoes from Purgatory, or Marie's Rose-bush, and which give as premiums to yearly ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... gloom beyond him there gleamed a light which had not been there before. The meditative snort of a horse supported his statement. He began to deal as authoritatively with Mr. Peters' steamer trunk as he had dealt with the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the marquise, after a meditative pause. "We are both still beautiful enough to inspire love, but we could never convince any one of ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... becoming quite hard to please," her face turned partially away, her look meditative, "and—and dictatorial; but I will try. You are intelligent, a splendid dancer, fairly good-looking, rather bright at times, and, no doubt, would prove venturesome if not held strictly to your proper place. Take it all in all, you are even interesting, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... seemed to emerge from a cloud. It had always to Gregory's eyes the air of steadfast advance; the way in which her hair swept back and up from her brows gave it a wind-blown, lifted look. He glanced at her now from time to time, while, in a meditative and communicative mood, she continued to share her reflections with ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... own aims, and no one can read what he said without an increased admiration for him. But it is difficult to forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six poems and then fell asleep." And among the six are not Tintern Abbey or the Intimations of Immortality. Meditative poetry is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival volcanoes. Every man with him was ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Malcolm, of Loch Ore, an eccentric baronet, pronounced this oracular couplet in his old age, when troubled with the talk of the French Revolution. As a picture of meditative serenity and neutrality, it seems worthy ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... home methought she was in a meditative mood, and as we parted she bid me go to see her early next morning. This I should have done in any case, inasmuch as I knew no greater pleasure, after a feast or dance at which we had been together, than to talk with her of any matter we might each have marked, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... we talked so lightly last summer of what might be," Thorold said at last. And he said it in a meditative way, as if he ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... book; and the two young men stood several minutes, quite silent, on opposite sides of the hearth, with folded hands and meditative countenances; but the face of the one looked like the muddy waters of the Shatemuc tossed and tumbled under a fierce wind; the other's was calm and steady ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... his head, and looked round at his father, wondering what he would think or say. For a minute or two the fisherman smoked his pipe in silence. At length, taking it from his mouth, he said, in a slow, meditative fashion: "Well, little 'un, I s'pose if it's printed that way it's true; and if it is, why I s'pose we've all got a share in that 'Star of Peace' we was talking ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... crown thoughtfully in her hand, her large blue eyes fixed upon the smiling countenance before her with an earnest, meditative expression. ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... reddish earthenware pot upon the table, took out a cigarette and lit it at a candle. Then he sat smoking, pushed back a little from the circle, gravely watching. Sometimes I heard his deep, grave voice assenting 'Ye-es, ye-es,' with meditative boredom. Sometimes his little finger flicked off the ash on to the floor. His manner was that of a man too much interested in the life about him to wish to be more than a spectator. His interest was in life, not in ideas. He was new to that particular kind of life. Afterwards, when ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... he found himself disinclined for further talk. He had suddenly become meditative, and curled up in a corner with his head hard against the window pane, watching the wet fields and glistening roads as they slipped past. He had his plans made for his conduct at Glasgow, but, Lord! how he loathed the whole business! Last ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... the chambers under the roof. Towards the end of June Mr. Spicer began to amuse himself with a little gardening. He had discovered in the coal-hole an ancient fork, with one prong broken and the others rusting away. This implement served him in his slow, meditative attack on that part of the jungle which seemed to offer least resistance. He would work for a quarter of an hour, then, resting on his fork, contemplate the tangled mass of vegetation which he had succeeded ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... him, if the peculiar economic conditions of his Age had not intervened to bring about a different result; while two characteristics alone led one to suspect his latent power,—his large energetic hands with their powerful spatulate fingers, and his masterful and meditative dark eyes. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... the Baby, and set him at Jane's feet; and he sat there, looking at Jane, as at some object of extraordinary interest and wonder and fascination. And Brodrick looked at both of them with something of the same naif expression, and the Doctor, the attenuated, meditative Doctor, looked at all three, but especially at his brother. Gertrude Collett looked, now at ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... "before he comes Charlotte must have a bigger allowance." She became meditative. "By the way, you had better leave it in my hands; don't give it to Charlotte herself. She wheedles you, I know; but she has ideas about dress which I am not going to encourage; she makes herself far too noticeable ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... and respectable little stream. To-day it was a flood. "I must keep my feet," she thought; "I must not be swept away!" The thought of him was sometimes overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... than learning and leisure which impel him to the task. There is the nature of his profession, with the experience it brings him and the reflections it induces. The most unliterary pastor cannot but be a meditative man. The literary pastor cannot but be disposed to turn his meditations into verse, often finding in that 'mechanic exercise' the means ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood—"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Seeing her meditative, Deane slipped away to his cigar, and she sat in the hotel hall, musing. Deane's revelation of Charlie's treachery hardly surprised her; she meant to upbraid him severely, but she was conscious that, if little ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... all enthusiasm and eloquence, but not a man, I judge, of deep practical sagacity. A sort of Hamlet, he seems to me,—graceful, delicate, thoughtful, meditative, moral, noble-minded; and I should not wonder if he was now feeling something of Hamlet's burden: "The time is out of joint: oh, cursed spite, That ever I was born to ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... fascination; not, perhaps, at meal-times, when the water is lashed to froth by the darting, gleaming bodies—that is too greedy a business. But when a passer-by on a spring morning sees a pound fish fall back into the water with a meditative flop, he may pay the pond the compliment of wishing himself elsewhere. One accompaniment of a trout farm he may hope to escape—the sight of a dead kingfisher. Without wire netting, kingfishers find out the young fry ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... presents to his imagination, and the transient emotions which it will excite in him. But besides this there is a secret life which the careless reader will fail to see, and which the critic cannot report, but which will be revealed to the thoughtful, patient, meditative student. In this power to reveal an otherwise unknown world, lies the true glory of poetry. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the poet has to say ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... eventful day I enjoyed the first decent night's rest I had had for a week. The colonel refused, with an unnecessary ostentation of scorn, my patriotic offer to keep watch and ward over the city, and I turned in, tired out, at eleven o'clock, after a light dinner and a meditative pipe. I felt I had some reasons for self-congratulation; for considerable as my present difficulties were, yet I undoubtedly stood in a more hopeful position than I had before the revolution. I was now resolved to get my money safe out of the country, and I had hopes of being too ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... meditative astonishment). How great is the power of King Dushyanta! Since his arrival our ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the Governor again had recourse to the Elizabethan bards, then he lapsed suddenly into a meditative mood. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... bound to finish the chase by hunting the cat-like creature out; but he always altered his mind and went under the waggon once more, to walk close to the heels of the last pair of oxen, one of which looked back from time to time in a thoughtful meditative way, with its great soft eyes, as if in consideration whether it ought to kick out ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... with such friendly sweetness under the great trees of the long avenue. Beside him, little Ann was silent, with her legs stuck out rather wide apart. Motoring was a new excitement, for at home it was forbidden; and a meditative rapture shone in her wide eyes above her sudden little nose. Only once she spoke, when close to the lodge the car slowed down, and they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... house suited me. Of meditative and sedentary habits, I enjoyed the extreme quiet. There were but few lodgers, from which I infer that the landlord did not drive a very thriving trade; and these, probably oppressed by the sombre spirit of the place, were quiet and ghost-like in their movements. The proprietor I scarcely ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... lawyer with a meditative laugh, as he lighted a cigar, 'it strikes me that you must be a cursed nuisance in this world ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Dave chewed a meditative cud. "Maybeso you're right—and maybe 'way off. Say you're wrong. Say Meldrum has nothing to do with this. In that case it is in the hills that we have got to find ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... meditative slowness and with playful eyes: "Whenever I am justified in having such ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... object was to make the foundations of benevolence vibrate like the strings of a many-toned lute, and he compared his general progress through the haunts of the charitably disposed to the passage of a highly-charged firework through an assembly of meditative turtles. He was usually known, he added, as "the rapidly-moving person," or "the one devoid of outline," and it soon became apparent that he was also quite destitute of all dignified restraint. Selecting the place of commerce of some wealthy merchant, ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Cure, peacefully conning his "Hours," as with slow and thoughtful step he paces round and round. I can now read his calm, benevolent face by the light of half a century's experience of life, and have learned to love that still, black, meditative aspect which I found so antipathetic as a small boy—he is no burner alive of little heretics! This world is big enough for us both—and so is the world to come! And he knows it. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... once more bounded up, dashed the tears from his eyes, and was again singing some wild, barbaric chant. Abstracting itself from the appeal to its outward sense by melodies of which the language was unknown, my mind soon grew absorbed in meditative conjectures on the singular nature, so wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man grave ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prepares that after-joy Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul, By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued Doth find herself [13] insensibly disposed To virtue and true goodness. 105 Some there are, By their good works exalted, lofty minds And meditative, authors of delight And happiness, which to the end of time Will live, and spread, and kindle: even such minds [14] 110 In childhood, from this solitary Being, Or from like wanderer, haply have received [15] (A thing more precious far than all that books Or the solicitudes of love can do!) ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... of Nietzsche, whose whole position is implicit in Goethe's Divan, popularized it in Germany. The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... soaring dreams of fancy in which he so ardently delights. Not only is the Swiss determined by the peculiarities of his geographical position to lead a pastoral life, but the climate, and mountain scenery, and bracing atmosphere inspire him with the love of liberty. The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed to the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his mythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and infinite diversity of nature, the colossal magnitude ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... suggestions: but truth is to be mined from Nature, to be wrung from experience, to be seized as the victor's trophy on the battlefield of action and suffering. The flowers of poetry may bud spontaneously around the meditative spirit of genius, but the harvest of Truth, though, to be reaped by mind, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... at me silently with meditative eyes; and after a while she said slowly: I wish I were a man, only for a moment, to judge of myself and thy answer: for in one way thou art right, since I cannot understand why all men seem to lose their reason, as soon as they see me. And I said: There it is again, the very thing I spoke of, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... this outburst the impregnable wall of a calm and meditative silence. She looked angrily into his quiet eyes, which met hers with unflinching kindness. The contrast between their ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God holds with children "communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... looked sympathetic and amused. Bessie was silent for a few minutes and full of thought. Presently, in a musing, meditative voice, she said, "Ambition! I suppose all men who have force enough to do great things long for an opportunity to do them; and that we call ambition. Harry Musgrave is ambitious. He is going to be a lawyer. What ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Dominie Bogardus, which his fancy had heard in the air; or was he obeying another Dominie, of a wider parish, whose voice he heard in his heart? It was not often that the painter went to church. More frequently, in his little studio at the top of a house in Fulton Street, he sat smoking meditative cigars during the Sunday hours; or, if the day were auspicious, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... had been to ordinary salads as his 80-H.-P. car was to an electric buckboard. While Maitland, with all time at his purchase, idly flicked the ash from his cigarette and followed his attorney's meditative gaze out ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the taffrail side by side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone: ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... in the garden, because nature too is subject to the law of decay and death. The flowers fade and men die. Meditative souls have ever gathered lessons of mortality there, and invested death with an alien softness by likening it to falling leaves and withered blooms. But the contrast is greater than the resemblance, and painless dropping of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... his two or three shelves of books in the recess; not that he disturbed them much, but they were a grave and gentlemanlike property, and he liked them for their binding, and the impression they produced on his visitors. There was a meditative fragrance of cigars about him, and two or three Havannah ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... had gone out and he sat meditative in the shadows of the terrace—himself a shadowy shape, with his eyes fixed upon Conscience, and Conscience, too, remained quiet with that unstirring stillness which bespeaks a mood of dreams. Something in the air, subtle yet powerful, was working ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the meditative mood that had taken possession of her, and after shaking Hugh's hand and explaining that she did not want him to go further went away. When he thought she had quite gone she came back. "You'll hear I was engaged ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... She stood with a meditative air, holding a large piece of gauze, or some such ethereal stuff, as if considering what picture should next occupy the frame; while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored garments, which her quick fancy and magic skill could ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a meditative shoemaker, with weak eyes and a piping voice. "Why, I read in the 'Trumpet' that was what the Duke of Wellington said when he turned his coat and went ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can't possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously hard—and I'm decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self." ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... body regular and secular, is due to this contrast. Previously, they were not always well-disposed to it; the peasantry, nowhere, were content to pay tithes, and the artisan, as well as the peasant, regarded the idle, well-endowed, meditative monks as but little more than so many fat drones. The man of the people in France, by virtue of being a Gaul, has a dry, limited imagination; he is not inclined to veneration, but is rather mocking, critical and insubordinate at the powers above him, with a hereditary undertone of distrust and envy ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that she was in it. Never again, he knew, could he enter it without its being faintly fragrant of her who, all his life, he had considered the divinest created thing on earth. By her presence she had sanctified it and made of it a shrine for his meditative and wakeful hours. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... vivacious, unusually mobile face. At first sight he appeared younger than his years. The high, white forehead gave an impression of freshness and vigour; the eyes blazed one moment with intelligence, emotion or gaiety, a moment later they wore a meditative, dreamy expression, then again they looked young, even childlike. At other times they evidenced knowledge of life, or looked so weary, so bored that they betrayed their owner's age; at these times there appeared between them three furrows, certain indications of time and knowledge of life. ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... took his hat up, for he thought he'd had enough; Rubbed an elongated forehead with a meditative cuff; Paused before the stable doorway; said, when there, in accents mild, "She's a fine young 'oman, cook is; but that's where it ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... a note of answer about his neck, the master made ready to take by force. First he went over his new outfit of saddle and guns, looking to every strap of the former, and the latter, revolvers and rifle, he weighed and balanced with a meditative look, as if he were memorizing their qualities against a time of need. With Satan saddled and Bart on guard at the mouth of the cave, he gathered up all the accumulation of odds and ends, provisions, skins, and made a stirring ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... curate of Ivell still held aloof, tantalizing Frances by his elusiveness. Plainly he was waiting upon events. Millborne bore the reproaches of his wife and daughter almost in silence; but by degrees he grew meditative, as if revolving a new idea. The bitter cry about blighting their existence at length became so impassioned that one day Millborne calmly proposed to return again to the country; not necessarily to ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... rest himself. He was tired, and he experienced that state of mental vacuity which comes at the end of an exhaustive discussion that has liberated some belief matured in the course of meditative years. He had indeed been making his confession of faith, had he only known it; and its effect was to make Jukes, on the other side of the door, stand scratching his head ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... was a regular shout when, the matter having been explained to him, Mac took a meditative stare at Rose through his goggles, and said in a philosophical tone, "Well, I don't think I should have minded much if she ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... "too deep for tears;" not only does the sternness of my habits of thought present an antagonism to the feelings which prompt tears—wanting of necessity to those who, being protected usually by their levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow, would by that same levity be made incapable of resisting it on any casual access of such feelings; but also, I believe that all minds which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have done, must, for their own ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... replied Willie in a meditative tone, "from a friend of mine—a very partikler friend o' mine—as declines to let me mention his name, so you'll have to be satisfied with the wittles and without the name of the wirtuous giver. P'r'aps it was a dook, or a ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... House,' which is still to be seen (now the Office of the Accountant-General), that he lived with his wife. The ancient Council Chamber is replete with historic associations; and St. Mary's Church offers material for many researchful and meditative visits. The streets have history in their names. 'Charles and James Street,' for example, which is a present-day combination of two streets of yore, is jointly commemorative of the days of the Merry ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... shifted his chair so as to command a better view of the road. He watched in meditative silence until the tramp had become a mere blot upon the whiteness of the dusty road and had finally disappeared over the brow of a distant hill. Then he spoke ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... He never looked towards me, but plucked with nervous fingers at his torn trousers. The gulls hovered around us with melancholy cries, as they wheeled in graceful circles and swooped down to their prey in the depths at our feet. Presently he spoke again in a meditative, far-away voice— ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... brief notes, one to Colonel Adye, gave them to his servant to take, with explicit instructions as to her way of leaving the house. "There is no danger," he said, and added a mental reservation, "to you." He remained meditative for a space after doing this, and then returned to his ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... an Infant-Eye. As regards the title 'Centuries of Meditations' we are ignorant of the meaning Traherne may have attached to it, and what he meant by calling the four parts of the book, 'First', 'Second', etc., Century. The book itself represents a manual of devotion for meditative study by ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Lady Lufton do for her protege, and it may well be imagined that the Devonshire physician, sitting meditative over his parlour fire, looking back, as men will look back on the upshot of their life, was well contented with that upshot, as regarded his eldest offshoot, the Rev. Mark ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... then, that the village clock was striking four, when meditative cows were examining the length of their shadows, and all the geese were setting forth for their afternoon swim, a stranger opened Mrs. Derrick's little gate and walked in. Stretching out one hand to the dog in token ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... however, he possessed fully and intensely. It was his love for his wife, and three poems embody it. The first is By the Fireside. It does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long, too many-motived for a lyric. It is a meditative poem of recollective tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married love in England is more beautiful. The poet, sitting silent in the room where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses on what ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... but it was in a meditative fashion, and not very much to the point. He lay back in his easy-chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and talked; and his talk was not at all about the selling of Hill Beeches in Buckinghamshire, but of much more abstract matters. He spoke ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... of the sun, out of the blast, Out of the world, alone I passed Across the moor and through the wood To where the monastery stood. There neither lute nor breathing fife, Nor rumour of the world of life, Nor confidences low and dear, Shall strike the meditative ear. Aloof, unhelpful, and unkind, The prisoners of the iron mind, Where nothing speaks except the bell, The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remains objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of being felt universally,—the profound moods of the meditative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historic states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... must be saved!" cried Ezra, with meditative brows and hands plunged deep in his trouser pockets. "There is that girl's money. Could we not get ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ages, were swept away; and, in their stead, fields of waving grain hung their golden ears in the ripening sun, ready for the coming harvest. Flocks and herds grazed in the green pastures which sloped to the water's edge, or collected in meditative groups beneath the scattered trees that spread their ample branches to shelter them. The noble range of hills which rose beyond in beautiful inequalities, girdling the indented coast, presented a rich and variegated prospect. Broad patches of cultivation appeared in every sheltered ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought lying at the root of many a metaphorical term, employed for the designation of spiritual things, even of those with regard to which professing ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... meditative thought, A serpent writhed across my pathway; not A large or deadly serpent; yet the sight Filled me with ghastly terror and affright. I shrieked aloud: a darkness veiled my eyes - And I fell fainting 'neath ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... get bored with William was when he turned inventor. It came rather as a surprise to us; and when he began to be abstracted, profoundly meditative, almost sullen, with an apparent desire to be alone, we thought at first that it was the onset of hydrophobia. In fact, we looked it up on the back of the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... her shirt in colour—or rather in all absence of it—that her face was thin, its contours hardened, her eyebrows drawn into a little frown, her eyes enormous, sombre and clouded as with meditative thought, increased, in Carteret's estimation, assurance of her regained self-mastery and composure. Nor did a reticence in her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... wrapped in meditative thought, unheeding the approach of the rider, the horseman, coming on with a long, swinging lope, watched the motionless figure on the summit of the Divide with careful interest. As he drew nearer the cowboy pulled his horse down ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... nevertheless we are always exploited by them. We have a heart somewhere beneath the intellect; we have NOT the grim qualities of the man who makes others work for him. We are indolent, we like to look on at the game, we are meditative, and we are fastidious; they will sweat our brains and blame us ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... tall, blond young man who earned his eighty marks per month as wireless man on the Ottilie, having eaten his dinner with the passengers of the second-cabin and smoked a meditative pipe at the door of the little coop on the after boat-deck which served him as office and bedroom, knocked out the ashes and entered his citadel to prepare for the night's business. But first he connected up his detector and snapped the receivers against his ears, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... that sentence written at the root of all declarations of love? Sarrasine, who was too passionately in love to make fine speeches to the fair Italian, was, like all lovers, grave, jovial, meditative, by turns. Although he seemed to listen to the guests, he did not hear a word that they said, he was so wrapped up in the pleasure of sitting by her side, of touching her hand, of waiting on her. He was swimming in ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... its intensest height, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to the burning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly ten years ago he expressed his preference for political activity over the meditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into the Revolution with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixed and unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that the great ones ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... save you first; rest assured, I will save you;" he responded, shaking her hand, bidding her good night. On returning to the mansion he found Marston seated at the table in the drawing-room, in a meditative mood. Good night, my friend!" ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... was very well when I left home,' the other answered constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... from a troublous dream, Pursues with force his meditative theme; Calm as the ocean in its halcyon still, Calm as the sunlight sleeping on the hill; Calm as at Ephesus great Paul was seen To rend his robes in agonies serene; Calm as the love that radiant ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... harmonious introduced. He knew a young man by the name of Ellsworth, an architect newly graduated from a local school, with whom he had struck up an interesting friendship—one of those inexplicable inclinations of temperament. Wilton Ellsworth was an artist in spirit, quiet, meditative, refined. From discussing the quality of a certain building on Chestnut Street which was then being erected, and which Ellsworth pronounced atrocious, they had fallen to discussing art in general, or the lack of it, in America. And it occurred to him that Ellsworth was the man to carry out ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... what he meant to imply, and I also knew that he knew that I understood that he considered me a disturbing element. Then he again raised the half-demolished hunk of bread to his mouth, stopped and regarded the apple in meditative indecision. From head to heels he was clothed in the most exquisite white flannel and buckskin tennis clothes, but for all their civilized worldliness he resembled nothing so much as a feeding king of ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... voice monotonous and nasal, she began to read. Maria Clara gazed vaguely into space. The first commandment finished, Aunt Isabel observed her listener over her glasses, and appeared satisfied with her sad and meditative air. She coughed piously, and after a long pause began the second. The good old woman read with unction. The terms of the second commandment finished, she again looked at her niece, who slowly turned ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... confident step of a familiar. Having deposited hat, cane and ulster in their respective places—there was a place for everything or it would have been quite impossible to abide in that snuggery—he sank into one of the easy chairs, rolled a cigarette with meditative deliberation, lighted it and blew the smoke into the moonlight where it assumed a thousand ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... aroused. A noble strain of fighting blood courses through my veins. Not that I go out of my way to seek quarrels, you understand. On the contrary. 'Peaceful' could well describe my general attitude. Meditative. I am usually to be found Thinking. I have a powerful intellect. No doubt you have noticed the stamp of genius on ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... modest attire. He was one of a class occasionally met with in the most quiet walks of life, men who torment their spirit on some public question till it becomes a personal grievance, or rather a corroding passion. What were bishops personally to him? He might have prayed, and expounded, and walked meditative in his fields, and left a public question to be decided by the movements, necessarily slow, of public opinion. But no; he was constituted quite otherwise. From a spiritual jurisdiction, claimed though ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... several more classical studies of extraordinary beauty; but your interest in them would depend upon something more than interest in Greek and Roman history, and we can not study all the poems. So I prefer to go back to the meditative lyrics, and to give a few splendid examples of these more personal compositions. The following stanzas are from a poem whose Latin title signifies that Love conquers death. In this poem the author becomes the equal of Tennyson as a ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... of learning are simply "boarding schools" for bigger boys; that learned men are not more numerous in them than out of them; that the advancement of knowledge is not the object of fellows of colleges; that, in the philosophic calm and meditative stillness of their greenswarded courts, philosophy does not thrive, and meditation ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... very definitions that he gave, and by the turn of his phrase, which always keeps an audience rather than a meditative reader in view. "What is the function of criticism at the present time?" he asks, and answers—"A disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." That is a wide warrant. The writer who exercises ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No! Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow Not melancholic, but meditative Not to instruct but to be instructed Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice Nothing can be a grievance that is but once Nothing falls where all falls Nothing is more confident than a bad poet Nothing ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... is! Right over there under the spruces." He threw the bearskin over the sorrel, who stood passively by the roadside, hanging a meditative head. Then he caught Mattie's hand and drew her ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... charming conceit which prompted the plan of the series, with its half-playful, half-ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, there is, throughout, an undertone of grave and meditative tenderness which it is one of the peculiar properties of MacDowell's art to communicate and enforce. This is continually apparent in "The Lover" and "Sweetheart," fugitively so in the "Prologue," and, in an irresistible ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... goodness at all is mine," said the meditative Professor, "save that of being as honest as I can to both sides! But there is some change in the situation which I do not quite understand. There is some new plan on foot I would swear! The Prince was too triumphant—Gloria too happy—Ronsard too satisfied! ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... them. Then Dolly begged for instances. Had we, Americans, ever fought at sea? Mr. Eberstein answered that, and gave her details of facts, while Mrs. Eberstein sat by silent and watched Dolly's serious, meditative face. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... by a thermometer, it could not have been better for the yellow tassels that were ripening and fertilizing the silk day by day. The cornfields were far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between. It took a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee that they would enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields, or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... afterwards, and was always delighted by the affectionate simplicity of his demeanor. As it was the country's custom to educate the first-born of royalty for the throne, the Ali-Mami of Footha-Yallon had been brought up almost within the precincts of the mosque. I found the prince, therefore, more of a meditative "book-man" than warrior; while the rest of his family, and especially his younger brothers, had never been exempt from military duties, at home or abroad. Like a good Mussulman, the sovereign was a quiet, temperate ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... described by the Sankhya manuals and think of the relation of the soul to matter in a more materialistic way. The notion of the separate eternal soul was the object of the Buddha's persistent polemics and was apparently a popular doctrine when he began preaching. The ascetic and meditative exercises prescribed by the Yoga were also known before his time and the Pitakas do not hide the fact that he received instruction from two Yogis. But though he was acquainted with the theories and practices which grew into the Yoga and Sankhya, he did not found his religion on them for he ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... meditative way; "it is very late." Then, after a pause, she turned towards me with an expression in her face which said plainly enough: I am now going to give you a little confidential information. Her words were: "The fact is we are just waiting ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... wrong tack. A chum of one's own age is quite a different article. Very often they are not lads of the same dispositions and tastes, and are drawn to one another by these very differences. It not unfrequently happens that a bright active lad will chum with a very quiet meditative one. The one doing the thinking and the other the acting. Such friendships will last on sometimes through life, but generally well through boyhood. Very often the last act of chumship is the acting ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous |
