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More "Impressionable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... protect themselves and secure what they need for health of body and mind; they are exceedingly impressionable; and the future is always in their hands. The first and most imperative duty of parents is to give their children the best attainable preparation for life, no matter at what sacrifice to themselves. There are hosts ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... happened to you and you had been given special leave of forty-eight hours to make all necessary preparations, would not you have gone where your more impressionable acquaintances and friends were gathered together in the greatest numbers, informing them of the position and doing, on the strength of it, a quiet but irretrievable swank? No ostentation, mark you, and nothing approaching a boast, but just a suspicion of a brave careless ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... he stole away into the hall, there was a sound followed him as between a groan and a cry. Hearing which statement, an impressionable charwoman went into hysterics, and had to be recalled to her senses by a dose of gin, suggested and taken ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... genius," she declared, "must be impressionable. We ought to set ourselves to discover your ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... would have perhaps been more than could be expected of human nature. But it is true that he seemed to lose where those two artists proved they had everything to gain from a style that passed detail swiftly, treating it suggestively. They were by nature impressionable to a different aspect of life, and in self expression they required a ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... the anathemas hurled at my innocent head, during the impressionable years of girlhood, by the pale and determined Congregational ministers with gold-bowed spectacles, who held forth in the meeting-house of my maternal ancestry (all honor to their sincerity), had taken little hold upon my mind, still, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... payment, and sometimes, as in Our Boys, uncles come and weep at the infinite pathos of a bad breakfast egg. But it's always a very sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no doubt it conduces to mortality by deterring the young and impressionable from literary vices. As for its truth, that is ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... a new migration, which no doubt exercised a determining influence on the boy's development. The family removed to Mexico, and there Alan spent a great part of the most impressionable years of his youth. If New York embodies the romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... spent in Italy at the most impressionable period of his life fixed the characteristics of his style as a composer, and we may well suppose that they exercised a decisive influence on his personality and character. His youth had been spent in the respectable ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... Demosthenes' oratory was unable to defeat the great antagonist of his country. To Philip of Macedon failure was an inconceivable idea. Resident during three impressionable years of his youth at Thebes, he had there learned, from the example of Epaminondas, what a single man could do: and he proceeded to each of the three great tasks of his life—the welding of the rough ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... not the versatile nature of the Scot and his ability, especially when caught young, in "doing in Rome as the Romans do." Barclay's English education and foreign travel, together extending over the most impressionable years of his youth, could not have failed to rub off any obvious national peculiarities of speech acquired in early boyhood, had the difference between the English and Scottish speech then been wider than it was. But the language of Barbour and Chaucer was really one and the same. It will then not ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... as if to speak, but she turned her delicate head aside. The crowd engulfed her presently, and Fitzgerald picked up the card. There was neither name nor definite address on it. It was a message, hastily written; and it sent a thrill of delight and speculation to his impressionable heart. Still carrying the tray before him he hastened over to the club, where there was something of an ovation. Instead of a dinner for three it became one for a dozen, and Fitzgerald passed the statuettes round as souvenirs of the most unique bet ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing was new and living—poetry. Chenier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... rather oddly for a moment. "I am very, very glad that you are such a steady, sensible, practical man. A vapid, impressionable youth, during this season of propinquity, might have been so foolish as to fall in love with me, and that would have been ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Genga, impressionable as his nature was, yet has much individual excellence to distinguish him from the rest of Signorelli's assistants. Born at Urbino in 1476, he was placed, at the age of fifteen, in the studio of Signorelli, with whom, according to Vasari, he remained for twenty years, ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... of her face. She gazed after the trailer with the unabashed interest of a child, wondering who he might be. In that instant her soul, impressionable and eager, received and retained, like a sensitive plate, every line of his figure, every minute modelling of his face—even his fashion of saddle and the leather of his gun-case remained with her as food for reflection, and as she loitered down the trail a wish to know more about ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... he was gathering in impressions of the outsides of things—he did not dip beyond that: he was full of quite definite tastes, desires, and prejudices; and though he was interested in life, he was not particularly interested in what lay behind it. He was not in the least impressionable, in the sense that others influenced or diverted him from ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they were genuinely conscientious men—and they did not grudge the money, though the tutor's terms were high. Jane was then a very young girl—so young, indeed, that parents and guardians would scarcely have taken alarm had they been aware of her being beneath the same roof with their impressionable charges; and she was childish-looking even for her tender years. Leonard Yorke, gentle and good-humored, was moved with compassion toward the orphan girl, as guileless-eyed as a saint in a picture; he pitied her poverty, and, still more, the worldly character ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... hidden keg of gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians, and it will even be found to have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and almost identical in form appear and appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... presence must inspire his lips with the eloquence of love. And she—was not this delirious atmosphere of light and music just the influence to which he would wish to subject her before trying the last experiment of all which can stir the soul of a woman? He knew the mechanism of that impressionable state which served ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... doubt, to lack of time for more extended work) was that he loved to seize a passing impression or inspiration and to express it in music before it faded from his mind. Nearly all his small pieces are musical photographs of the fancies of an impressionable and sensitive imagination. ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... there silently for a time, but evidently the Professor was not disposed to allow too much time for reflections which he knew must be gloomy to the boys' impressionable minds. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and you know how in nervous cases the mind reacts upon the body. If he chose to preserve crutches and sticks, as they do in the mediaeval churches, he might, I am sure, paper his consulting room with them. A favourite device of his with an impressionable patient is to name the exact hour of their cure. "My dear," he will say, swaying some girl about by the shoulders, with his nose about three inches from hers, "you'll feel better to-morrow at a quarter to ten, and at twenty past you'll be as well as ever you were ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness. Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament, quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying bass was rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... in charge of St. Anne's had whetted her appetite for the experience by interposing unexpected objections. Their charges, they explained, about two hundred in number, were very impressionable, very easily excited. A stranger in the chapel meant a sensation. Of course, the lay workers of the institution and the old people from the Home across the way sometimes came in, but they were so soberly dressed. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... are to say to him the moment you see him that I was right about the novel, and that he is to look and see if it did not end as I said it would. And Loretta—" here she rose and approached the speaker with a sweet, appealing look which brought tears to the impressionable girl's eyes, "don't go gossiping about me downstairs. I sha'n't be sick long. I am going to be better soon, very soon. By the time you see me here again I shall be quite like my old self. Forget how—how"—and Loretta said she seemed to have difficulty in finding the right word here—"how childish ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the appeals for rescue of an entombed Christ in the hands of an infidel enemy, the tears and cries of the crowds, worked on the impressionable shepherd lad, unaccustomed to aught but life with his flocks, worked on him so powerfully that he was hot with a desire to rush to Jerusalem and expel the hated Mohammedans from that land and city, once blessed ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... She held out her hands like a child, to the least impressionable boatman. In an instant she was clasping ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... an impressionable person, but Melmotte's eloquence had moved even him. It was not that he was sorry for the man, but that at the present moment he believed him. Though he had been absolutely sure that Melmotte had forged his name or caused it to be forged,—and ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... of "Vive Bonaparte!" which came from the lower part of the Rue du Mont Blanc, and swept like a sonorous wave toward the Rue de la Victoire, told Josephine of her husband's return. The impressionable Creole had awaited him anxiously. She sprang to meet him in such agitation that she was unable to utter ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... women," he said, "can hardly be over-estimated. We must never forget that the most impressionable years of a man's life are those during which he is learning to say his prayers ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... It excites the captain's admiration to see how perfectly lady-like, how really gracious is her manner to the aspiring widower, and yet—how serenely unencouraging. No one understood this better than Mr. Gleason himself. Finding her deeper, less impressionable than he at first supposed, he simply changed his tactics. He avoided the store, he shunned conversations on dangerous topics, he cultivated the society of Colonel Whaling, and deeply impressed that veteran with the ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in regard to the secret of Senior's power of recording conversations which is worth noting by modern psychologists. I cannot help thinking that what Senior did, unconsciously of course, was to trust to his subconsciousness. That amiable and highly impressionable, if dumb, spirit which sits within us all, got busy when Thiers or Guizot was talking. The difficulty was to get out of him what he had heard, and had at once transferred to the files in the Memory cupboard. Senior, without knowing it, had, I doubt not, some little ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the beats would come the quack of a wild duck near at hand, the splash of a leaping fish, the plaintive whistle of water-fowl: altogether such a chorus of incongruities as was not lost upon our very impressionable young vagabond. The booming strokes of eleven recalled him to a sense of time and his immediate needs. His great adventure was still before him; he pushed on, bag in hand, to select its scene. Another road he crossed, alive with the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... till his death, in 1516, at the ripe age of ninety, and nearly to the end was he both a busy painter and an interested and impressionable investigator of art, open to the influence of his own pupil Giorgione, and, when eighty, being the only painter in Venice to recognize the genius of Duerer, who was then on a visit to the city. Duerer, writing home, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... was so strange, so self-willed, and yet babyish, so heartless, and yet so impressionable. A sharp word or tone even would make her cry, and she was sensitive to even less than that, yet seemingly quite careless of the trouble and distress ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... their abilities and confide their projects. And Peschiera has done all he can to render this poor woman so wholly dependent on him as to be his slave and his tool. But I have learned certain traits in her character that show it to be impressionable to good, and with tendencies to honour. Peschiera had taken advantage of the admiration she excited, some years ago, in a rich young Englishman, to entice this admirer into gambling, and sought to make his sister both a decoy and an instrument in his designs of plunder. She did not encourage ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His letter to the Literary ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... represented by Joseph Bridau, one of the best painters among the younger men. But for a too impressionable nature, which made havoc of Joseph's heart, he might have continued the traditions of the great Italian masters, though, for that matter, the last word has not yet been said concerning him. He combines Roman outline with Venetian ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... be glad to see me again?" he asked himself. "Pshaw! I daresay she has forgotten me by this time. A fortnight is an age with some women; and I should fancy Charlotte Halliday just one of those bright impressionable beings who forget easily. I wonder whether she is really like that 'Molly' whose miniature was found by Mrs. Haygarth in the tulip-leaf escritoire; or was the resemblance between those two faces only a silly fancy ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... who enters this perilous career. Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point. They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them, and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... He is falling asleep! He is asleep! A remarkably rapid occurrence of hypnosis. The subject has evidently already reached a state of anaesthesia. He is remarkable,—an unusually impressionable subject, and might be subjected to interesting experiments!... (Sits down, rises, sits down again.) Now one might run a needle into ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... The fact that none of Mr. Glenthorpe's clothes were missing was not likely to be discovered in an inn until suspicion was aroused. Ronald laid his plans well, but how was he to know that in his path to the pit he walked over soil as plastic and impressionable as wax?" ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... is much exaggeration in all you have told me. Your imagination has been struck, and you have suffered it to carry you away, so that you believe all you say now; but I can assure you, you are mistaken. You are impressionable, susceptible, but too young to understand the real passion of love. At your age, young girls have very often some little love affair with the engaging young dancer they met at the last ball. You, who have been kept out of society on account of the ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... temptations before our young people." Alfred felt himself sinking in the pew. "I do not hesitate to condemn the theatre as one of the broadest roads that leads to destruction. Fascinating no doubt to the young of susceptible and impressionable feelings, on that account all the more dangerous. Show life is a delusion. It holds out hopes never realized; it poisons the mind and diseases the soul; it takes innocence and happiness and repays with suffering and misery. It separates families; it desolates ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... expression my too obscure affections. Your words haunted my sleeping and waking thoughts until it fortunately occurred to me that you yourself had the very means for accomplishing my reformation. You know how impressionable I am to every wave of sound. Who knows but your voice, which I am sure will be the sweetest in the world to me, may be the instrument destined to stir my drowsy soul, to loose my halting tongue, and even to force ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... it. Men like Elmer Ford aren't fit to have charge of a child. You don't know him, but he's just an unscrupulous financier, without a thought above money. To think of a boy growing up in that tainted atmosphere—at his most impressionable age. It means death to any good there ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... explanation. The girl felt that she was a prisoner, under sentence for something which she could not understand. She turned hither and thither in her appeal for help and understanding, and everybody turned aside as if she were an outcast. The iron of injustice began to enter her soul. She was at the impressionable age, when she felt deeply every injury done her. She thought much of Ann Barnes and Martin Christiansen, her two friends. They would have understood. They would have answered the questions, told her the truth which her mother hinted at yet ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood, tired to regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more easily infected me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation leaves the body, because I was younger and more impressionable than he. Like two lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a common reverie. His intuitions had already acquired that acuteness which must surely characterize the intellectual perceptiveness of great poets and often bring ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... projects he undertook. He had also that invaluable attribute of the priest, the gift of inspiring confidence and opening the heart. He did not seem to seek confidences, yet they always came to him. Young men in trouble, young women in woe, lads in the impressionable period when sentimental experiences assume importance prodigious, youth of both sexes bewildered between physical and religious sensations, the sick and the poor, the ignorant and the cultivated, all found in him that sympathy which opens the heart, ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... not a free-thinker—the phrase is always a mockery—but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as a man can be without faith, the conjunction struck him. Moreover, the strongest men are naturally the most impressionable, and consequently the most superstitious, if, indeed, one may call superstition the prejudice of the first thoughts, which, without doubt, is the appreciation of the result in causes hidden to other eyes but perceptible to ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... that it was their manifest duty to save the dear little thing from the other relatives, who had no idea about how to bring up a sensitive, impressionable child, and they were sure, from the way Elizabeth Ann looked at six months, that she was going to be a sensitive, impressionable child. It is possible also that they were a little bored with their empty life in their rather forlorn, little brick house in the medium-sized city, and that they welcomed ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... loathe this irritability, sensitiveness, impressionable-ness, fastidiousness, inherited from my aristocratic father! What right had he to bring me into this world, endowed with qualities quite unsuited to the sphere in which I must live? To create a bird and throw it in the water? An aesthetic amidst ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... to emotional appeal, his heart is tender and he is impressionable. If he feels with the characters in his tales he develops a power of emotion. In Andersen's Snow Man it is hard to say which seems more human to him or which makes more of an emotional appeal, the Snow Man or the Dog. He is sorry for the poor Shoemaker in ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... that he was already agog. Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... black with reproach upon him. Then turning to the ladies: "That shows how he misunderstands me. Just because I had a witty mother,—just because I 'm not a stolid, phlegmatic ox of a John Bull,—just because I 'm sensitive and impressionable,—he calls me flighty. But you know better, don't you? You, with all your fine feminine instincts and perceptions, you know that I 'm really as steady and as serious as the pyramids of Egypt. Even my very jokes have a moral purpose—and what I teach in them, I learned in sorrow. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... All impressionable, imaginative young people, brought into close association with him, appear to have felt his spell. His private secretaries were his sworn henchmen. Hay's diary rings with admiration—the keen, discriminating, significant admiration ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... a ludicrous spectacle when he donned the uniform, he would march away with a light heart. He did not analyze her influence over him, but only knew that she had a peculiar fascination which it was not in his impressionable nature ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... most frequently either early in life, when pubescence is, or is about to be, established, or late in life, when sexual desire has become either entirely extinct or very much abated. Young boys and girls are exceedingly impressionable at, or just before, puberty, and are apt to embrace religion with the utmost enthusiasm. A distinguished evangelist declares that "men and women seldom or never enter into the kingdom of God after they have arrived at maturity. Out of a thousand converts, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... school, it must be owned that Mr. Sanford Ray was a most indifferent scholar. Of geography, history, and languages he had rather more than a smattering because of occasional tours abroad when still at an impressionable age. Yet Sandy "took more stock," as he expressed it, and "stawk," as he called it, in Sioux and the sign language than he did in French or German, knew far more of the Rockies and Sierras than he did of the Alps, studied the European cavalry with the eye of an accomplished critic, and ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... more! Magsie would be a rage! Magsie's young favors would be sought far and wide. Magsie's summer home, Magsie's winter apartments, Magsie's clothes and fads, these would belong to the adoring public of the most warmhearted and impressionable city in the world! Rachael saw it all coming with perhaps more certainty than did even the little actress behind ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... be alarmed," said the Major, turning to smile at his son. "It is only that I am a little nervous and impressionable from my illness. But it is strange how a depth attracts, and how necessary it is for boys to be careful and master themselves when tempted to do things that are risky. Upon my word, I marvel at the daring of you fellows in running such a risk as you ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... found himself in distinguished company there, amongst men of considerable position. And you know, what that means: thick waists, bald heads, teeth that are not—as some satirist puts it. Imagine amongst them a nice boy, fresh and simple, like an apple just off the tree; a modest, good-looking, impressionable, adoring young barbarian. My word! What a change! What a relief for jaded feelings! And with that, having, in his nature that, dose; of poetry which saves even a simpleton from ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... Doubtless their founders were actuated by a belief that Esculapius was ever ready to help those who first helped themselves. In view, therefore, of the superior hygienic conditions, together with intelligent medical care, it is not surprising that seemingly marvellous cures should result, especially of impressionable persons affected ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... his former sudden departure, and of running a gauntlet of inquiry concerning his marriage to the aristocratic Miss Warwick of South Carolina; the fear that some one at Patesville might have suspected a connection between Rena's swoon and his own flight,—these considerations so moved this impressionable and impulsive young man that he called a bell-boy, demanded an early breakfast, ordered his horse, paid his reckoning, and started upon his homeward journey forthwith. A certain distrust of his own sensibility, which he felt to ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... undertake it. Had there, however, been men who, regardless of themselves, would have undertaken to do it, it would certainly have succeeded, as not only was the Emperor full of good intentions, but he was also impressionable, and consistent purposefulness on a basis of fearless honesty would have impressed him. Besides, the Emperor was a thoroughly kind and good man. It was a genuine pleasure for him to be able to do good, neither did he hate ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... could not possibly enter; I resolved to wait the morrow, and the succeeding days of our convention at Chickle University, for opportunities to exert upon this impressionable young girl ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... sphere. And it affects character; for it is the atmosphere he breathes. It enters his blood and makes the circuit of his veins. "All love assimilates to what it loves." A man is moulded into likeness of the lives that come nearest him. It is at the point of the emotions that he is most impressionable. The material surroundings, the outside lot of a man, affects him, but after all that is mostly on the outside; for the higher functions of life may be served in almost any external circumstances. But the environment of other lives, the communion of other souls, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... Franks; it was in great measure set aside by the Lombards; it seems to have been unknown to the Alemanni and Bavarians. We shall see in the sequel the importance of these facts. The future of Europe lay not with the Goths or with the Burgundians, but with more ignorant or less impressionable races who, rather by good fortune than by choice, escaped the vices in missing the lessons of Roman civilisation. The Franks and the Saxons, as we find them described by Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede, were far from resembling the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... interest of the Greeks was strengthened by this, and the Egyptians were made to see their history in its proper light. To this endeavour we owe the history of Manetho. But, in spite of the policy of the Ptolemies, the impressionable nature of the Hellenic character and the interest of the Egyptians,—in spite of all that tended to a fusion of Hellenism and Orientalism, it never came to a proper amalgamation. The contradiction between the free-thought philosophy of Greece, which was fast outgrowing ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... your head, Barker boy," said Demorest, "for here are the pack mules and packer." This was quite enough to divert the impressionable young man, who speedily finished his dressing, as a mule bearing a large pack-saddle and two enormous saddle-bags or pouches drove up before the door, led by a muleteer on a small horse. The transfer of the treasure to the saddle-bags was quickly made by their united ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... boot, to last, peg, trim, gum, blackball and stone it, all processes of the craft as then practised. But how does one know when he is learning? I was laying up a good store of things more valuable than any in books, whilst the free life I led was preparing in me the soft and impressionable tablets on which could be traced future experiences and acquisitions of a more intellectual kind. Tomorrow would come and this was its preparation. Yet not consciously can one prepare for it all that ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... concluded her legend. It was the first love-story Dick had ever heard, and in pity at the beautiful narrative, which no clumsiness of narration could altogether rob of its pathos, he was crying too. There is no audience like an impressionable child, and the immortal story of love and misfortune seemed very pitiful to his small ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... had lost something of their aristocratic pallor. Margaret Babcock, the daughter of a well known glass manufacturer, had been one of the list of feminine acquaintances whom he had honored with long distance familiarity. She was an impressionable young person and her papa was very wealthy. The correspondence had broken off when her mother discovered one of the letters. Mrs. Babcock had definite views concerning her daughter's future, and Mr. Hungerford was not included in the perspective. The ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... City children who have access to the theatre often get their heroes from the stage; and the same thing may be said about the drama as about fiction. It is only the too highly colored and exaggerated melodrama that is likely to be objectionable for the impressionable youth. The moving-picture shows, which are coming to supply so many of the children with their chief opportunity to learn life, have been, on the whole, fairly wholesome; and the movement to secure more adequate censorship of the films will probably leave these sources of instruction perfectly ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... which was the work of Planche, is founded upon an old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king has quarrelled with Titania, and has vowed never to be reconciled to her until he shall find two lovers constant to each other through trial and temptation. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... as their heads are always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire, of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life, and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... referred to the papers before him, evidently much puzzled. It seemed that Madame had been recognized in the Bois by the impressionable Frenchman who I had believed, had been attracted by ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... much of the King's indignation had subsided, and that the delicate health of his royal consort was not without its influence over his mind. Sully adroitly profited by this circumstance to impress upon Henry the danger of any agitation to the Queen, whose impressionable nature occasioned constant solicitude to her physicians, and reminded him that her late violence had been principally induced by the rumours which had reached her of a liaison between Madame de Verneuil and the Due de Guise, an indignity to his own person which she had declared herself unable ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... herself was of the North, and not impressionable. Grey skies were familiar tents to her, moorlands roomy places, one heap of stones much like another. But her heart beat high to know Richard half a league away; all her trouble was how she should find him in such a great town. It was dusk when she reached it; they were about ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... walls, hallowed by long tradition, formed a peaceful and sweet harbour of rest for a woman's life,—and the tranquil dignity of her old-world surroundings with all the legends and memories they awakened, soon had a beneficial effect on Maryllia's impressionable temperament, which, under her aunt's 'social' influence, had been more or less chafed and uneasy. She began to feel at peace with herself and all the world,—while the relief she experienced at having deliberately severed herself ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the "little gods," or bojki, was founded about 1880 by a peasant named Sava. Highly impressionable by nature, and influenced by the activities of at least a dozen different sects that flourished in his native village (Derabovka, near Volsk), Sava ended by ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... almost as unaccustomed as the maiden herself to the end-of-the-age young man, or she might have wondered less. Raye, having looked about him awhile, left abruptly, without regard to the service that was proceeding; and Mrs. Harnham—lonely, impressionable creature that she was—took no further interest in praising the Lord. She wished she had married a London man who knew the subtleties of love-making as they were evidently known to him who had mistakenly ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... of a Parisian barrister of thirty-three. His father was a heavy drinker, his mother subject to nervous attacks, his younger brother mentally deficient, and the patient himself was very impressionable. It was said that a judge in a court, by fixing his gaze on him, could send him into an abnormal state. On one occasion, while looking into a mirror in a cafe, he suddenly fell into a sleep, and was taken to the Charite where he was awakened. He suffered occasional ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... about, and he had been as ready to write on one side as to fight on the other. He was a rolling stone, and had been a rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty. Yet you can see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the life of the clubs. She had gone through life as some people go ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... a fixed and old-established topographical point; as do the Arabs and Russians, neither of whom have a word expressing our "home" or "Heimat." Here, the nearest equivalent is la famiglia. We think of a particular house or village where we were born and where we spent our impressionable days of childhood; these others regard home not as a geographical but as a social centre, liable to shift from place to place; they are at home everywhere, so long as their clan is about them. That acquisitive ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... though their outlines are so distinct that they appear close at hand. The desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into lines of beauty in certain lights. It is well that this is so, for it helps to dispel an illusion of the imaginative and impressionable when first they visit San Pasqual—the illusion that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... unsullied happiness and overflowing joy. It is quaint, simple, unassuming; without affectation, full of pathos, and gently sensitive. He was a man who knew no guile, and his sweet and artless nature is faithfully portrayed in the outpourings of an impressionable, poetic soul. To dance with rustic maidens on the lea; to sing by moonlight to the piper's strain; to be happy, always happy, such is the theme, delicate and refined, of these ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... dear. It's just the way I'm made. I don't like them either. I hate them. That's where the fascination comes in. There! Let me put on my hat, and I am ready. I suppose I must veil myself? We mustn't dazzle the impressionable Max, must we? He must accustom his sight to me gradually. Never mind the rest of those things, Allegro! Francoise can finish, and send them on by the luggage-cart in the evening. Come along, let us face the ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... man, and to think how proud your relations would some day be of you, and how you would come back and excite a great commotion at the place where you used to be a school-boy. And it is because the world has still left some impressionable spot in your hearts, my readers, that you still have so many fond associations with "the school-boy spot we ne'er forget, though we are there forgot." They were Vealy days, though pleasant to remember, my old school-companions, in which you used to go to the dancing-school, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... powerful influence over his pupil, and as a master of rhetoric he would naturally be eloquent and have command of language, and in consequence would be most probably of fiery and enthusiastic temperament. We can imagine the fervour with which the impressionable boy drank in stories of the sufferings of the royal family during their imprisonment in the Temple, and strove not to miss a syllable of his master's magnificent exordiums, which glowed with the light and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... account of our physical self, height, width, weight, colour, age, etc., would bear no relation whatever to the true self. In part, this effect may be due to Ireland and to the fact that Borrow was only there for one short impressionable year of his boyhood, and had never seen any other country like it. But most of it is due to Borrow's nature and the conditions under which the autobiography was composed. While he was writing it he was probably living a more solitary and sedentary ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... springs of action which brought to all crusades the vile, who came for license and spoil, and the base, who sought the immunity conferred by the quality of crusader."[445] "To comprehend fully the magnitude and influence of these movements we must bear in mind the impressionable character of the populations and their readiness to yield to contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach masses so easily ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... obviously home manufacture never were seen in one company. The married ladies whispered scandal behind their fans, and in a Christian spirit shot out the lip of scorn at their social enemies; the young maidens sought for marriageable men, and lurked in darkish corners for the better ensnaring of impressionable males. Cupid unseen mingled in the throng and shot his arrows right and left, not always with the best result, as many post-nuptial experiences showed. There was talk of the gentle art of needlework, of the latest bazaar and the agreeable address ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the famous beauty, was always somewhat shy. She was not a wit, but she possessed the gift of drawing out what was best in others. Her biographers have blamed her that she had not a more impressionable temper, that she was not more sympathetic. Perhaps (in spite of her courage when she took up contributions in the churches dressed as a Neo-Greek) she was always hampered by shyness. She certainly attracted all the best and most gifted of her time, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... can not translate his title,—these are side issues. But it is forgotten that the total examination in which the public school pupil presents his hastily crammed Latin and Greek, never implies a careful training in his most impressionable period of life. Hence the criminalist repeatedly discovers that the capacity for trained thinking belongs mainly to the person who has been drilled for eight years in Greek and Latin grammar. We criminalists have much experience in ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... and feverish the last two nights; but now, wherefore? All had happened as it had been arranged. The undertaking had succeeded well, he had nothing to do but sleep on his triumph. But it was not so. In spite of his strong robust figure, the Conde had an excessively nervous and impressionable temperament. The slightest emotion upset him and excited him to an indescribable extent. Such intense sensibility was the result of heredity as well as education. His father, Colonel Campo, had been a self-centred sensitive man, of such keen susceptibility that he was quite ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... woman, but one reason why I'm dead against women's colleges is because they shut girls up with women, at the most impressionable period of the girls' lives, when they should be meeting members of the opposite sex continually, learning to tolerate their little weaknesses and ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Tapping. It really sent your flesh through your bones, all on edge like, to see a child fly up in the air like that. So she testified, embellishing her other physiological experience with a new horror unknown to Pathologists. Mrs. Riley, less impressionable, kept an even mind in view of the natural invulnerability of childhood and the special guardianship of Divine Omnipotence. If these two between them could not secure small boys of seven or eight from disaster, what ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... county of the same name, a widow named Susanna, and she was well-to-do according to the modest standard of the times. She was blest with a goodly family of sons and daughters, among whom was Mary Almira, a maiden fair to look upon and impressionable withal. Now it befell that Mary Almira, while still very young, was sent to school at the Academy in Leicester, Mass., where she met, and, in the language of the law, formed "a natural and virtuous attachment" with a student named Jeremiah, sent thither by his guardian from ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... working of the Transcaucasian legions under the supreme leadership of the Grand Duke Nicholas, of whom officers all spoke with enthusiasm, and whose personality undoubtedly counted for much amongst the impressionable moujik soldiery. What one had seen in these forward situations inspired confidence in the future. Nor was that confidence misplaced, for the Russian forces in Armenia were to achieve great triumphs ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the first I shall try to prove that the great scientific development of our time has inspired hopes in the mind of all classes, hopes which it has not realised to the satisfaction of the most impressionable, therefore the most exacting and unreasonable minds. How such minds have returned with greater conviction to the belief in the existence of something more powerful than science, a something which can alleviate the evils from which they suffer, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... must be told, Miss Bines was less impressionable than either of the three would have wished. Her heart seemed not easy to reach; her impulses were not inflammable. Young Milbrey early confided to his family a suspicion that she was singularly hard-headed, and the definite information that she had "a ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... and frequent inquiries as to whether they pinched. Who stood little girls and boys on the counter and called for the most expensive frocks, the latest and best in sailor suits, and the brightest ribbons; and things came long distances by bullock dray and were expensive in those days. Impressionable diggers—and most of them were—who threw nuggets to singers, and who, sometimes, slipped a parcel into the hands of a little boy or girl, with instructions to give it to an elder sister (or young mother, ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay. Our word GAY, it is said, is itself Celtic. It is not from gaudium, but from the Celtic gair, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade. The German, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... My sister had a weakness for dabbling in the various "new" theories of the day, and Mabel, who before her marriage had belonged to foolish societies for investigating the future life to the neglect of the present one, had fostered this undesirable tendency. Her amiable, impressionable temperament was open to every psychic wind that blew. I deplored, detested the whole business. But even more than this I abhorred the later influence that Mr. Franklyn had steeped his wife in, capturing her body and ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... school has outlived its usefulness; and morality, because it is hard or tiresome, must give way to the freedom and romance of no morality. Such blind and irresponsible agitation is a perpetual menace to the balance of impressionable and unsteady minds, if not indeed to the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... asked sorrowfully. "When I didn't mean anything except that my heart—which is rather impressionable—feels very warmly and tenderly toward the man who swam after me.... Won't you understand, please? Listen, we have been engaged only a minute, and here already is our first quarrel. You can see for yourself what would happen if we ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... unprofitable and ordinary life, if he had not been able to gild it with the glamour of philosophic immoralism. Finally, because everybody else was writing, he too wrote—a play. Then follows a period of discovery of the newest movement in art. So impressionable is he that his stay of some years in Paris causes him actually to forget how to write English prose, and when he returns to London and has to earn his living at journalism he has to learn his native tongue over ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... is stimulated, without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this personage, is in fact hypnotised by her, follows her down to the sea, and, watching her row away, turns dizzy, ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... age, and it is impossible not to wonder what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence, however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all that we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that "filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his character," and on the ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... three weeks, she returned to the consultation room, sat down in a deep leather chair, fixed her eyes on a bright metal ball, and fell asleep. The famous physician found her, as he had expected, extremely impressionable. On waking, she had no objective recollection of what ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... impressionable age of six or thereabouts an aunt fired the boy's imagination with stories of the departed glories of the Hart family. She used to tell him how their ancestor, Captain van Hardt, came over from Holland with King William, fought at the Battle of the Boyne and greatly distinguished ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... inventions, delirious absurdities, this joyous little populace, not much larger than a chick-pea, which reflects and sums up in itself the instincts of the whole French South, lively, restless, gabbling, exaggerated, comical, impressionable—that is what the people on the express-train look out for as they pass, and it is that which has made ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... Brodie, in 1822, described an affection of joints, characterised by the prominence of subjective symptoms and the absence of pathological changes. Although most frequently met with in young women with an impressionable nervous system, and especially among those in good social circumstances, it occurs occasionally in men. The onset may be referred to injury or exposure to cold, or may be associated with some disturbance of the emotions ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... his friends, his impressionable soul, his devotion to church, his yearning for education and enlightenment, his thrift, industry, devotion to country, fidelity to the flag shown upon hundreds of battle-fields, must be admitted and command the admiration of all fair-minded men. Let him add to all these attributes, purity in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Maurice, impressionable at all times, the absence of ceremony, of those trivialities which obscure and belittle the one supreme fact, gave an added solemnity to the unadorned service: forced upon her a half-disturbing realisation that she was passing from an independence, dearer to her than life, into the keeping ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... towards Vandeloup were curious. She had been a very impressionable girl, and her ill-fated union with Villiers had not quite succeeded in deadening all her feelings, though it had doubtless gone a good way towards doing so. Being of an appreciative nature, she liked to hear Vandeloup talk of his brilliant ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... slightly troubled by the knowledge that the recollections to which she referred were those of the Weimar days when she who was now a widow had been a young married woman. Tony Cornish had also been young in those days, and impressionable. It was before the world had polished his surface bright and hard. And the impression left of the Mrs. Vansittart of Weimar was that she was one of the rare women who marry pour le bon motif. He had met her by accident in the streets of The Hague a few hours ago, and having learnt her ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... of these theatrical announcements, which answered the purpose he designed, of attracting the sympathy of the impressionable French people. The following is a short summary of the mode in which Italy was really freed "from the Alps to the Adriatic":—Lombardy was surrendered to Sardinia 11th July, 1859; the treaty ceding ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the future success of the work. The boys and girls will look after that. In many instances they have already begun to look after it and the best assurance for the future maintenance of free libraries in America rests with those who, having tried them and liked them during the most impressionable years of their lives, believe in the value of them for others as well as for themselves to the extent of being ready ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven. He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks. Moreover, he now fell into a certain foul habit. Of course Scripture formed a portion of his ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... commencement to its close, more reason to congratulate themselves than on this circumstance, that in youth and earlier manhood fortune and his own success kept him from visiting Rome. Though his was not the eclectic tendency, the easily impressionable artistic temperament of a Sebastiano Luciani—the only eclectic, perhaps, who managed all the same to prove and to maintain himself an artist of the very first rank—if Titian had in earlier life been lured to the Eternal City, and had there settled, the glamour of the grand style ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of Professor Blackie in the North and West, and no wonder. He was a laughing, jocular, impressionable man, who hobnobbed with landlords and amiably slapped drivers and policemen on the back, throwing a Gaelic greeting at them as he did so. His faculty for writing poetry is seen in many a guidebook; Oban, Inverness, Pitlochry, and numberless ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... was a younger man than Lockwood, with an impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as great as any of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the worst of it. If the women get at you you're lost. You're young, you're impressionable, you won't mind my saying that you're not built for a stoic, and hang it, they'll coddle you, they'll enervate you, they'll sentimentalize you, they'll make a Mungold ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... compelled him to pursue, the honour and glory it promised him. What was all that to the prize of wisdom? For wisdom he felt himself ready to give up the world.... But these heroic outbursts do not, as a rule, keep up very long in natures so changeable and impressionable as Augustin's. Yet they are not entirely thrown away. Thus, in early youth, come dim revelations of the future. There comes a presentiment of the port to which one will some day be sailing; a glimpse of the task to fulfil, the work to build up; and all this rises before ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... undoubtedly a man of impressionable heart, and had many affairs such as Heine had; but they were not deep or lasting. That he should have made a favorable impression on the women whom he met is not surprising, because of his social standing, his chivalry, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... words the abbreviations stand for, that he becomes Ph. D. and can not translate his title,—these are side issues. But it is forgotten that the total examination in which the public school pupil presents his hastily crammed Latin and Greek, never implies a careful training in his most impressionable period of life. Hence the criminalist repeatedly discovers that the capacity for trained thinking belongs mainly to the person who has been drilled for eight years in Greek and Latin grammar. We criminalists have ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... taken down, because he had rung out the signal for revolt. Yet the cries of "Noel, Noel!" continued every step of the progress through the town, until they gave way to a silence that had an even greater effect upon the impressionable boy. For he was welcomed at the great western gate of the Cathedral by the Archbishop Guillaume de Lestrange, and by him was led before the sepulchre in which the heart of Charles V. lay buried, bearing testimony ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... "Vive Bonaparte!" which came from the lower part of the Rue du Mont Blanc, and swept like a sonorous wave toward the Rue de la Victoire, told Josephine of her husband's return. The impressionable Creole had awaited him anxiously. She sprang to meet him in such agitation that she was unable to ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Caldew, always impressionable, became uneasy under his companion's silence, and that uneasiness was tinctured in his mind with such a dread of the possibility of mistake that it flowed forth in ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... eyes that left him a bit wistful at thought of this? There was not a detail of her features, of her dress, of her speech, that he could not see now as vividly as though she were still standing before him. That was odd, too. He was not ordinarily so impressionable. It occurred to him that he would not like her to know what he was about to do. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... standards of value. City children who have access to the theatre often get their heroes from the stage; and the same thing may be said about the drama as about fiction. It is only the too highly colored and exaggerated melodrama that is likely to be objectionable for the impressionable youth. The moving-picture shows, which are coming to supply so many of the children with their chief opportunity to learn life, have been, on the whole, fairly wholesome; and the movement to secure more adequate censorship of the films will probably leave these sources of instruction perfectly ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find it out and wily enough to feign it when ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... ascertained the following facts, which may guide every horse-owner in the application of electricity to an animal that is opposed to being shod: (1) To a horse that defends himself because he is irritable by temperament, and nervous and impressionable (as happens with animals of pure or nearly pure blood), the shock must be administered feebly and gradually before an endeavor is made to take hold of his leg. The horse will then make a jump, and try to roll over. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... Marie de Zanoni.' So far as I have been able to gather, the affair was a love match. The lady, it appears, had no end of suitors, both in and out of the profession; it has even been hinted that she could, had she been so minded, have married an impressionable young Austrian nobleman of independent means who was madly in love with her; but she appears to have considered it preferable to become 'an old man's darling,' so to speak, and to have selected the middle-aged ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... defrauded of at least one early ramble in the woods and fields. It is well, in the impressionable season of life, to realize, if only occasionally, how much of the sweetest air, the brightest and best hours of the day, people spend in bed. Any one who goes out every day before breakfast knows how very seldom he is kept in by bad weather. For ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... blessings of the new faith had attracted them too, and the certainty of finding their beloved among the Christians had been an added inducement to crave instruction from Zeno. And it had been given them in so zealous and captivating a manner that, in their impressionable hearts, the desire for learning had soon been turned to firm ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... verse, the people following lamely, for they did not know the words; but the children, proud of their superior knowledge, and with a glow in their impressionable little hearts, sang exultantly—this song ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... which influenced him profoundly, appeared in 1829, and the first performance of "Hernani" was February 25, 1830. There is no record that he formed important literary friendships in either England or France, but, clannish as the emigrados appear to have been, an impressionable nature like Espronceda's must have been as much stirred by the literary as by the political revolution of 1830; the more so as the great love adventure of his life occurred at this time. The Mancha family followed the other emigrados to London, just when we cannot say. In course of time Teresa ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... fond of these theatrical announcements, which answered the purpose he designed, of attracting the sympathy of the impressionable French people. The following is a short summary of the mode in which Italy was really freed "from the Alps to the Adriatic":—Lombardy was surrendered to Sardinia 11th July, 1859; the treaty ceding Savoy and Nice to France was signed 24th ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... his poetry that can be so called is small. But a great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Dave Wardle giv' Mrs. Tapping. It really sent your flesh through your bones, all on edge like, to see a child fly up in the air like that. So she testified, embellishing her other physiological experience with a new horror unknown to Pathologists. Mrs. Riley, less impressionable, kept an even mind in view of the natural invulnerability of childhood and the special guardianship of Divine Omnipotence. If these two between them could not secure small boys of seven or eight from disaster, what could? The unbiassed observer—if he had ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Monsieur Rodin referred to the papers before him, evidently much puzzled. It seemed that Madame had been recognized in the Bois by the impressionable Frenchman who I had believed, had been attracted ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... advantage of the fact that Miss Doris Gray, an impressionable young English girl, receptive to sympathetic admiration and half in love with me—suppose, I say, I took advantage of this fact, and we marry in ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to love her, is not the same as virile intellect. It is more and it is less. A woman must have a mind open, delicate, sensitive, refined, impressionable. She has no need of either power or initiative in thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry, and that faculty of assimilation which, in a little while, raises her to an equality with him who shared her life. Her greatest quality must ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... shape and the detailed personal history of the Olympians. In this connexion we must not forget the power of hallucination, still fairly strong, as the history of religious revivals in America will bear witness,[26:1] but far stronger, of course, among the impressionable hordes of early men. 'The god', says M. Doutte in his profound study of Algerian magic, 'c'est le desir collectif personnifie', the collective desire projected, as it were, or personified.[27:1] Think of the gods who have appeared in great crises of battle, created sometimes by the desperate desire ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city. But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... say, 'Why have I brought up a son whom I loved and who loved me, for whom I have undergone a thousand cares and toils, who, thanks to my prayers and my example, was impressionable to good influences, and from whom, after my long and weary course, I hoped to receive attentions like those which I have given him? Why does he now ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his casement and looked at the weather-beating rain and yeasty water. He counted, rather nervously, the pulses between each pair of the bell's deep tones. He was impressionable to circumstances, and the coincidence of storm and passing-bell awed him.... "Either the God of Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is breaking";—he remembered a scrap of talk wafted towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... to use it. Some of the most daring and successful outrages of the past years had been carried out under his direction, and executed by these youths. He always made a point of choosing men who were highly strung and impressionable. He was known to boast that after three interviews with him he could make anyone, either man or woman, into ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... clothes were missing was not likely to be discovered in an inn until suspicion was aroused. Ronald laid his plans well, but how was he to know that in his path to the pit he walked over soil as plastic and impressionable as wax?" ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... atmosphere of the class-room, we claim, should be as near as possible, that of the home. The parents have a right to see that it should be so. Is this possible in a neutral school? Its very negative character impregnates the class-rooms with an irreligious feeling which the impressionable mind of the child cannot but notice. How is the child to grow up with the feeling of Religion's importance in life if the ban is placed upon Religion the moment he passes the threshold of the school-room? "What we most ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... said Mrs Jefferson brusquely, "you won't try to see her, for it's my belief that she's not the woman any man can look at and forget, and you poets are mostly impressionable." ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... let me put you right on one question. Dicky is not in love with this girl yet. If he were, he would not wish any meeting between you and her. He is interested and attracted, of course, as any impressionable man with an eye for beauty would be if thrown in constant companionship with her. And, forgive me, but I am sure you have taken the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... whispered Betty, her eyes glowing. I suppose to an impressionable girl these things really are of absorbing interest. For myself, bongos intrigue me even less than pongos, while dongos frankly bore me. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... conscious of an ascent to be surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... revulsion of feeling swept through the impressionable people. Her departure had been watched, the fall observed, and the serious nature of the accident was soon known; all hurried to the spot where she lay, full of sympathy and distress. Jean, perhaps not altogether ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... imagination is stimulated, without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this personage, is in fact hypnotised ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... relations between the two men were delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met, Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it. It was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as it ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... its geography, had the misfortune never to be conquered at one fell swoop by an alien race of conquerors. Such a conquest may not at first sight strike one as a blessing, but it is, if it takes place when a people is in an early, fluid, and impressionable stage, as may be seen from a comparison of countries which have undergone it with countries which have not—a comparison, for instance, of England with Ireland or Germany. Perhaps the nearest parallel in the history of Wales to the Norman Conquest of ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... from the moment we heard who she was that your impressionable nature would fall a victim, but you can't write a story of her alone; you will want your hero and one or two other people. I suppose, now, that very handsome young fellow with the fastidious get-up will about suit you for the hero. He does look rather lover-like ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and in a steady, unmoved voice tell Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn what had happened. The faded beauty merely smiled, and lifted her eyes to the chandelier with the expression that had melted the hearts of a thousand and one impressionable subalterns. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... window forced himself quite deliberately to look the plain facts in the face. He compelled himself to envisage this beautiful girl with her tragic eyes for just what his reason knew her to be—an adventuress, a decoy, a lure to a callow, impressionable, foolish lad, the tool of that arch-villain Stewart and of the lesser villain her father. It was like standing by and watching something lovely and pitiful vilely befouled. It turned his heart sick within him, but he held himself to the task. He brought to aid him the vision of his lady, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... When the Christian world awakens to its profound significance, and when its ideals and methods are raised, even to a level with those of the public schools, the other grave problems will be near their solution. If the individual is thoroughly taught during the impressionable years of childhood and youth, the fundamental principles of ethics and religion, society and the state will have no difficulty in meeting their problems; but if not, these will perforce continue to ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... Alice, again forgot his second daughter's vagaries, but a much sterner and more formidable interview was in store for him; it was one thing to conquer Alice, who was impressionable, and had a soft heart, and another to encounter the stony visage and rather ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... to put any nonsense in her head," she mused. "What a piece of luck!—that she happened to be in that car that day. Of course, the fact that he saved her life has cast a glamour of romance around him—Violet is very impressionable—and it may take time to disenchant her. I hope that nurse was vigilant and did not allow her to see much of him; however, one thing is sure, she won't get a chance to ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... always a fighter. Jefferson was a lover of peace, given to quiet, hating quarrels and bloodshed, and at times timid in dealing with public questions. Washington was deliberate and conservative, after the fashion of his race. Jefferson was quick, impressionable, and always fascinated by new notions, even if they were somewhat fantastic. A thoroughly liberal and open-minded man, Washington never turned a deaf ear to any new suggestion, whether it was a public policy or a mechanical invention, but to all alike he gave careful consideration ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... quickly gone, vanishing into the throng like a flash of red flame. For a breathless moment Winston's admiring gaze followed, conscious merely of her dark beauty, her slender, graceful figure. He was young, impressionable, and there was rare witchery about the girl which momentarily fascinated him. His attention shifted back to Farnham with a swift remembrance of the stern purpose which had brought him there. The gambler was playing out his case silently, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... by the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this romantic place he passed the most impressionable part ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... circumstances—suspicious, I admit. Far be it from me to speak in defence of such a person as Mrs. Wade; I think she is a source of incalculable harm to all who are on friendly terms with her—especially young and impressionable women; but you must trust my judgment in this instance: I am convinced she is not guilty. Her agitation in the coroner's court has no special significance. No; the solution of the mystery is not so ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... thought which should have controlled them was wanting. She squandered the wealth of her nature in obedience to social conventions; she was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her scruples degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than force of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with more brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a coquette, and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant life and gaiety, reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the verge of poetry, and humble in the ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... passive and impressionable condition which is called hypnotic, mesmeric, somnambulic, or somniloquent, it has long been known that the subject may be absolutely controlled by the operator, or by a simple command or suggestion, or by his own imagination. This has been so often demonstrated ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... fails to marry her sons to the right people. Perpetually Hatchways is wiping the eye of Holmer, and this touches the nerve of the great lady. Her sons, Wickford, the authentic but hardly reigning duke, and Lord Iveagh Suir, the queer impressionable (on whom the author has spent much pains to excellent effect), both take their troubles to Ernestine. And a young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations and characters from his coign of privilege—a device adroitly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... Flamineo and the shame-stricken Vittoria refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere of the poem by the passing presence of their virtues. The shallow and fiery nature of the fair White Devil herself is a notable example of the difference so accurately distinguished by Charlotte Bronte between an impressionable and an impressible character. Ambition, self-interest, passion, remorse, and hardihood alternate and contend in her impetuous and wayward spirit. The one distinct and trustworthy quality which may always ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets made one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away... Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race-vanity, still persist in speaking of themselves as a "nervous and impressionable" people! ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... are less strongly made; but in intellect they are superior to any of the half-casts. They possess a very great aptitude for mechanical employments, great dexterity and a remarkable degree of imitative talent, which, if well directed, might be brilliantly developed. They are exceedingly impressionable, and all their feelings are readily exalted into passions. Indifferent to all out sensual enjoyments, they indulge in the fleeting pleasure of the present moment, and are regardless of the future. There is a certain class ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... was not still alive because he was innocent, since for all the good that this very doubtful innocence of his was likely to be even to his own conscience, he might almost as well have been guilty. Nor was he alive because he feared to die. He did fear to die horribly, but to the young and impressionable, at any rate, there are situations in which death seems the lesser of two evils. That situation had been well-nigh reached by him last night when he set the hilt of his sword against the floor and shrank back at the prick of its point. ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... towards his, the poise of her head, all of her listening intently while he talked . . . one could see how he was dominating her. A man with such a personality as his, regularly hypnotic when he chose, and practised in handling women, he would be able to do anything he liked with an impressionable creature like Marise, who as a girl was always under the influence of something or other. It was evident that he could put any idea he liked into Marise's head just by looking at her hard enough. She had seen him do it . . . helped him ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king has quarrelled with Titania, and has vowed never to be reconciled to her until he shall find two lovers constant to each other through ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... mother's mind had stood the strain bravely, but it gave way at last; not, however, until that fatal winter journey to New Hampshire, when cold, exposure, and fatigue did their worst for her weak body. Religious enthusiast, exalted and impressionable, a natural mystic, she had probably always been, far more so in temperament, indeed, than her husband; but although she left home on that journey a frail and heartsick woman, she returned a different ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the hidden keg of gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians, and it will even be found to have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and almost identical in form appear and appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... regular gang of strollers. It is exhilarating, do you know, this feverish existence, this life in front of the footlights. But, for the love of Heaven, shut the door, Marie, there is a frightful draught blowing on me. This hourly struggle with the public, the hisses, the applause, would, with my impressionable nature, drive me mad, I ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction, while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... a man is impressionable, impulsive, emotional. This one was, and had no gift at hiding his feelings; or if he had it he took no trouble to exercise it. He carried his soul's prevailing weather in his face, and when he entered a room the parasols or the umbrellas went up—figuratively speaking —according to the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... school. It was not the custom of the family; and Mrs. Allison could not be induced to break the tradition. There was accordingly a succession of tutors, whose Church-principles at least were sound. And Ancoats showed himself for a time an impressionable, mystical boy, entirely in sympathy with his mother. His confirmation was a great family emotion, and when he was seventeen Mrs. Allison had difficulty in making him take food enough in Lent to keep him in health. Maxwell was beginning ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dear," said Mrs. Enderby to Nell, "I will not allow you to tell her. Indeed, I am a little nervous about the matter, for Hetty is such a strangely impressionable girl one never knows what way she will take things. I must break ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... suggests all that these dominant cities represent of congestion of industrial and social pressure, and their powerful effects upon new Americans in their most impressionable period. ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... burlesque some synagogue chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coarse Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by any means. He was good-natured, extremely impressionable, and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay. Our word GAY, it is said, is itself Celtic. It is not from gaudium, but from the Celtic gair, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... averred, as he stole away into the hall, there was a sound followed him as between a groan and a cry. Hearing which statement, an impressionable charwoman went into hysterics, and had to be recalled to her senses by a dose of gin, suggested and taken ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... itself to me unexpectedly, and always with an unwholesome effect. This I have found happen generally in times of physical depression, and the same air no doubt exerted a similar influence on Sir John, which his impressionable nature rendered from the first ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into lines of beauty in certain lights. It is well that this is so, for it helps to dispel an illusion of the imaginative and impressionable when first they visit San Pasqual—the illusion that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... down again, and then the melancholy voice lulled her into a vague interval of thoughtless inactivity. I promptly seized my opportunity, and in a moment her whole mind was full of me. She was an excitable, impressionable sort of girl, and when once I had obtained an entrance into her mind I found it the easiest thing in the world to dominate her thoughts. Though she stood, and sat, and knelt, and curtseyed, and articulated words, her thoughts were entirely absorbed in me. I crowded out the Magnificat ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... his apparent roughness Wyvis Brand was an impressionable man. He had come into the room cold, tired, not quite in his usual health, and more than usually out of humor; and instead of the ordinary sight of Janetta—a trim, pleasant, household-fairy sort of sight, it was true, but not of the wildly exciting kind—he ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... An Impressionable Person (carried away by the local influence—to the Man at the wicket, blandly). Could you kindly oblige me by exchanging this "Note in Black and White" for an "Arrangement in Silver ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... then have curative influence on the nerves. There can be no doubt that, whatever may have been the value of his theories, he cured a large number of patients, evidently producing a state which we would call today a hypnoid state and often simply appealing to the natural suggestibility of the impressionable minds. Among his pupils, usually called mesmerists, was Puyseyur, who discovered, in 1784, the state which was called artificial somnambulism, a kind of sleep in which the ideas and feelings of the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... enemy. He took no interest in politics, but one day when a brutal ruffian, who had assaulted a lame native, escaped because the easy-going sheriff was too slow in pursuing, Charley was heard to exclaim, "Oh, if I were sheriff!" The man who heard him was both impressionable and practical. He said that Charley's face, when he made that remark, looked like Christ's might have looked when he was angry, but the hearer also remembered that the sheriff-incumbent's term of office had nearly expired, and he quietly gathered a few ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... relationships from his neighbour who as a child, was dragged to listen to the brilliant exhortations of Robert Ingersoll, the enemy of all revealed Devils. In due course of time, both men may forget their early training and never again visit either church or lecture hall. But the influence of these impressionable years stays with them and they cannot escape showing it in whatever they ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... defects of character in the Indians, if they are frequently moderated, thanks to the religion that they profess, wholly disappear but with difficulty, and generally even have some influence on the private life and religious character of the natives. Since they are, therefore, more superficial and more impressionable to new things than those of other races, they would perhaps be less constant in their Catholic practices, sentiments, and convictions, and would feel more easily than do others the evil influences of false doctrines ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... called on to deal specially with the problem of increasing manifestations of sexual depravity they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... concerned for their welfare and has told me many things, among others something of a certain lady to whom they are devoted and who has a remarkable influence over them. It has interested me, too, for they are at the most impressionable, susceptible period of their lives and a wise influence can do much for them. I am glad to meet 'The Little Mother ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... are those in which, as we look back upon them, we seem to have been impressing, impressionable, creative, and receptive at the same time. The alternating currents of these moods are so swift that they seem simultaneous, and the immeasurable swiftness with which they pass from one to the other is the soul's instinctive ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... chapel somewhere in the Bernese Oberland during the summer months. Energetic, athletic, a great talker and squire of dames—in all honesty and correctness, this last, well understood, for there wasn't a word to be breathed against the good cleric's morals. But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious, as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs. Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of her internal organs? Recumbency was a mania with her and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... which Skippy derived from his periodic application of ostracism was in the immediate success it achieved on his roommate's impressionable temperament. At present, being in an exceedingly grouchy mood, he drew forth a pad and pencil and tendered them with a plain intimation that only thus would he ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... receptive and impressionable, they come expecting to receive satisfaction and enjoyment for the money they have expended in the purchase of a ticket, or because they have some other interest in the proceedings. Presumably if they were ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... not only uncommon cleverness but also great suppleness of body. As usual, these qualities, together with the qualities of voice, the magnificent dress, and the carefully cultivated long hair, won for the actor demoralising influence over too large a number of the more impressionable and untrammelled Roman dames. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Roka there was no difficulty in following the line which Hendry and the supercargo had taken; their footsteps showed deep in the soft, sandy soil, rendered the more impressionable by the heavy downfall of rain a few hours before. And even had they left no traces underfoot of their progress, the countless broken branches and vines which they had pushed or torn aside on their way through the forest were a sure ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... It was only at a later period that it was the cause of unkind tittle-tattle. In the beginning of Maurice's residence at Brayfield eulogy attended it and applause was never far off. People said that Maurice was impressionable, and that the vision of pain upon which the medical student's eyes must look so closely had robbed him of the natural buoyancy of youth. Poor young man, they thought enthusiastically, he suffers with those who suffer. And this was considered—and rightly considered—a very touching ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... creatures suffering misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and it was possible to help and save them. His emotion was profound: there was no difficulty In communicating it. Christophe was easily impressionable, and he in his turn was moved. When he heard Olivier's story he tore up the page of music he had just been writing, and called himself a selfish brute to be amusing himself with childish games. But, directly after, he picked up the pieces. He was too much under the spell of his music. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... counterpart in the most ancient of tribal communities. Women even more than men are slaves of their tribal instincts; they are as susceptible to the dictates of fashion as their ancient sisters were impressionable to the movings of the tribal spirit. The local spirit which is so inherent a trait of the countryman, particularly in the case of the Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, is another, and often a very powerful, ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... some good fellow who would make her happy. And she would be happy. The poor girl would love her children to distraction; for motherhood, which develops the whole of a woman's nature, would give full scope to her overflowing sentiments. She has never cared for any one, however. Yet her impressionable nature is a danger to her. She knows this herself, and when she saw that I recognized it, she admitted the excitability of her temperament to me. She belongs to the small minority of women whom the slightest contact with others causes to ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... there was an interview though nobody knows about it, and that's where they met—she fell asleep, which sounds an odd thing to do in the midst of such a gale as was raging on Christmas Eve, and so was overwhelmed. But who can say? Impressionable and unhappy women have done such deeds before now, especially if they imagine themselves to have become the object of gossip. Of course, also, the mere possibility of such a thing having happened on his account would be, and indeed has ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... reached the proportions of a very amiable selfishness. "She has the habit of detesting those who are unhappy," said the witty Abbe Galiani, "for she does not wish to be so, even by the sight of the unhappiness of others. She has an impressionable heart; she is old; she is well; she wishes to preserve her health and her tranquillity. As soon as she learns that I am happy she will love me ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... understood—in countries that have no similar institution. But, imagine one hundred thousand youths of the wealthiest, healthiest, and most influential classes passed during each generation at the most impressionable age, into a sort of ethical mold, emerging therefrom stamped to the core with the impress of a uniform morality, uniform manners, uniform way of looking at life; remembering always that these youths fill seven-eighths of the important positions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... twins twiddled their legs and looked sentimentally at the ocean. They were a pair of pink and white little things with china-blue eyes and the fairest of hair, and they were very impressionable; and when they thought of Selwyn they looked unutterable things at the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... brother-in-law I'd like you to have, my dear," she said to Tip, "but if you'd seen some of the men Joanna's taken up with you'd realize it might have been much worse. I'm told she once had a most hectic romance with her own shepherd ... she's frightfully impressionable, you know." ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... For a brief period in his life it seemed as though peace might come back. Maximilian's death in 1519 followed by Charles' election to the Empire placed the sovereignty of Western and Central Europe in the hands of three young men, who were chivalrous and impressionable, Henry and Francis and Charles: only the year before they had been treating for universal peace. If they would really act in concord, it seemed as though the Golden Age might return, and Christendom show a united face against the watchful and unwearying ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Dick Sherwood was the victim Maggie and Barney and Old Jimmie were so cautiously and elaborately trying to trim! It seemed an impossible coincidence. But no, not impossible, after all. Their net had been spread for just such game: a young man, impressionable, pleasure-loving, with plenty of money, and with no strings tied to his spending of it. That Barney should have made his acquaintance was easily explained; to establish acquaintance with such persons as Dick was Barney's specialty. What more natural ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... hurled at my innocent head, during the impressionable years of girlhood, by the pale and determined Congregational ministers with gold-bowed spectacles, who held forth in the meeting-house of my maternal ancestry (all honor to their sincerity), had taken little hold upon my mind, still, the vital drop of the Puritan was in my blood, and the fear of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... Fenner. "She is the only child I ever have had in my practice who managed to reach earth as all children should. During the impressionable stage, no one expected her, so there was no time spent in worrying, fretting, and discontent. I don't mean that these things were customary with Ruth. No woman ever accepted motherhood in a more beautiful spirit; but if she would have protested at any time, it ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... Magsie would be a rage! Magsie's young favors would be sought far and wide. Magsie's summer home, Magsie's winter apartments, Magsie's clothes and fads, these would belong to the adoring public of the most warmhearted and impressionable city in the world! Rachael saw it all coming with perhaps more certainty than did even the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gay, it was brilliant. Life flowed fast and it was astonishingly vivid. A restless society, always seeking something new flitted from house to house. Dick, young and impressionable, would have been glad to share a little in it, but his time was too short. He went once with Colonel Winchester to the theatre, and the boy who had thrice seen a hundred and fifty thousand men in deadly action hung breathless over the mimic struggles of a few ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the two men worked like magic upon the impressionable mind of young Robert, who sat listening. Long after all had retired for the night he lay awake, his little mind away in the future, living in the earthly paradise which had been conjured up before him by the warm, inspiring sentences of this miners' leader, and joyful in the contemplation ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, who thanks to his size and sturdiness, lends himself admirably to an experiment of this kind. I operate upon a dozen, in the corselet, on the breast, on the belly and, by preference, on one of the hind legs, far removed from the impressionable nervous centers. No matter what part my injector attacks, the effect produced is the same, or nearly. The insect falls as though struck by lightning. It lies on its back and wriggles its legs, especially ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Transparent o'er the Neva beamed The firmament in mellow light, And when the watery mirror gleamed No more with pale Diana's rays,(17) We called to mind our youthful days— The days of love and of romance! Then would we muse as in a trance, Impressionable for an hour, And breathe the balmy breath of night; And like the prisoner's our delight Who for the greenwood quits his tower, As on the rapid wings of thought The early days of life ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... many times before, yet they are a joy eternal, a changing joy of which neither the eye nor the mind ever grows weary. Both he and Merrihew were foremost in the press against the forward rail. To the latter's impressionable mind it was like a dream. In fancy he could see the Roman galleys, the fighting triremes, the canopied pleasure-craft, just as they were two thousand years ago. Yonder, the temples and baths of Nero of the Golden House; ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... her, after all," Wingrave continued coolly. "She possesses powers which you yourself have already admitted, and you, I should say, are a fairly impressionable person, so far as her sex is concerned. Confess now, that she did not leave ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our schools, there is in them a uniform standard of morals. Schools, that neglect or suppress the daily reading of the Bible, do not keep the vision of those attending them on the christian ideal, or develop the christian motive in them, during the most impressionable period of their lives. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... as an art culled from the classics, from pro-German[1] economists and historians, from poets such as Shelley, and from German[1] higher critics of the Bible—were taught to fifth form boys with crude impressionable minds, the result would be Bolshevism. We agree that under careful guidance much of ultimate political value can be taught from history and literature. But it must be done with infinite care, and opinions must be excluded from the teaching. That is ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... a grave danger; for if, in the impressionable period of youth, attention is given to one kind of knowledge, it may very likely be withdrawn from another. A life of sheltered study does not allow a boy to learn the hard facts of the world—and business is concerned with reality. The ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... word. Its ancient walls, hallowed by long tradition, formed a peaceful and sweet harbour of rest for a woman's life,—and the tranquil dignity of her old-world surroundings with all the legends and memories they awakened, soon had a beneficial effect on Maryllia's impressionable temperament, which, under her aunt's 'social' influence, had been more or less chafed and uneasy. She began to feel at peace with herself and all the world,—while the relief she experienced at having deliberately severed herself by both word and act from the undesired ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... explanation of the fact that white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish is almost irresistible when ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... certainly had fallen into not a few bad habits, especially of late. He had obviously and rapidly deteriorated; and it was true that he had become slovenly. He drank more and had become more tearful and nervous; and had grown too impressionable on the artistic side. His face had acquired a strange facility for changing with extraordinary quickness, from the most solemn expression, for instance, to the most absurd, and even foolish. He could not endure solitude, and was always craving ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he wishes to be successful and popular, he must suit himself to the tastes of his public; and even if he be indifferent to immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of the most impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live in a sense WITH and FOR his generation. To meet this demand upon his genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which he carefully and assiduously exercised in a long series of poetical experiments, and which he was able felicitously to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... one fear he had swallowed the poker as a preliminary to the interview, and was bearing himself in accordance with the unyielding fact. The result was highly effective, and gave Mr. Gwynn a kingly air not likely to be wasted on impressionable ones such as the President and General Attorney. When the four were seated, Richard, using the potential name of Mr. Gwynn, proceeded to speak, while Mr. Gwynn at ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers seemed to close round his heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured, gurgling scrap—and the pure eyes looked truthfully into ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... earnest men there, eagerly engaged in canvassing the general affairs of the world, and more especially their own particular ventures, hopes, anticipations, investments therein. If you are an artist, or indeed at all impressionable in matters of taste, you will, I fear, be painfully affected by a marble figure near the centre of the hall, which many persons assert to be a statue of the Queen of these realms—a calumny which I, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... invariably be addressed in classical language from the moment of their birth. So should they learn to speak English undefiled from their earliest utterance. "How," demanded Sir Oracle, "can a mother reasonably expect her child to learn correct speech, when she continually accustoms its impressionable gray matter to such absurd expressions and distortions of our noble tongue as thoughtless mothers inflict every day on the helpless creatures committed to their care? Can a child who is constantly called 'tweet itty wee singie' ever attain to any proper conception of his own being ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... her ardent reply, accompanied by a gesture, the freedom of which suited her style and person as it would not have done those of a less impressionable woman. And, seeing that I had no intention of leaving the spot where I stood, she moved at last from where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked, pausing to ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... of Reed was that the only way to work out the freedom of Ireland was by force of arms. Mat at first was inclined to laugh at the idea; but an impressionable and vehement nature such as his was ill calculated to cope for a lengthened time with a nature precise, cold, and stubborn like that of Reed. Strength of will and tenacity of opinion make their way against better judgment, especially if there can be no doubt of the sincerity of ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... given to travel by both motor car and bicycle was here self-evident. The Hotel du Grand Monarque literally swarmed with tourists, one and all French folks taking their ease at their inn. And our neighbours do not take their pleasure solemnly after the manner of the less impressionable English. Stay-at-home as they have hitherto been, home-loving as they essentially are, the atmosphere of an inn, the aroma of a holiday, fill the Frenchman's cup of hilarity to overflowing, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and favorite, and his letter to his nurse in New York gives a good idea of how the place affects a bright, impressionable child. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... when in 1801 he mounted the throne over the body of his murdered father: a mystic melancholy liable at any moment to issue in extravagant action. At first, indeed, this exercised but little influence on the emperor's life. Young, emotional, impressionable, well-meaning and egotistic, Alexander displayed from the first an intention of playing a great part on the world's stage, and plunged with all the ardour of youth into the task of realizing his political ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of genius," she declared, "must be impressionable. We ought to set ourselves to discover your ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been intended that the boy should see on this ecclesiastical pilgrimage, he returned to Rome at the end of three months with his quick, impressionable mind stuffed with food for reflection. Though he had seen the glories of the Church, worshiped in her matchless temples, and sat at the feet of her great scholars, now in the quiet of his little room he found himself dwelling upon a single thought, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... youngest man in the exploration party, was in the lounge listening to them. Chandler was a nice kid, clean-cut and right out of the finest tradition of Earth, but Chandler was, like all boys barely out of their teens, impressionable. He was particularly impressionable in these, his first months ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... fundamental and persistent self-consciousness—persistent in dreams, and even in the calmest sleep, which is always accompanied by a vague sensation—is the consciousness of a living subject, active, impressionable, exercising his will, capable of emotions and passions. It is not the consciousness of an inert thing, passive, dead, or extrinsic; for animal life consists in sensation of greater or less intensity, but always of sensation. Consequently, such ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the hymns were highly impressionable and fresh. At this stage the time was not ripe enough for them to accord a consistent and well-defined existence to the multitude of gods nor to universalize them in a monotheistic creed. They hypostatized unconsciously any ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... final resolve to declare war the Emperor, Empress, and Ministers went to St. Cloud. After some discussion Gramont told me that the Empress, a high-spirited and impressionable woman, made a strong and most excited address, declaring that "war was inevitable if the honour of France was to be sustained." She was immediately followed by Marshal Leboeuf, who, in the most violent tone, threw down his portfolio and swore that ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pole of psychic influence, we find those persons who believe firmly that the other person has power over them, and who are more or less afraid of him. This belief and fear acts to make them particularly sensitive and impressionable, and easily affected by his psychic induction. This is the reason that the so-called witches and sorcerers and others of evil repute have been able to acquire such a power over their victims, and to cause so much trouble. ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... twenty-one years old; and then they were turned loose upon the world, like a pair of young bears, with a couple of hundred pounds of capital apiece to shift for themselves with. Uncanny, very; I don't like the look of it. Not at all the sort of people an impressionable girl like our Elma should ever be allowed to see too ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... former sudden departure, and of running a gauntlet of inquiry concerning his marriage to the aristocratic Miss Warwick of South Carolina; the fear that some one at Patesville might have suspected a connection between Rena's swoon and his own flight,—these considerations so moved this impressionable and impulsive young man that he called a bell-boy, demanded an early breakfast, ordered his horse, paid his reckoning, and started upon his homeward journey forthwith. A certain distrust of his own sensibility, which he felt to be curiously inconsistent with his ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children, women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... prisoner, under sentence for something which she could not understand. She turned hither and thither in her appeal for help and understanding, and everybody turned aside as if she were an outcast. The iron of injustice began to enter her soul. She was at the impressionable age, when she felt deeply every injury done her. She thought much of Ann Barnes and Martin Christiansen, her two friends. They would have understood. They would have answered the questions, told her the truth which her mother hinted at yet failed to explain. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... ten years in age between her daughters, and it was the younger of the two whose education was being completed. Johanna, the elder, had been a disappointment to her mother. Left to her own devices at an impressionable age, the girl had developed bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but she ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... as ready to write on one side as to fight on the other. He was a rolling stone, and had been a rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty. Yet you can see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the life of the clubs. She had gone through life as ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... man, with a broad brow and a pleasant gentleness of expression. The eyes were fine and thoughtful, and there was a combination of intellectual force with great delicacy of line in the contour of the head and face which was particularly attractive, especially to women of the more cultivated and impressionable sort. His thin grayish hair was rather long—not of that pronounced length which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to exert over this impressionable, mobile, almost too ardent nature, an influence which was to determine its direction. His father had advised him to choose his friends with care, and not yield himself to the first comer. He was not only incapable of doing that, but equally incapable of yielding himself to anybody. Do we ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... NOT QUARRELSOME. As a species, man appears to be the most quarrelsome animal on the earth; and the same quality is strongly reflected in his most impressionable servant and companion, the domestic dog. Nearly all species of wild animals have learned the two foundation facts of the philosophy of life— that peace is better than war, and that if one must fight, it is ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... practical competence. The more plastic a being is to experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure. What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character, namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Asensio's house—" "It is cold before the dawn—" ... Poor little Rosa! He had always thought of her as so proud, so high-spirited, so playful, but another Rosa had written this letter. Her appeal stirred every chord of tenderness, every impulse of chivalry in his impressionable Irish nature. She doubted him; she feared he would not come' to her. Well, he would set her doubts at rest. "O God! Come quickly, if you love me." He leaped to his feet; he dashed ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... her personality; there was not one of us on board the Ertak who had not. And she had not exercised her wiles on any of us save Hendricks; with the shrewdness which had made her the leader she was, she had elected to fascinate the youngest, the weakest, the most impressionable. ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... sharp-cut features a steamer has since been wrecked and sunk, and its expression of gloomy fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited "the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing and cameo cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she had received ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... dimensions, and that a geometrical projection, such as a plan or elevation, only partially represents its appearance, he advocates the more general use of perspective drawing in designing. By this is not meant the making of pretty sketches after the design is all determined, to mislead impressionable clients, but the serious study of a design to determine its appearance from different points of view. In fact his suggestion is that the usual order of proceeding shall be reversed, and that the design shall be made in perspective and then translated ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... noticed a change in him—and that very night he spoke to me. For such an impressionable fellow, he had really extraordinary tenacity, and, spite of the course of Herbert Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... this time that the labourers began to think the young master rather more important than the old one; but for their connivance, James Rooney could never have been drawn into Fenianism. The conspiracy was just the thing to fascinate the boy's impressionable heart. The poetry, the glamour of the romantic devotion to Mother Country fed his starved idealism; the midnight drillings and the danger were elements in its attraction. James Rooney drilled with the rest, swore with them their oaths of fealty ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie's fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. The strain of her studio experience had left her a little cowed and unsure of herself, but she had brightened up like a flower set in the cheerful ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... to his friends, his impressionable soul, his devotion to church, his yearning for education and enlightenment, his thrift, industry, devotion to country, fidelity to the flag shown upon hundreds of battle-fields, must be admitted and command the admiration of all fair-minded men. Let him add to all these attributes, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... divided his words with such cynical scission, relaxed separately into the inane lines of superstitious fear, and the luster of his restless eyes seemed to have degenerated into that surrounding dullness of sickly white which would have provided the impressionable Lal Lu with an easy fortitude to deny the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens of France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen Rizzio murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with the Earl of Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Men like Elmer Ford aren't fit to have charge of a child. You don't know him, but he's just an unscrupulous financier, without a thought above money. To think of a boy growing up in that tainted atmosphere—at his most impressionable age. It means death to any good ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... "Oh, impressionable youth! 'thou art the gilded sand from which the kiss of a wave washes every impress.' Tune thy myriad atoms to imitate the rock, and gird thyself with strength to meet the battery of onrushing breakers ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... fortune, save of that part of his landed estate on which his wife's jointure was settled; and even from this incumbrance he was very soon freed. His wife died in the second year of marriage, leaving an only son,—Graham. He grieved for her loss with all the passion of an impressionable, ardent, and powerful nature. Then for a while he sought distraction to his sorrow by throwing himself into public life with a devoted energy he had not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at home whom I knew intimately (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one of whom, Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation the spring before); she seemed refreshingly original, impressionable and plastic.... ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the county of the same name, a widow named Susanna, and she was well-to-do according to the modest standard of the times. She was blest with a goodly family of sons and daughters, among whom was Mary Almira, a maiden fair to look upon and impressionable withal. Now it befell that Mary Almira, while still very young, was sent to school at the Academy in Leicester, Mass., where she met, and, in the language of the law, formed "a natural and virtuous attachment" with a student named Jeremiah, sent thither by his ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... kindness. He showed him an ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand passion of science became henceforth the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
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