"Receptivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... subject through some indication or hint given by the operator, is found to be analogous to dreaming. Say the authors: "For suggestion to succeed, the subject must have naturally fallen, or been artificially thrown into a state of morbid receptivity: but it is difficult to determine accurately the conditions of suggestionability. However, we may mention two. The first, the mental inertia of the subject: * * * the consciousness is completely empty: an idea is suggested, and reigns supreme over the slumbering consciousness, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... soixante ans, un homme ne vaut rien. The rash dictum had certainly no application to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he approached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be consumed by that lust for knowledge, libido sciendi, which he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians forbade him, four years ago, to expend his failing strength any longer on political ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... practical purposes she always looked well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat-and-skirt and a small hat of black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding sensitive receptivity. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... with a certain vulgarity of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity which culminates in the state of being "controlled." An untrained psychic who is mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, may easily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor who is determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may rise to unaccustomed levels ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... consists in still receptivity, but in what exact and severe outline is this passive life inclosed! In the animal kingdom the strife between Life and Form seems first properly to begin; her first works Nature hides in hard shells, and, where these are laid aside, the animated world attaches ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the projects as outlined above there are a number of minor problems that are receiving some attention: such as the retention of the vitality of pollen, the period of receptivity, the seed production in hybrid fruits, and the time for and percentage of the germination of seeds. On all of these points we are accumulating considerable information that it is hoped may be of some practical value."—Journal ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... poetic interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on. It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There is still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater receptivity, - delight in new experiences, in gratified curiosity, in sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing faculties. But the belief in the impossible and the bliss of ignorance are seen, when looking back, to have assumed almost ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... is the artist's business to catch the suggestion and make it his own. For nature seldom works out her own suggestions. The effect as nature gives it is either not complete, or is so evanescent as to be uncopyable. But the habit of constant receptivity on the part of the artist makes nature an infinite mine of possibilities ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... distribution curve of woman's ability in any trait overlaps the men's curve to at least half its range. In detail the exact measurements of intellectual abilities show a slight superiority of the women in receptivity and memory, and a slight superiority of the men in control of movement and in thought about concrete mechanical situations. In interests which cannot be so definitely measured, women seem to be more interested ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... young Mowbray was strange with emotion, pale but brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... of religion. Even for a man of really strong and independent intellect it may be many years before the precociously dulled feelings become fresh again, before the fetters of routine fall off, and he is enabled at last to approach the Bible with fresh receptivity and to realize, for the first time in his life, the treasures of art and beauty and divine wisdom it contains. But for most that moment never comes round. For the majority the religious education of the school as effectually seals the Bible for life as the classical education of the college ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... but relics simply on idle cessation for its reinforcement, it will get too much lymph. Work is worship; but work without rest is idolatry. And rest is not, as some seem to think, a swoon, a slumber; it is an active receptivity, a masterly inactivity, which alone can deserve the fine name of Rest. Such, we believe, our favorite game secures better than all others. Besides this direct use, one who loves it finds many other incidental uses starting up about it,—such as made Archbishop Magnus, the learned historian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the other hand, lets itself go with a more passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining and registering functions of the intellect does this ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... this to be so I cannot question; but what you term 'open-mindedness'—implying a state of receptivity—is in fact an utter rejection of all established spiritual truths. The open-minded and the atheistical draw dangerously closer day by day. The only thing of which they are sure is that they are sure of nothing and their credo is 'I do ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... complication. The more anarchic modern may again attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity. Light (he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to perceive and expand; in short, enlightenment should be shed over darkest London. Now here is ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... same condition of slightly exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,—talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... self-control, the faculty of thinking logically and distinguishing the true from the false, the faculty of combining aesthetic thoughts and sensations, all constitute human values which are much superior to the faculty of rapid assimilation or receptivity, and a good memory for words ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short? Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the Prolegomena to AEsthetics? The Prolegomena to AEsthetics was not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... proofs of the slow rise of the Andes, than they were in 1830, when I first startled them with that doctrine." This sentence refers to the theory elaborated in my father's geological observations on South America (1846), but the gradual change in receptivity of the geological mind must have been favourable to all his geological work. Nevertheless, Lyell seems at first not to have expected any ready acceptance of the Coral theory; thus he wrote to my father in 1837:—"I could think of nothing for days after your ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... second rank of English poets: through love he once set foot in the circle of the mightiest. Sincere he was always, simple often, sensuous rarely. His great industry, his careful study, and his great receptivity are shown in the unusual spectacle of a man who has sung well in the language of his youth, suddenly learning, in his age, the tongue spoken by the younger generation, and reproducing it with individuality and sureness of touch. ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... engaged, he mutely raved to the stars, protesting by his dimmed eyes, moving lips, and strained-out arms how every breath she took was to him also an inspiration. Her frankness, the truth lucent in her eyes, her abounding receptivity,—for she believed everything she was told and objected to nothing,—her sweet long body, the tired grace with which she carried her lovely head, her tender, stroking ways, the evenness of her ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... what idea will be accompanied with pleasure and what with pain, it will depend on experience alone to find out what is primarily good or evil. The property of the subject, with reference to which alone this experiment can be made, is the feeling of pleasure and pain, a receptivity belonging to the internal sense; thus that only would be primarily good with which the sensation of pleasure is immediately connected, and that simply evil which immediately excites pain. Since, however, this ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the Hindus. Soham, mystic syllable representing involution; lit. "that am I." Soonium, a magical ceremony for the purpose of removing a sickness from one person to another. Soorya, the sun. Souramanam, a method of calculating time. Space, Akasa; Swabhavat (q.v.) Sraddha, faith. Sravana, receptivity, listening. Sthula-Sariram, the gross physical body. Sukshmopadhi, fourth and fifth principles (Raja Yoga.) Sunyata, space; nothingness. Suras, elementals of a beneficent order; gods. Surpa, winnower. Suryasiddhanta, a Sanskrit treatise on astronomy. Sushupti ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... afternoon into the peace of evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine. ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Asiatic barbarism upon European civilization. The virtue of the Slavonic race is thus first of all passivity; and as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow, so the virtue of the Russian is first of all passive receptivity. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the finest faculties of mind, and an uncommon receptivity and docility, and soon became to all that got acquainted with her a dear and precious object. To declaim passages from her Brother's Poems was her greatest joy; she did her recitation well; and her Swabian accent and naivety of manner gave her an additional charm for ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Peter's voice and steady gaze as he said, 'Look on us!' It was a strange preface, if only some small coin was to follow. It kindled some flicker of hope of he knew not what in the beggar. He expected to receive 'something' from them, and, no doubt, was asking himself what. Expectation and receptivity were being stirred in him, though he could not divine what was coming. We have no right to assume that his state of mind was operative in fitting him to be cured, nor to call his attitude 'faith,' but still he was lifted from his usual dreary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... ignore her. But in the slow rumination of the forest he became more and more irritably sensible of her presence. Sam's taciturnity was contrastedly sunny and open. He looked on things about him with the placid receptivity of an old man, and said nothing because there was nothing to say. The Ojibway girl remained inscrutable, helping where she could, apparently desirous of neither praise ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... There is more or less receptivity to receive the Grace of God, as there is more or less life still in the germ formerly implanted. When He comes to the latter class there is nothing to work on. The foundations must be laid. A receptivity must be brought about, a new life must be inbreathed. In other words, in the conversion of the latter the Holy Spirit must do what He has already done in the former. The one is the conversion of a once regenerate but now lapsed one. The other is the regeneration and conversion of one heretofore ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... will find in the succeeding portions thereof, from time to time, certain general instructions regarding the cultivation of psychic receptivity and sensitiveness. These general instructions are also applicable to the cultivation of telepathic power, and may be properly applied to that end. There is really but one general principle involved ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... less prejudiced, than any other class that one could name. We must not count upon finding our savant "semper vacuum, semper amabilem," any more than Horace found his young ladies always in that condition of affable receptivity. The main reason why so many eminent men neglect our work may be stated in a much less offensive way. The minds of all of us move in certain orbits, from which we are sensibly deflected only by the approach ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his work: L'essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, he developed Locke's ideas and contended that not only the soul, but also the senses, not only the art of fashioning ideas, but also the apparatus of sensual receptivity, are subjects of experience and usage. Consequently, the entire development of man depends upon education and external circumstances. Condillac was only supplanted in the French schools by the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... receptivity, I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve, My sombre image, warped by insidious heave Of those less forthright, must lose place ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the historian, the critic, will find himself at home with Amiel. The power of organizing his thought, the art of writing a book, monumentum aere perennius, was indeed denied him—he laments it bitterly; but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself, responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catching and reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions—all this Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new formation. The very elements of dissociation are positively charged, so to speak, and contain creative power. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... said with slight embarrassment, "your mind interests me exceedingly. It is not complex, nor subtle, but remarkably intuitive. You have imagination and humor, and great receptivity." ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... than specialization of interest. These differences depend on the attitude of mind of the physician, and are largely the result of his own personal equation. They do not reflect in any way either on his judgment or on the special knowledge of his time, but are the index of his special receptivity and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... of this early history was that of a Spirit which should fill the whole nature of the men to whom He was granted; filling—in the measure, of course, of their receptivity—them as the great sea does all the creeks and indentations along the shore. The deeper the creek, the deeper the water in it; the further inland it runs, the further will the refreshing tide penetrate the bosom of the continent. And so each man, according to his character, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... protoplasm in man has a something in addition to its instincts or its habits. It has a capacity for God. In this capacity for God lies its receptivity; it is the very protoplasm that was necessary. The chamber is not only ready to receive the new Life, but the Guest is expected, and, till He comes, is missed. Till then the soul longs and yearns, wastes and pines, waving its tentacles piteously in the empty air, feeling after ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... infallible principles can have but imperfect application because of local limitations. The failure of a particular field of grain does not disprove the universal principle of vegetable growth. The imperfection of the healer, and the lack of receptivity in the patient, are local limitations. There are sudden cures, but as a rule recovery will be in the nature of a progressive growth. Lack of immediate results often causes disappointment, and leads to an abandonment of the treatment before the seed has had time to take root. The healer is the sower, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... revelation some day—towards some ampler vision, which [220] should take up into itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... yourself successfully responding to the foot test. When you have actually accomplished test No. 4, you see yourself accomplishing the "hand levitation" test—No. 5. In other words, you use each step to enhance a greater receptivity for the following progressive test. As you couple this approach with posthypnotic suggestions that you will go deeper and deeper into the hypnotic state at a given stimulus, you set into motion a conditioned response mechanism which ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... course we know that the human body has electrical capacity and that operators sometimes have to use metal shields to protect the tube from the influence of the hand. And in our loop aerial at Ocean Point you noticed that the receptivity of the tube was modified when we ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... of the brain's receptivity is that this organ be brought into a state of complete rest. So long as the waking consciousness is active, the brain vibrates powerfully, and if, at this time, the soul sends the brain its thought, this latter can no more make an impression on the existing cerebral activity than a faint ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... revival strove to capture and convey the influence of nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one another. They were none the less artists because they approached nature in a state of passive receptivity. They believed in the autocracy of the individual imagination none the less because their mission was to divine nature and to understand her, rather than to correct her profusions in the name ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... either sex is commonly due to a certain inability to appreciate consequences, to visualize the inevitableness of cause and effect, combined sometimes with a sex-hyperesthesia and lack of self-control. Criminality in its worst forms is similarly due to a lack of appreciation of or receptivity to moral ideas. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... historian, priest and poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred years. From the Revival of Learning to the middle of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew the soul of Europe as few men have known it, and he helped to translate Europe to America. His intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color and costume and landscape, his ear for folklore and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made him the most resourceful of international interpreters. And this lover of children, walking in quiet ways, this refined and courteous ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... France and caused the earlier events of the Revolution to fade away into a seemingly remote past. The failures of the civilian rulers and the military triumphs of Bonaparte had exerted a curious influence on the French character, which was in a mood of expectant receptivity. In 1800 everything was in the transitional state that favours the efforts of a master builder; and one was now at hand whose constructive ability in civil affairs equalled his transcendent ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... we should understand the saying of Keats—to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we do not know that real musicians, real Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a paper covered with little lines ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... shall he change his habits, shall the law regarding instruction in hygiene be changed, or shall other provision be made for bringing child and essential facts together in a way that will not dull the child's receptivity? ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... derived from his own thought-world, he is apt to develop a tendency to withdraw himself from the impressions of the outer world. Yet such a step only leads to parching and withering the inner life; and he will go farthest who manages to retain an unchecked receptivity for all impressions of the outer world, while possessing the power to withdraw within his own inner self. It is by no means necessary to think only of the so-called important events of life: every one, in every sphere of life, be his four walls ever so humble, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... that the expressed or implied similitude in parabolic teaching cannot logically and consistently be carried beyond the limits of the illustrative story. In the parable we are considering, the Teacher depicted the varied grades of spiritual receptivity existing among men, and characterized with incisive brevity each of the specified grades. He neither said nor intimated that the hard-baked soil of the wayside might be plowed, harrowed, fertilized, and so be ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... from his rustication; the French Ambassador at Warsaw gets his instructions. French Ambassador opens himself largely, at Warsaw, by eloquent speech, by copious money, on the subject of Stanislaus; finds large audience, enthusiastic receptivity;—and readers will now understand the following chronological ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... question; and one, I am disposed to think, which can receive its solution only by the idea, or the act and fact of justification by faith self-reflected. But, humanly considered, this position of Luther's provokes the mind to ask, is there no receptivity of faith, considered as a free gift of God, prerequisite in the individual? Does faith commence by generating the receptivity of itself? If so, there is no difference either in kind or in degree between the receivers and the rejectors of the word, at the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... interesting secret, indispensable to us all. The beloved maiden attracts us, as a ray of light attracts the wanderer in the dark. Yet we know that every creature of her kind can shed this radiance about her, and that it is simply our own accidental receptivity that, among so many thousands, gives to this one creature in particular her ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... were conducted with an air of great secrecy in violent whisperings, emphasized by blows of the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the "philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... needed no preparation for the bloody work perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of the organized chivalrous ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... of technique. The consequence was not seldom a nervous derangement of the whole apparatus of the soul, just at the moment when it should have been ready for its greatest performances, as in the case of Nikolaus Lenau; however, it also frequently resulted in an endlessly increased receptivity for every experience, as in the case of Bettina von Arnim, Heine, or Annette von Droste, and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... quasi-material results; and his success in doing this will be gauged in due course by an "examination,"—a periodic test which is designed to measure, not the degree of growth which the child has made, but the industry of the teacher as indicated by the receptivity of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves—the Andante in F, the three movements of the Kreutzer Sonata, a prayer from Otello, the Twelfth Rhapsody, the Swan Song and the Evening Star, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... effort, to clothe ourselves with God's great gift, which is of no use to us, and is in no real sense ours, unless we do. It takes no small effort to keep ourselves in the attitude of dependence and receptivity, without which none of the great gifts of God come to us, and, least of all, the habitual practice of Christian virtues. The soldier who rushed into the fight, leaving armour and arms huddled together on the ground, would soon fall, and God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... first glimpse of the Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be larger than our receptivity could take in. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recently told is lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, "But if we are not to laugh at 'Don Quixote,' at whom are we, please, to laugh?"—a question which I, for one, would hardly dare to answer. Only, after r eading ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... that good is more contagious than evil, since God is omnipresence, how [10] much more certain would be the doctor's success, and the clergyman's conversion of sinners. And if only the pulpit would encourage faith in God in this direction, and faith in Mind over all other influences governing the receptivity of the body, theology would teach man [15] as David taught: "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... at first sight they might have seemed to be. He was not, in fact, despite all his love of logic, the "yes OR no" from which most people cannot escape, but a "yes AND no"; not immorally and through lack of resolution, but by reason of an original receptivity and the circumstances of his training. If he had been merely a student the case would have been different but he was not a student. He was a journeyman printer; and hard work has a tendency to demolish ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... gem, and new ones. To the north-east and north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the first sense; he has died in his Lord, and without particular suffering has passed over to his gods and heroes. What talent and spirit, learning, common sense, receptivity, and versatility, conjoined with industry and endurance, can accomplish, utile nobis proposuit exemplar. If every man would so employ his gifts and his time, what marvels would then ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... just so many themes in a prescribed order and treated in the routine fashion, listening to music was a comparatively easy task. Since Berlioz, music has made ever greater demands on the hearer; who only when his receptivity is of an equal degree of cultivation with the creative power of the composer, can grasp the full meaning of the music. The first step, therefore, toward an appreciation of Berlioz is to recognize the peculiar, picturesque power of his imagination, which was of an entirely ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... sensibility which furnishes us, as our faculty of receptivity, with those intuitions that become translated into thought by means of the understanding. This is the origin of our conceptions, or ideas. I denominate as matter that which in a phenomenon corresponds to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... impending visit that made her irritable beforehand and ruffled the absolute serenity that she felt was alone appropriate in a house dedicated to love. But it was not only Dellwig and the brick-kiln that had depressed her; she had actually had doubts about her three new friends, doubts as to the receptivity of their souls, as to the capacity of their souls for returning love. At one awful moment she had even doubted whether they had souls at all, but had hastily blown out the candle at this point, extinguishing the doubt ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... understand; and its curiosity will help it to solve the problem. Beth did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her, they formed a poor opinion of her intellect. The truth was that she had no use for letters or figures. The books of nature and of life were spread out before her, and she was conning their contents to more ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... union is a personal relation, and that it should be a distinctly conscious one on the soul's part, all will admit who think but a moment of the infinite, loving activity of the Spirit of God, and the natural and supernatural receptivity of the spirit of man. Although not even the smallest germ of the supernatural life is found in nature, yet the soul of man ceaselessly, if blindly, yearns after its possession. Once possessed, the life of God blends into our own, mingles with it and is one with it, impregnating it as magnetism ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the ennui of the years. Adventures, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... never be thoroughly dull or lacking in adventure to a child of Rebecca's temperament. Her nature was full of adaptability, fluidity, receptivity. She made friends everywhere she went, and snatched up acquaintances ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... investigated the remote and preparatory factors which give the mind of crowds a special receptivity, and make possible therein the growth of certain sentiments and certain ideas. It now remains for us to study the factors capable of acting in a direct manner. We shall see in a forthcoming chapter how these factors should be put in force in order that ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... were the sights of the city, he did not come to them with the naive receptivity of Purdy. It was, besides, hard to detach his thoughts from the disagreeable affair that had brought him to Melbourne. And as soon as banks and offices began to take down their shutters, he hurried off to his interview with ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... closely, that were quickening my own faculties; for they were in direct contrast with each other; one, the animated debates and attempted logical presentation of a subject with its related facts, as presented at the Worcester Academy; and this new method of passive receptivity, this opening of the inner eye of the mind to receive impressions. It was a long time before I could experiment with any success in this new direction, for I was of an active and impatient temperament, longing to hurry to an end ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... positive!—I saw it myself! I saw you kneeling beside it. I helped to sort it, afterwards. The actual heap on the floor was the broken chair, Ronnie mixed up with it; and, on top of both, that unholy Infant, whose precocious receptivity is responsible for the entire business. I exonerate the Florentine chair; I exonerate poor Ronnie. I shall always maintain that that confounded 'cello worked the whole show, out of ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... in the country, my receptivity and hospitality of consciousness, became in the town my ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According to their measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a few great mystics appear to have possessed—not indeed in its entirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, "one with the Reality of things." The ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Sulphur] like a crust and hinder it from its free radiation. Sulphur is to be regarded as a symbol of the expansive power, as individual initiative, as will. Mercury stands opposite to it as woman does to man, as that which goes to the subject from without, or as absolute receptivity. Salt is midway between both; in it the equilibrium between [Symbol: Sulphur] and [Symbol: Mercury] is found. It is a symbol of what appears as the stable being of man. In the first degree the purification of the salt is worked out for the release of the sulphur. The red column J corresponds ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... masters too much—I mean, from the amateur's view-point; in the case of an artist it depends on the receptivity of his temperament. Velasquez didn't like Raphael, and it was Boucher who warned Fragonard, when he went to Rome, not to take the Italian painters too seriously. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes stifles individuality. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the slightest idea in what light the modern critics see the works of Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels recently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing for receptivity and what one may call temperament, I know of no book more revealing as to the relations of nature and art than "A Painter's Camp." I recall vividly the words of the beginning of the preface ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... repeated, but more gently. She began to wonder now whether trouble had weakened the wife's brain, her power at least of receptivity. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... that if it did touch a high one it could long hold it in a living growth, cut off from the rest of the world. I do not believe it. For no state, however large, is sufficient unto itself. No state is really alive in the highest sense whose receptivity is not equal to its power to contribute to the world with which its destiny is bound up. It is only at its best when it is a part of the vital current of movement, of sympathy, of hope, of enthusiasm of the world at large. There is no doctrine ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... threshold of every man's thought, and in the sub-conscious depths of every man's feeling, to enlighten our understanding and purify our desires. To every man he gives all that he can receive of light and power. To many his gifts are but meagre, because their capacities are small and their receptivity is limited; but there are always in the world open minds and docile tempers, to whom he imparts his larger gifts. Thus we have the order of prophets and inspired men, whose words are full of light and leading. In the Bible we have a record of the messages given ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... other, "are as a printed page. We have been with you by mental contact at all times. We could hear, but, at that distance, and—pardon me!—with your limited receptivity, we could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... this unexpected mood of receptivity, however unwilling, came a sharp corrective in the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... I here, and readier to be musical than you think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if at the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat. I shoot my arrows at a mark that is pretty certain to return them to me. And as to perfect success, I should be like the panic-stricken shopkeepers ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that "gravened" voice arrested Mr. Fane-Smith's attention. He had not heard what had passed before, and there was nothing special in the words that fell now upon his ear; it was rather that his own soul was in a state of receptivity, and so through the first channel that came to hand he was able to receive a ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... own souls might love it in him. He was their master-conception, their true ideal, acting before them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions. This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching. Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed around ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... teaching as never man taught; and it is in proportion as we walk meekly with our fellow-men that our capacities become capable of receiving, to their fullest extent, the influx of goodness and truth that should be the end of social intercourse. Nothing obstructs our receptivity so much as that egoism of thought and affection which keeps self perpetually before the mind's eye, and to this egoism meekness is the direct opposite. Meekness implies forgetfulness of self. There ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... During the long winter evenings her father found no pleasure like that Kate had always ready for him in the cheery library. He was soon amazed at his keen interest in the world of mind unrolled to his understanding; more than all, he retained with the receptivity of a boy all that was read to him. Kate made believe that she needed his help in reviewing her own studies, and so carried him through all she had gone over in the seminary classes. Boone began presently to see that education is not the result of mere attendance in schools ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... trembling and striving not to be tense, which destroys the receptivity, there came thrilling round and round my spiritual essence the throb of the Master-Word, beating steadily in the night, as doth that marvellous sound. And then, with all that was sweet in my spirit, I called with my brain ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... little practice in this will produce amazingly interesting and profitable results in both use and understanding. A keenness for words will be rapidly developed. Word-lists of all kinds will take on entirely new meanings. A spontaneous receptivity will develop into permanent retention of ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... meantime, did his day's work contentedly, had a quick eye for all trouble, and in such cases was sure to give overweight, or even to let the heavy penny or two fall accidentally into the purchase. His donkey had something the same expression of patient good-humored receptivity. The children climbed over the barrow and even on the donkey's back, and though Widgeon made great feint of driving them off with a very stubby whip, they knew well that it would always just miss them, and returned day after day undismayed. He "did for ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... in part, to a certain quality of intellectual receptivity, by virtue of which he was enabled to appropriate to himself the genius of two of his predecessors for whom he had a special affinity. His epoch-making work was rendered possible through Shakespeare and Beethoven, who served him as ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... that we are a nation of shopkeepers. "The traders' spirit, that is Englishdom." I confess that as an Englishman I have always felt there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in this sneer. We are surely a somewhat stodgy, money-making people with far too little receptivity for new ideas. "I have long thought and preached," wrote Lord Haldane in the Nation of August 7, 1915, "that the real problem in this country is the development of thought and ideas." Dr. Drill does not in his review concern himself with ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... habits of pecan varieties at Rockport, Indiana, conducted for four seasons in co-operation with Mr. J. F. Wilkinson. There the Busseron was found to be a protandrous variety, shedding most of its pollen, and in some years all of it, before the period of receptivity of its pistillate flowers. "With Butterick ... the order was reversed, as the period of receptivity began first," and it was classified, therefore, as regularly protogynous. "... Furthermore, upon close observation it has been found," he said, that trees of the Butterick variety ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... and effective methods, at that. But, notwithstanding this, I feel that I should impress upon you the importance of laying a firm foundation for such instruction, by developing yourself first along the lines of telepathic power. Such a course will not only keenly sharpen your powers of receptivity to such vibrations as you may wish to receive; but it will also train your mind in the direction of translating, interpreting, and ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... and it attracted her, as it would have attracted a French-woman of the eighteenth century. Her maimed life had made her perforce an 'intellectual'; and in these letters, the man's natural poetry and force stirred her enthusiasm. Hence a new interest and receptivity in her, quickened by many small and natural incidents—books lent and discussed, meetings in picture-galleries, conversations in her father's house, and throughout it that tempting, dangerous pleasure of 'doing good,' that leads astray so many on whom Satan has no other hold! She was introducing ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are complementary to each other—the tracing of facts to their causes, and the logical advance from the cause to the fact. In the former process, called induction, certain moral qualities come into play. The first condition of success is patient industry, an honest receptivity, and a willingness to abandon all preconceived notions, however cherished, if they be found to contradict the truth. Believe me, a self-renunciation which has something lofty in it, and of which the world never hears, is often enacted in the private experience of the true ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Cohort. 8; Justin, Dialogue 115. 7; Apol. I. 31, 33, 36; etc.; see also Hippolytus, de Christo et Antichr. 2). These were not necessarily at all times in a state of ecstasy, when they received the revelations; but they were no doubt in a condition of absolute receptivity. The Apologists had no other idea of revelation. What they therefore viewed as the really decisive proof of the reality of revelation is the prediction of the future, for the human mind does not possess this power. It was ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... day after day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of increasing ability, was not in me." "Anything like passive receptivity is foreign to my nature; and there results an unusually small tendency to be affected by others' thoughts. It seems as though the fabric of my conclusions had in all cases to be developed from within. Material which could be taken in ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... a boy of quick receptivity as far as books were concerned, and therefore was no favourite with Mr Malison, he was not by any means a common or a stupid boy. His own eyes could teach him more than books could, for he had a very quick observation of things about ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... their exclusiveness; Cicero's attitude towards them; new type of noble; Scipio Aemilianus: his "circle"; its influence on the Ciceronian age in (1) manners; (2) literary capacity; (3), philosophical receptivity; Stoicism at Rome; its influence on the lawyers; Sulpicius Rufus, his life and work; Epicureanism, its general effect on society; case of Calpurnius Piso; pursuit of pleasure and neglect of duty; senatorial duties neglected; ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... determines entirely the worth of his services. If his aim be happiness, the more of a man he is, the larger is his capacity of enjoyment; for as a dog gets more enjoyment out of life than a zooephyte, and a man than a dog, so does the fully and symmetrically developed man exceed in receptivity of happiness him whose nature is imperfectly or abnormally developed. Now it is through the thorough training and faithful exercise of his moral faculties and powers that man is most capable of influence, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... in a continuous state of receptivity when it comes to food. Nowhere in the world have I seen people who ate so much. I have offered the leavings of a meal to a savage just after he had apparently gorged himself and he "wolfed" it as if he were famished. The invariable custom in the Congo is to have one huge meal a day. On this ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... recipient of impressions thus imparted to it. It was as wax under the stylus, tabula rasa, clean paper waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity with its receptivity. The material of thought, or at least some of the materials of thought, must be given us in the multiformity of our perceptions, through what we call experience from the outer world. On the other hand, the formation of this material into knowledge is the work of the activity of our own minds. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... certainty is consistent with progress; with an attitude of receptivity toward new light. A firm belief in what the Lord told us yesterday is harmonious with an eagerness to hear what He may have to add to-day. It is indeed to be regarded as proof of our faith in yesterday's communication ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their deepest impulses—their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their emotional receptivity—were used, with no conscious and deliberate Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of modern creation, nor by any means due, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... triumphantly their original proposition, added to which, Frenchmen are, as a rule, very poor linguists. This, of course, is speaking broadly, but I fancy that the French mind is very definite and clear-cut, yet rather lacking in receptivity. The French suffer from the excessive development of the logical faculty in them. This same definite quality in the French language, whilst delighting both my ear and my intelligence, rightly or wrongly prevents French poetry from making any appeal to me; it is ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the drift of events, to the characters or changing views of friends and opponents, to a careful avoidance of that rigidity of standpoint which stamps the doctrinaire or the mule. The mind of success must be receptive and plastic. It must know by the receptivity of its capacities whether it is paddling against ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... constitutions will under the long sense of disappointment at having missed their imagined destiny. And thus, though naturally of a gentle and pleasant disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those persons to be. The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of indescribable depression. The practical issue of such a condition was improvidence, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of moral and social refinement; and her ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... come home to die with my own people, for verify I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart- strings. London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... can be used to good effect in selling. Your muscles should appear somewhat tense when you are presenting ideas, in order to make the impression that your mind is fully active. Conversely, by normal relaxation of your muscles when you are listening, you suggest the receptivity of your mind and your entire readiness to take in ideas from outside. When you show your muscles are relaxed, you also indicate that you are perfectly at ease and unafraid of objections or criticism. If you were to sit tense ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... generally accepted standards, a judge always stood for the epitome of wisdom, and it is worth noting that the recognized function of a judge is to consider all questions in the light of the precedents of the past. That fact sufficiently explains the difference in receptivity to a new and liberating truth on the part of the wise and prudent as compared with babes unhampered by a judicial attitude or a ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... the law of association had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Jamaica, and whether he could get there from Santiago before his fuel should be wholly exhausted Mr. Chamberlain did not know. However, he was ready, like Ladislaw in "Middlemarch," to "place himself in an attitude of receptivity toward all sublime chances," and away he went. Nothing can be more exasperating to a war correspondent than to have a fight take place while he is absent from the scene of action looking for coal; but many newspaper men in Cuban waters had ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... in all Berlin a single friend or relative of her own family, yet she soon felt at home in the capital. She loved my father. Heaven gave her children, and her rare beauty, her winning charm, and the receptivity of her mind quickly opened all hearts to her in circles even wider than her husband's large family connection. The latter included many households whose guests numbered every one whose achievements in science or art, or possession of large ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... creature, and we shall perceive that there is nothing so just as this comparison. The current is the cause of the movement of the vessel, but not of its retardation; God is the cause of the perfection in the nature and the actions of the creature, but the limitation of the receptivity of the creature is the cause of the defect in its actions. Thus the Platonists, St. Augustine, and the schoolmen, have reason to say that God is the material cause of evil, which consists in what is positive, and not the formal cause of it, which consists in privation, as we can ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of children at school. Children of even the same family manifest different degrees of receptivity to certain studies. Some "take to" one thing, and some to another. Some find arithmetic so easy that they almost absorb it intuitively, while grammar is a hard task for them; while their brothers and sisters find the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it must seek other and more fertile conditions. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... a little money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of time: he used the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to defray the expenses of a trip to Greece. It was natural that Oscar Wilde, with his eager sponge-like receptivity, should receive the best academic education of his time, and should better that by travel. We all get something like the education we desire, and Oscar Wilde, it always seemed to me, was over-educated, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... passive except under the impulses of instinct or of mischievous ideas; they have no regular and systematic work to do; everything is done for them. During their early years habits of idleness, of passive receptivity, of mischief, and possibly of crime, are ingrained. And though this kind of life may be more pleasurable, in a low sense, than the active life of the country, there can be no doubt as to which is the more ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... following this with half his receptivity, for, though he fought against it, the memory of Bootea—gentle, trusting, radiating love, warmth—cried out against the bitter unfemininity of the girl who had stabbed his honour and his cleanness. The black figure of Kali still rested on the table, and somehow the evil lines in the face ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... in the individual, which makes that subject, reacting upon mere sensations and ideas, its object, and, as a new immaterial subjective unity, acts determiningly upon that subject which has just become object. This new subject, considered from the side of its receptivity, we call self-consciousness; from the side of its spontaneity, free moral self-determination. Whether we consider this freedom predetermined or not, does not at all alter the described fact and ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... place, much knowledge only superficially acquired will drop off; and again, talents, long slumbering and unsuspected, may first make their appearance. Whatever has been forced upon a child in opposition to his individuality, whatever has been only driven into him and has lacked receptivity on his side, or a rational ground on the side of culture, remains attached to his being only as an external ornament, a foreign outgrowth which enfeebles ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... no thoughts. All that took place round him, all that he had gone through in life, was meaningless to him now. It was all outlived, and he had nothing to think about. Neither had he any feelings, for all his organs of receptivity had grown dulled. ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... of De Brosses' book was calculated to make a telling appeal to the French nation, with their love of eclat and their ready receptivity. It was made, too, in the age of Voltaire, when the great man was living at Lausanne; and when, too, another of equally enduring fame, Edward Gibbon, was, in the same neighbourhood, polishing those balanced periods in which ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... man who is willing to be taught; the mind of every one who is ready to be instructed. Never does the spiritual teacher withhold knowledge because he grudges the giving. He is hampered in the giving by the want of receptivity in those to whom his message is addressed. Ill do men judge the divine heart of the great Teachers, or the faint reflection of that love in the mouth of Their messengers, when they think that knowledge is withheld ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... not appeal to all right-minded and generous Frenchmen that their influence should also be in the direction of preserving the freedom of this nation?—one of the few dark peoples who have shown an unusual receptivity for civilization and Christianity, who have already advanced themselves so much, and who will still, if left undisturbed, become one united ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... When it is further considered that only a fraction of what any author reads leaves a mark that can be identified on what he writes, we shall readily allow that in the matter of study Shakespeare showed an activity and receptivity of mind that harmonizes with the impression received from his ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... to the question of government, we must nicely discriminate the boundaries of sense, understanding, and reason. Sense is a receptivity - ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique, not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect receptivity, and devotion to the truth. In the days of persecution and martyrdom Emerson would have gone to the stake smiling and undismayed, but questioning all the time, even as to the nature of his own emotions. It was this serene impassibility in his study of human nature which gave the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? The ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas must be inherent. I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain English word, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity,' employed by Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power(6) to receive ideas, whether in man or in any living thing by which ideas are received. A man and an elephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas suited to the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ezekiel—touch upon them, although the previous more distinct prophecies of Isaiah were certainly known and acknowledged by them. We must never forget that it is from above that each of the prophets received his share of the prophetic spirit, and that this depended partly upon the measure of his receptivity, which might have been greater with the former than with the latter prophets,—and, partly, upon the wants and capacities of those for ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... migrated to the other big cafe, on the other side of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy it by any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain future. I ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Yet some day it will be considered clear as crystal. It was not the "nature" of man which shrank from it, but his "errors." These errors not only make man incapable of production, but are in themselves hostile to receptivity. Thus it often happens that the pioneers of salvation are persecuted by a sort of unconscious ingratitude, which is ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on—the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his—and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, the more it is movable and offers surfaces to phaenomena, the larger is the part of the world seized upon by man, and the more virtualities he develops in himself. Again, in proportion ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... this connection is significant of a very definite attitude toward books,—an attitude not uncritical, since it is love of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than instruction or entertainment,—both valuable, wholesome, and necessary, and yet neither descriptive of the richest function which the book fulfils ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... explained by the many anticipations of his own thoughts to be found in the earlier writer. The intimate relation into which sensibility and understanding are brought is an instance of this from the theory of knowledge. Receptivity is not passivity, but activity arrested (through the body). All knowledge is inborn; all men are potential philosophers (and, so far as they are loyal to conscience, Christians); the spirit is a thinking and a thinkable ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... soul. For youth all is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... gather together; but the fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised receptivity—a conception of its utilities that has come from long need. A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in mating with a woman or ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... question of time, of receptivity, and treatment," said the doctor, arching his eyebrows indifferently. "I do not regard either of your ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... apply his leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut glass in a house where there ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... matter is only an effect produced upon our senses by the motion of atoms,—that is to say, by our unceasing receptivity to sensations. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various |
