"Environment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is that the very things which dishearten one nature and break it down, only help another to find out what it was made for! If you would foretell the development, either of a bird or of a man, it is not enough to know his environment, you must know also what ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... went on energetically, "I find that she is a very superior sort of person. In another environment she might have been a big, strong woman. She's amazing, considering the sickly, sycophantic atmosphere she's been brought up in. Now, I want to see her married. She's thoroughly discontented and unhappy. She's becoming sour ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... lecture and talk to those people about the subjects which applied to their locality. "Acres of Diamonds"—the idea—has continuously been precisely the same. The idea is that in this country of ours every man has the opportunity to make more of himself than he does in his own environment, with his own skill, with his own energy, and with his ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... its course in the one hundred years following the settlement of the Hill, presents the social history of a homogeneous population, assembled in response to common stimuli, obedient to one ideal, sharing an environment limited by nature, cultivating an isolation favored by the conditions of the time, intermarrying, and interlacing their relations of mutual dependence through a diversified industry; knowing no government so well as the intimate authority of their Monthly Meeting; ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... surrounding hereabouts one may as well give a brief description of the Cape Adare and Robertson Bay environment. The place on which the hut was built is a small triangular beach cut off from the mainland by inaccessible cliffs. A fine bay, containing an area of perhaps nine hundred square miles, lies to the westward, and south and behind this the Admiralty ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... comprises the diseases of environment, or personal surroundings,—that is, our manner of living both as regards our private life and our relations to other people. These diseases are largely preventable and it is with them that most of the work of prevention ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... arrived officers, we are on the eve of the most serious native outbreak this country has ever witnessed. As it is under the leadership of Pontiac, a man who I honestly believe would be unexcelled among the commanders of the world had he the advantages of education and environment, it is certain to prove a ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... because you cannot help it. You are merely out of harmony with your environment. You ought to bring a supply of 'environment' about with you, seeing that you cannot manufacture it off-hand like myself. I wish ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... temple uncertain whether to go or stay. In some respects her condition corresponds with your own, only that with you, as dissolution approaches, your soul grows brighter and more active, while hers becomes more and more latent; this result being largely the difference of environment—a contrast of the soul unfoldment possible in Temple life and that amid the distractions ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... surroundings, but also the power of feeling, which is a wonderful faculty. Feeling reproduces within the organism of the animal the external condition; it is an ideal reproduction of the surroundings. The environment of the plant may be seized upon and appropriated in the form of sap, or in the form of carbonic acid, for the nourishment of that plant; but there is no ideal reproduction of the environment in the form of feeling, as in ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... since the Lombard barbarians conquered Italy, the two races, originally so different in their ideas and in their character, so opposed in their customs and in their nature, have been slowly but surely blending together, on the strength of common environment and by the necessities of mutual relations: so that by the last half of the eighth century, we can truly say that national differences, as such, have disappeared, and left behind them a single race, a combination but still a unity. We no longer have to deal with a double nationality, with ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... skill, the animation, the brightness, the force, and the charm with which he arrays the facts before us are such that we can hardly conceive of more interesting reading for an American citizen who cares to know the nature of those causes which have made not only him but his environment and the opportunities life has given him what ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... site a piece of land that has been worked to death, I believe it would be well to inaugurate a system of inter-cropping that would have for its object the building up of that soil and the improvement of the environment for the roots of those trees. In the South, we are favored with twelve months of growing weather. We plant our crops throughout the year. I am just about beginning now to plow for my oat planting. I am going to pasture those oats all winter ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... in the textile art is not necessarily a reliable index of the culture status of the peoples concerned, as progress in a particular art depends much upon the encouragement given to it by local features of environment. The tribe that had good clay used earthenware and neglected basketry, and the community well supplied with skins of animals did not need to undertake the difficult and laborious task of spinning fibers and weaving garments and bedding. Thus it appears ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... the Apes had a man's figure and a man's brain, but he was an ape by training and environment. His brain told him that the chest contained something valuable, or the men would not have hidden it. His training had taught him to imitate whatever was new and unusual, and now the natural curiosity, which is as common to men as to apes, prompted him to ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... immediate facts of perception. Given a planet, moving at a given speed in a given direction, and controlled by given attractive forces, we can determine its place at a future moment. Or given a vegetable organism in a given environment, we can predict within certain limits the way in which it will grow, although the laws are too obscure and too vague to enable us to speak of it with any approach to the precision of astronomy. And we should have reached a similar ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... possible to find answers to issues which really depend on fairness and commonsense by legalistic or theoretical approaches. What is needed is a broad and balanced assessment of what has happened and been done in the general environment of the ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing,—except, when he did very cruel things—bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting—for that also was ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... was not quite as conscious of dissatisfaction as was Rachael. Her position as a successful mother, wife, housekeeper, and member of society was theoretically so perfect that she derived from it, necessarily, an enormous amount of theoretical satisfaction. She could find no fault with herself or her environment; she was pleasantly ready with advice or with an opinion or with a verdict in every contingency that might arise in human affairs, as a Christian woman of unimpeachable moral standing. She knew her value in a hectic and reckless world. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... not Englishmen, and American humor is not English humor; but both the American and his humor had their origin in England, and have merely undergone changes brought about by changed conditions and a new environment. About the best humorous speeches I have yet heard were a couple that were made in Australia at club suppers—one of them by an Englishman, the other by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were in very bad taste, they amused more than they shocked the company, for indignation like everything else depends on environment, and the atmosphere that had gradually developed around them ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... worth remembering," said the other dryly, "and, by the way, you'll be able to study him in a strange environment, for he is ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... environment and convivial atmosphere were producing a most inspiriting effect on the lawyer. The delightful consciousness that the people with whom his son was supping were of the smartest set in town for the moment had banished all fears of exposure. From time to time he glanced proudly across to the alcove ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... end of the War has not brought an end either to the work of the Y.W.C.A. or to the claim which that work has upon our recognition. There is pressing need of accommodation and protection and healthy environment for the large army of girls who have been demobilized and are now engaged in, or seeking for, civilian employment. The funds of the Y.W.C.A. do not admit of the establishment and maintenance of sufficient hostels for this good ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... of the Ten Commandments is guilty of violating them all, particularly when one of the ten is conventionally selected as the essential precept and the most important to be observed. It is purely a matter of predilection or fancy, perhaps training and environment may have something to do with it, though judgment is wanting, but many will have it so, and hence, they arrive at the opinion that the end of the controversy has ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction of organism and environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere product of organization; living bodies being subject ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the household read, or sang, about far-away knights and heroes, and the banquets they gave in splendid halls. In their imagination people thus tended to make their environment seem larger, and better, than life, as did Hrolfur with his fishing-boat in the story When I was on ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... by the genial environment of our Mission, the minds of these four girls unfolded in a remarkable manner; fascinated with their studies, they constantly begged us to intercede with the authorities that they might remain in the Mission and obtain an education; but, although ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... the Origin, Ed. i. Chs. I. and V., the author does not admit reproduction, apart from environment, as being a cause of variation. With regard to the cumulative effect of new conditions there are many passages in the Origin, Ed. i. e.g. pp. 7, 12, vi. ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... of the peasants of the Black Belt; barely able to support themselves, often plundered with more or less of legality by landlord and storekeeper, shut up to heavy, dull, almost hopeless lives. Inheritance weighs on them as well as environment; when these plantations were recruited from Virginia, it was only the worst of the slaves whom their masters would sell, and the bad elements propagated their like. The case of these people to-day presents one ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... mouth and throat cavities, also physical conditions of the anatomy, it is no cause for wonder that the human instrument should differ in each individual. Then think of all sorts and conditions of mentality, environment, ambitions and ideals. It is a self evident fact that the vocal instrument must be a part of each person, of whom there are ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Next in interest to the history of our own branch of the human family is that of the yellow race confronting us on the opposite shore of the Pacific; even more fascinating, it may be, owing to the strangeness of manners and environment, as well as from the contrast or coincidence of experience and sentiment. So different from ours (the author writes as an American) are many phases of their social life that one is tempted to suspect that the same law, which placed their feet ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... advance, although it remained indistinct, a vague speck in the waste of water. I sat motionless gazing about at the scene, yet vaguely comprehending the nature of our surroundings. My mind reviewed the strange events of the past night, and endeavored to adjust itself to my new environment. Almost in an instant of time my life had utterly changed—I had been married and exiled; wedded to a man whom I despised, and forced to accompany him into the unknown wilderness. It was like a dream, a delirium of fever, and even yet ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... describing contains a rough draft of a curved sarcophagus, with an allegorical figure reclining upon it, indicating the first conception of the Dawn. Another, blurred and indistinct, with clumsy architectural environment, exhibits two of these allegories, arranged much as we now see them at S. Lorenzo. A river-god, recumbent beneath the feet of a female statue, carries the eye down to the ground, and enables us to comprehend how these subordinate figures were wrought into the complex harmony of flowing lines he ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... 'Cosmopolis' are certainly notable books. The latter marks the cardinal point in Bourget's fiction. Up to that time he had seen environment more than characters; here the dominant interest is psychic, and, from this point on, his characters become more and more like Stendhal's, "different from normal clay." Cosmopolis is perfectly charming. Bourget is, indeed, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dialogue. Eleanor found herself talking to Bertram. A kind of pride had been rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her once—and she could ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... served. Our joys and our sorrows, our gains and our losses, the bright hours and the dark hours, and the hours that are neither eminently bright nor supremely dark, our failures and our successes, our hopes disappointed or fulfilled, and all the infinite variety of condition and environment through which our varying days and years have led us, co-operate for one end. It is life that makes men; the infant is a bundle of possibilities, and as the years go on, one possible avenue of development after another ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... not to allow himself to be run over by the motorman. The obligation of teachers in the public schools to supply their pupils with all the aptitudes and graces formerly supposed to be the result of heredity and environment. The duty of each teacher to consult daily a card catalogue of duties, beginning with Apperception and Adenoids and going on to Vaccination, Ventilation, and the various vivacious variations on the three R's. The obligation resting upon the well-to-do ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... to realise the exact environment of the early patriarchs. Human society was then in its making. There were giants in those days, both physically and intellectually. They lived long, and unfolded a vigorous manhood, by which civilisation was developed ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... crossed a wide grassy glade, on which were several circles of brighter green. But even here I was struck with the utter stillness. No bird sang. No insect hummed. Not a living creature crossed my way. Yet somehow the whole environment seemed only asleep, and to wear even in sleep an air of expectation. The trees seemed all to have an expression of conscious mystery, as if they said to themselves, "we could, an' if we would." They had all a meaning ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... that unending stir, the kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that environment, so he felt—as he had not at first felt in the North—that in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all this activity ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... will never bring Euphues and Sacharissa "to their own again." They are as dead as the Jacobite cause. And for that very reason they are all the more interesting for the literary historian. All writers are conditioned by their environment, but some concern themselves with the essentials, others with the accidents, of that internally constant, but externally unstable, phenomenon, known as humanity. Waller and Lyly were of the latter ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical nod upon the one "blocked-in" countenance, or had drawn her brows together questioningly over a study in which the nose had a startlingly finished appearance in a still sketchy environment, but not until she had successfully avoided the last easel, planted at an erratic angle just where the unwary would be sure to stub his toe, ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... millions of solar systems; and as one or the other must be self-existent the difficulty about self-existence was common to both cases. The well-known argument from design did not convince him, as he believed in a continual process of natural adjustment of creatures to their environment,—a theory resembling that of Darwin, but not yet so complete. I listened to Mr. Uttley's account of his views with much interest; but they had no influence on my own, as it seemed to me much easier to refer everything to an intelligent Creator than ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... while this new existence suited him well enough. Thus he had wives in plenty of a sort, and he grew rich, becoming just such a person as might be expected from his environment and unchecked natural tendencies. At length it happened that he met Rachel, who awoke in him certain forgotten associations. She was an English lady, and he remembered that once he had been an English gentleman, years and years ago. Also she was beautiful, ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... from housekeeping to create the right home atmosphere for her children and to so enrich their home surroundings that they may gain their ideals of beauty and their tastes for books and music not from the shop windows, the movies, the billboards, or the jazz band, but from the home environment. ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... sense. Rather it is an automatic life. The soul of the machine pervades us all, and the machines are beautiful. Our lives are logically and inevitably directed by environment and heredity just as the machines are inevitably directed by their functions and capabilities. When a child is born, we know already what he will do throughout his life, how long he will live, what sort of children he will have, the woman he will marry. The Bureau could ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... equipment in human beings. No system can ever hope to be a practical system unless we can eliminate the possibility of children being born, some of them perfectly qualified for life and citizenship, and others hopelessly disqualified. If such differences were the result of environment it would be a remediable thing. But one can have a strong, vigorous, naturally temperate child born and brought up under the meanest and most sordid conditions, and, on the other hand, a thoroughly worthless and detestable ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Fielding's character. Mrs. Hussey's testimony as to his dignified and gentlemanly manners, which does not seem to be advanced to meet any particular charge, may surely be set against any innuendoes of the Burney and Walpole type as to his mean environment and coarse conversation. And the suggestion that "the characters of all his friends"—by which must be intended rather mention of them than portraits—are to be found in his masterpiece, is fairly borne out by the most casual ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... consequences of this reaction were that, evil—that is, the effect of internal and external struggle—being abnormal and transitory, penal and repressive institutions are likewise transitory; that in man there is no native vice, but that his environment has depraved his inclinations; that civilization has been mistaken as to its own tendencies; that constraint is immoral, that our passions are holy; that enjoyment is holy and should be sought after like virtue itself, because ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so delicately attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through the universal framework of things; and conversely his divine organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes of environment as would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... test of truth. And in the vast majority of cases this test of relative inconceivability is, for all practical purposes, as valid a test of truth as is the test of absolute conceivability. For as every man is more or less in harmony with his environment, his habits of thought with regard to his environment are for the most part stereotyped correctly; so that the most ready and the most trustworthy gauge of probability that he has is an immediate appeal to consciousness as to whether he feels the probability. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... into crystals by the frosty air. But the waters of the spring gush forth as abundantly and musically now as they did in the hot days of last July, and the clam-shell with which you then drank is still in its place by the rock. The pure, melodious, beautiful spring makes its own environment, regardless of surroundings. Its sources are in the unfailing hills. It suggests the lives of some men and women whose friendship you enjoy, and who are ever ready to refresh ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... was the sheltered Cove at his feet, the far sweep of the Gulf—colored according to its mood and the weather—great mountain ranges lifting sheer from blue water, their lower slopes green with forest and their crests white with snow. Immensities of land and trees. All his environment pitched upon a colossal scale. It was good to look at, to live among, and MacRae ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... its soul—that beautiful, spiritual softness and radiance which we love and which differentiate the home from the house which is but its shell. The life and spirit of the home should be one of growth and development, which can only be achieved in a proper atmosphere and environment; and these it now rests with the home builder to supply in the radiant harmony and softness which flow from these final "trimmings," which not only create but ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... a definite goal is essential to the progress of any individual. It should be made with care and in keeping with one's personality, talents, training, education, environment and experience, and having been made should be adhered to with the determination which does not permit little things ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... incident to Dr. James E. Kelly in a conversation in Dublin during the winter of 1881-82, in proof that environment has more to do with human actions, and especially with so-called criminal actions, than we generally concede; and to show how acute poverty may drive sound-minded, moral men to the commission of deeds that are supposed to belong entirely to hardened evil natures. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... weaknesses, their temptations. To use a slang phrase, he knew exactly what they "were up against" whether they lived in country or city. Within a comparatively short period before his death he addressed two audiences as widely separated by distance and environment as the farmers gathered together for the first Negro Fair of southwestern Georgia at Albany, Georgia, and five thousand Negro residents of New York City assembled in the Harlem Casino. He told those Georgia farmers how much land they owned ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... discordant harmony. Now it is overrun by Cook's tourists in bicycle costumes, irreverent, chattering, idle, and foolish. Even Wagner has grown gray and the Ring sounded antique to me, so strong were the disturbing influences of my environment. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Science plainly shows us that this primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the contents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that this dynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; and that this feeding environment is ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... medium of images has always been the aim of those who are artists as well as thinkers in literature, and it is to a desire to give a sensuous environment to intellectual concepts that we owe Mr. Pater's last volume. For these Imaginary or, as we should prefer to call them, Imaginative Portraits of his, form a series of philosophic studies in which the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in brown, a gray-shingled bungalow ranged itself on the lap of its broad lawns against a slope of orchard tops climbing to the dark environment of the forest. Not the original forest: of that only three stark pines were left, which rose one hundred feet out of a gulch below the house and lent their ancient majesty to the modern uses of electric wires and telephone lines. Their dreaming tops were ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... country has a right to an education and a chance in the world. The saloons say to hosts of children: "You shall have neither education nor opportunity. You shall go to the streets and sweat-shops to earn bread. You shall live in ignorance and mid evil environment that we may gather in the wages of your fathers." How does this sumptuary law of the saloon compare with a sumptuary law that forbids the sale of what is of no earthly or eternal benefit to any ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... had this house since shortly after the Revolution; four generations have been born here. As I have no fashionable wife and I live alone, I am content to stay. Then, the house suits me; everything is arranged to my taste. The environment may not be the most desirable; but, my visitors are seldom of the sort ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... are in danger of great mischiefs, I do assure you. Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has brought you from your home among the Apennines,—some rusty old castle, I suppose, with a village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of vineyards, fig-trees, and olive orchards,—a sad mischance, I say, that has transported you to my side. You have had a happy life hitherto, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... made, but unless given a sufficient sub-structure it can only be destructive. So for the waterway, so for the highway. You may have the most perfect equipment for their use but the instrument must work in a proper environment. So the waterway, then, the last few years—in fact, very recently—has come rapidly into its own. It is within 18 months, gentlemen, that I stood upon the first load of ore going south on the Mississippi River and saw it enter the port of St. Louis. It was only yesterday that ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... of honour, her fearless outlook, she seemed to him to collect in herself all that was most admirable in his countrywomen. But he saw in her something more than the perfect type of the American girl, he felt that her exquisiteness was peculiar in a way to her environment, and he was assured that no city in the world could have produced her but Chicago. A pang seized him when he remembered that he must deal so bitter a blow to her pride, and anger flamed up in his heart when he thought ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... flowers clambered and hung, in natural tufts and trails of foliage and blossom, mingling their sweet odours with the fresh scent of the sea. Amid all the glow and delicacy of colour, the crowning perfection of the perfect environment was the Queen-Consort, lovelier in her middle-age than most women in their teens. An exquisite figure of stateliness and dignity, robed in such hues and adorned with such jewels as best suited her statuesque beauty, and attended by ladies of whose more youthful charms she was never envious, having ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... gambling for diversion and relaxation. In the Yukon men gambled their lives for gold, and those that won gold from the ground gambled for it with one another. Nor was Elam Harnish an exception. He was a man's man primarily, and the instinct in him to play the game of life was strong. Environment had determined what form that game should take. He was born on an Iowa farm, and his father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country Elam's boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks for big stakes. Pluck ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... teacher or leader of games. A wide variety of conditions have been considered, including schools, playgrounds, gymnasiums, boys' and girls' summer camps, adult house parties and country clubs, settlement work, children's parties, and the environment of indoors or out of doors, city or country, summer or winter, the seashore, the woodland, or the snow. The games have been collected from many countries and sources, with a view to securing novel and interesting as well as thoroughly tried and popular ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... and they say, 'Environment is the thing that is to blame for it all. How can you get decent lives in the slums?' No, I know you cannot; and God bless every effort made to get the people out of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. You cannot change a man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by any change of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... operations of the different parts of the living thing, as well as of the whole organism itself, are mechanical; that is, they are the same under similar circumstances. The living creature secures fresh supplies of matter and energy from the environment outside of itself; these provide the fuel and power for the performance of the various tasks demanded of an efficient living thing, and they are the sources upon which the organism draws when it rebuilds ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... peoples who gradually advanced in civilization from generation to generation and passed through cycles of revolutions—in one century relapsing, in another advancing by leaps and bounds by an infusion of new blood or a change of environment—exactly similar to the checkered annals of the successive dynasties in the Nile Valley and the plains of Babylonia. In the New World, as in the Old World, from prehistoric times wealth was accumulated at such centers, bringing additional comfort and refinement, ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... to do it just because I am not strong enough to resist the world and my fleshly desires. I must be in an absolutely pure environment and lead an abstemious life, only then will I remain good. I have tried it for three weeks. But then I fell ill and was nursed and petted by kind hands and then Satan again ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... "You should take to gardening; it makes one recognise what you idealists seem to pass over—that men, my dear friend, are, like plants, creatures of heredity and environment; their growth is slow. You can't get grapes from thorns, Vigil, or figs from thistles—at least, not in one generation—however busy ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... were buying two streaks of rust and a right-of-way in the Red Desert. More than that, he asserted that the executive officer didn't live who could bring order out of the chaos into which bad management and a peculiarly tough environment had plunged the Red Butte Western. That's where I had him bested, Howard. All through the hot fight I kept saying over and over to myself that I knew ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... ashamed or nonplussed; he was not even embarrassed by his immediate environment. In fact he turned it to his own advantage, for his hairs, duly watered and soaped down on to his cranium, lost their rakish look and gave him the appearance of a gentleman of perfect integrity, great intellect and no little ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature, change in the new environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... but he was also extremely suggestible, and, until very recently, Theology and Religion were supposed to be synonymous, or at least to walk hand in hand. Balzac's early training and his environment, as well as the thought of the times in which he lived, were calculated to inspire in him the fallacious belief that God would have us renounce the love of our fellow beings, for love ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... the future, as in the past, use every endeavor to maintain and enlarge our friendly relations with all the great powers, but they will not expect us to look kindly upon any project that would leave us subject to the dangers of a hostile observation or environment. We have not sought to dominate or to absorb any of our weaker neighbors, but rather to aid and encourage them to establish free and stable governments resting upon the consent of their own people. We have a clear right to expect, therefore, that no ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... parted in a smile. She was a very beautiful woman, Kirk realized—a very compelling, unusual woman, and one whose capabilities seemed unbounded. He began dimly to perceive that all women have great capabilities for good or evil, depending largely upon the accident of their environment, and with this thought came the feeling that he must speak frankly now or prove himself worse than base. If only she were of the weakly feminine type his task would be far easier. But it was hard to strike her, for the very reason that he knew she would ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... in Ophiuchus remain to be examined. The first of these, No. 4256, is partially resolved into stars by the five-inch. No. 4315 is globular, and has a striking environment of bystanding stars. It is about one quarter as broad as the full moon, and our largest aperture reveals the faint coruscation of its crowded components. No. 4410 is a coarser and more scattered star ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... and its environment later on got me into serious difficulty. Having crossed the Stanislaus River and cleared the canon, I abandoned the main road for an alleged "cut-off." This I was following with the utmost confidence, when, to my surprise, it came to an abrupt end at the foot of a steep hill. In the ravine ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... soul of the righteous man passes from earth into a region out of which we 'gather all things that offend, and them that do iniquity.' There are other reasons for it, but that is the one which our Lord dwells on. Or, to put it into modern scientific language, environment corresponds to character. So, when the clouds have rolled away, and no more mists from the undrained swamps of selfishness and sin and animal nature rise up to hide the radiance, there shall be a fuller flood of light poured ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pallor of which the snowy whiteness of the haik absorbed even the reflection. Magnificently draped, they contrasted strangely with the busts which were ranged on both sides of the aisle they had taken, and which, perched on their high pedestals, exiled from their familiar surroundings, from the environment in which they would doubtless have recalled some engrossing toil, some deep affection, a busy and courageous life, seemed very forlorn in the empty air about them and presented the distressing aspect of people who had gone astray and were very much ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fireside the young men might be roaring "Old Grimes is dead, that good old man," or "Oh, then, Susannah"; but quite as likely close at hand some family group would be heard in sacred hymns. A strange envisagement it all made, in a strange environment, a new atmosphere, here on the threshold ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular features of his production must be a failure—this last as a matter of course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in lending ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... death-traps, it does not matter that the walls are covered by art papers and plastered over with china dishes. This erection, wherein human beings have to live and work and fight their sins and prepare for eternity, is a fraud and a lie. No man compelled to exist in such an environment of unreality can respect himself or other people; and if it come to pass that he holds cheap views of life, and reads smart papers, and does sharp things in business, and that his talk be only a clever jingle, then a plea in extenuation will be lodged for him at the Great ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... subjects in the following pages, will be understood to apply generally to all of the tribes which have been mentioned as inhabiting this region, although, of course, minor differences did exist, principally due to environment. As in the case of all primitive peoples, their mode of life, food supply, etc., were largely determined by natural conditions, and the tribes living in the warm foot-hills differed somewhat in these respects from those dwelling higher ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... are not the only things that hinder the ease and increase the strength of college girls. Their troubles and their triumphs are their own, often peculiar to their environment. How Wellington students meet the experiences outside the class-rooms is worth the doing, ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... theory of evolution by slow accumulation of slight fluctuations are divided into two camps. One group is called the Neo-Lamarckians; they assume a direct modifying agency of the environment, producing a corresponding and useful change in the organization. The other group call themselves Darwinians or selectionists, but to my mind with no other right beyond the arbitrary restriction of the Darwinian principles by Wallace. They assume fluctuating variations ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... as giving us knowledge of the time of perception, cognition, or association, except in so far as we discover the relations of these various processes and the conditions under which they occur most satisfactorily. To determine how this or that factor in the environment influences the activities of the nervous system, and in what way system may be adjusted to system or part-process to whole, is the task of the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order—the only environment in which our free institutions could ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... known each other for a very long time; too long, she sometimes thought, for them ever to grow to know each other any better. But there was always the chance that he had another side, one that had not disclosed itself, and which she could not discover in the strict social environment in which they both lived. And she was the surer of this because she had once seen him when he did not know that she was near, and he had been so different that it had puzzled her and made her wonder if she knew the real ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... A man's ancestry and environment, no doubt, account in a superficial manner for his appearance and mental characteristics. Having the man, we are able to trace the germs of his being in the past of his race and his country; but, with all our science ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... one cure for that. It comes, however, to pass. It is not so overpowering after the first home-going, and it grows less importunate after each visit. One finds after a short absence that things in the old environment are, somehow, not the same; that there has ceased to be a niche which one can fill; that one has a fresh point of view; and as time goes on and the roots of life go deeper into the soil of the new country, the realisation comes that it is in the homeland where one is homeless, and in the ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... eyed the shadowy corners—sensitive to impressions, forever alert: nevertheless possessing a fine feeling of security and hopefulness; still wistful, often weeping in the night, but not melancholy. Responsive to environment, by nature harmonious with his new surroundings, he presently moved through the lofty old rooms with a manner reflecting their own—the same gravity, serenity, old-fashioned grace: expressing even their stateliness in a quaint and childish way. Thus was the soil of his heart prepared for ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... wise." So it is with me. India has given me the best of good times. I have lacked for nothing—"howbeit let me go in any wise." You needn't think I am changed. I'm not. I'm afraid I'm not. One would think that a new environment would make a difference, but it really does not. A person with a suburban mind would be as suburban in the wilds of Nepal as in the wilds of Tooting. The illuminating thought has come to me that it isn't ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... he appealed to his missionary guide; this latest one, the last of the five men to whom Pastor Drury had written before J.W. had set out on his travels. Could he show his visitor a little of missionary work in village environment? ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... you think of me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind: their family, their surroundings, their whole social environment; all those of whom their nearest and dearest think only in the past, saying, 'We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this world, we know nothing of his fate.' Then I, feeling that you too have abandoned ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... most brilliant money-getters. He gathered in and disbursed with a lavish magnificence. She had been called the most beautiful woman in Europe and her gem-like brilliancy had been set in Life's gold and platinum of environment. When Cupid came to her what bill of health could he produce to prove that he was not a sneak-thief in disguise? She had accepted the cynical conclusion that she might never be sure of any man's love and the tenderer little heart-nerves ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... greater part of their history. During the first six centuries A.D. there was intercourse with Rome, Parthia, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Ceylon, India, and Indo-China, and in the seventh century with the Arabs. Europe was brought within the sociological environment by Christian travellers. From the tenth to the thirteenth century the north was occupied by Kitans and Nuechens, and the whole Empire was under Mongol sway for eighty-eight years in the thirteenth and fourteenth ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... contrived environment hadn't the power, it seemed, to shift the current of his thoughts. They went on dwelling on the behavior of Miss Beach and young Craig, which really got queerer the more one thought about it. It was hard to conceive of any allusion ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... her further pleasure. Her pleasure being capricious, she seated herself again, saying: "What I meant to say was this: evils that spring from heredity are no excuse for misconduct in people of our sort. Environment, not heredity, counts. And it's our business, who have every chance in the world, to ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... barriers, however, and was gradually recalled to the harsh realities of her daily environment, these fleeting dreams had disappeared with the rest, leaving the old, fixed feelings of hopelessness and sullen combativeness. With this revival came the pain from the still recent blows of ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... of perfect parents, brought up perfectly, in a perfect environment, would probably have no faults. Even such a child, however, would be at times inconvenient, and would do and say things at variance with the order of the adult world. Therefore he might seem to a hasty, prejudiced observer to be naughty. ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... the computer with its information banks, and the control room. As he went along he kept firing medical questions at Dal and Tiger, hardly pausing long enough for the answers, and ignoring Jack Alvarez completely. "What's the normal range of serum cholesterol in a vegetarian race with Terran environment? How would you run a Wenberg electrophoresis? How do you determine individual radiation tolerance? How would you prepare a heart culture for cardiac transplant on board this ship?" The questions ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... accumulates a little store of potential energy, and it proceeds to expend this, like an explosive, by acting on its environment. It does so in a very characteristic self-preservative fashion, so that it burns without being consumed and explodes without being blown to bits. It is characteristic of the organism that it remains ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... young man has succumbed to his environment. The hero of the following moving tale ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... managed—no dillydallying in this day and generation, unless one would join the down-and-out club! Such was the point of view from which this bridegroom of a year surveyed his domestic life. It was a point of view established almost of necessity from the environment in which he found himself established. He was in no wise unique: he was typical of his class. He was clean and wholesome, industrious, energetic, clever—but he knew nothing of woman.... So, now, he immediately rushed up to Mrs. Delancy, without so much as a glance toward the wife ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... performed, of tangible duty? Whither had it gone? Alien influences were at work upon him. Something new had insinuated itself into his blood, some demon of doubt and disquiet which threatened his old-established conceptions. Whence came it? The effect of changed environment—new friends, new food, new habits? The unaccustomed leisure which gave him, for the first time, a chance of thinking about non-professional matters? The south wind acting on his still weakened health? All these together? Or had he reached an epoch in his development, the termination of one ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... that lexic and grammatic elements have a life that changes very slowly. This is especially true where the habitat of the tribe is unchanged. Migration introduces a potent agency of mutation, but a new environment impresses its characteristics upon a language more by a change in the semantic content or meaning of words than by change in their forms. There is another agency of change of profound influence, namely, association with other ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... on the other hand, declare it to be merely the psycho-neurotic reaction of climatic environment on ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... or she never would have made him choose as she did! That was plain. If she had not loved, then it was better he should go out of her life! He was glad that the university days were over, and he might begin a new environment somewhere. He felt something strong within his soul pushing him on to a decision. Was it the Voice calling him again, leading up to what he ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... clambered into the car of the air-ship and with Frank at the wheel and the old Krooman at his elbow to direct the course they were to take, they left the ground and were soon flying through a breathless environment at ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... as well as plants and animals! Having denied the existence of God, or his active control and interference, they must account for environment by evolution. Listen:—"Henderson points out that environment, no less than organisms, has had an evolution. Water, for example, has a dozen unique properties that condition life. Carbon dioxide is absolutely ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... consider this subject as one which naturally divides itself into three periods: the preparation which precedes conception, the mental, moral and physical conditions at the time of conjunction, and the environment and condition of the mother during the period ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... himself and his neighbors. He bought and sold in the markets of the world. He needed more capital and more machinery. He had to borrow money and make shrewd business calculations. From every standpoint his economic environment had become more complicated and more extended, and his success depended much more upon conditions which were beyond his control. He never was a pioneer in the sense that the early inhabitants of the Middle West and South had ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly |
