"Psychological moment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That would be fatal. Your part is to put yourself in her way. She'll do all the courting, and when she scents the psychological moment she'll do ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... fact, O'Brien had never looked at the papers, much less made any effort to prepare the case; if he had he would have found that there was no case at all. And Delany's mind became at peace because he perceived that at the proper psychological moment he could go to O'Brien and whisper: "Say, Mr. O'Brien, that Mathusek case. It's a turn-out! Better recommend it for dismissal," and O'Brien would do so for the simple reason that he never did any more work than he was actually compelled ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... himself even to tell of his parting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse for letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had been able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance brought him and his friends ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the orders of Joffre along his whole concentrated line of troops: "The retreat has ended, not another foot; you die here or the enemy goes back!" He had chosen the psychological moment. The French and English had burned and broken the bridges as they retreated, and with the recoil the German communications ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... often of works of "absorbing interest" that appeared at "the psychological moment" that one feels a bit squeamish about applying these phrases even to such a book as Mr. HARRY DE WINDT'S Russia as I Know It (CHAPMAN AND HALL); but honestly their appropriateness cannot be denied in view of the author's peculiar knowledge of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... street. It was the brougham of her late mother-in-law, and it still rolled through the streets of Paris after fifteen years' service. Mme. Derline got into the woe-begone brougham to drive straight to a very well-known carriage-maker, and that evening, cleverly seizing the psychological moment, she explained to M. Derline that she had seen a certain little black coupe lined with blue satin that would frame ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... perhaps, straggle in. But the crowd, made wary by bitter experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd surges toward the ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... back from his embrace but she still sat close to him, her hands in his, pathetically eager for his sympathy and aid. The psychological moment had come and Gavin Brice knew it. Loathing himself for the role he must play and vowing solemnly to his own heart that she should never be allowed to suffer for any revelation she might make, he said with a gentle ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... for one of the biggest and richest groups of claims. He's backed by some Eastern people. It's the psychological moment to expose both the railroad and the coal situation, for the thieves are fighting among ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... people store of hatchets and axes had a value beyond many fields of the boundless earth. The Dove appeared before them, too, at the psychological moment. They had just discussed removing, bag and baggage, from the proximity of the Iroquois. In the end, these Indians sold to the English their village huts, their cleared and planted fields, and miles of surrounding forest. Moreover they stayed long enough ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... thought it the psychological moment to spring a request he had been entertaining in his heart for some time. "Will you let me take Pepper to camp? Lots of the boys have dogs but none of them are as ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... committee with regard to the Egyptian expedition, discouraging if not hopeless. The Government and particularly Herr von Bethmann wish for peace, but believe themselves restrained by public opinion and by the fear of the Pan-Germanists. It's now the psychological moment for intervention by the United States and there can be no doubt, that it should and will be exercised in favour of humanity, culture and freedom, in favour of the prevalence of the Anglo-Saxon race and the future development of the new world against ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... of it. Pretty? She's as beautiful as an angel, Buck—the colonel's wife, I mean. And you—" He laughed harshly. "You're always the lucky dog, Buck Nome. You think she's half in love with you now. Too bad she was taken ill just at the psychological moment, as you might say, Buck. Wonder ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... "The channel is but a ditch," he boasted, "and anyone can cross it who has but the courage to try." Boats were in readiness at Boulogne and at most of the French ports, fitted up for the attempt, while the Conqueror of Europe dallied only for the psychological moment to put his project into execution. With bated breath Europe awaited the possible demolition of the sole barrier which yet lay between the Tyrant and universal monarchy, while upon the other side of the "ditch" the little Island expected his arrival ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... passionate, tear-bedewed rhetoric that Staunton himself might well envy, she held the court under her sway. Many of the women present were overcome with emotion. O'Hara openly wiped away his tears, keeping an anxious eye the while upon the witness and waiting the psychological moment for the arresting ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... tolerably safe to assume that he will not jump backward. He may not jump at all, but, with a deceptive movement, merely sidle under a sage-leaf. Where questions concerning his personal safety are concerned, he shows rare judgment, appearing to recognize exactly the psychological moment in which to fly, jump, ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... students, and while a few of their characteristics are what is commonly and vaguely called "morbid," on the whole they must be regarded as ordinarily healthy individuals. They have the congenital constitution and predisposition on which some severe psychic lesion at the "psychological moment" might develop the most definite and obstinate symptoms of hysteria, but under favorable circumstances they will be ordinary men and women, of no more than ordinary abnormality or ordinary power. They are among the many who have been called to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... results had been good in most respects, and if in others there was something still to be desired, it was not too late to make the necessary changes, whether in the way of supplement or correction. Indeed, in his opinion, the psychological moment for introducing a new line of conduct had ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... "And that's the psychological moment for raiding our 'miser's sunless coffers'—if he happens to have any. It will give us time ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... "But at this very psychological moment Mrs Achrow interrupted: 'Now, no secrets, you two,' she said laughingly, leaning over the back of the divan and tapping Lady Kirlby playfully on the arm. 'There must be no mention of ghosts till it is close on bedtime, and ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... isn't settled. There is ample time for anything to happen. When the psychological moment comes, Cortlandt will be in position to swing his influence whichever way ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... was then mine, but the self on whose creation I was enthusiastically determined. But I felt like a murderer when I turned to leave the place which I had so suddenly, and I could not but think unjustly, become possessed of. And now, as I probe this poignant psychological moment, I find that, although I perfectly well realised that all pleasures were then in my reach—women, elegant dress, theatres, and supper-rooms, I hardly thought at all of them, and much more of certain drawings from the plaster cast. I would be an artist. More than ever ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to develop ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... cried, "I thought I wasn't going to get here in time, but I see I struck it at the psychological moment. I am as hungry as a ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... on the points of interest where you could most wish them to abound, there is nothing in them to complain of. There is less than nothing to complain of in the tea-room which enjoys our international favor except that at the most psychological moment of the afternoon you cannot get a table, in spite of the teas going on in the fashionable hotels and the friendly houses everywhere. The toast is exceptional; the muffins so far from home are at least reminiscent of their native island; the tea and butter are alike ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... on beside her for a while, but nothing further of an intimate nature passed between them. She felt that he had gained his objective and would say no more. The truce between them was to be observed until the psychological moment arrived to break it, and that moment would occur some time on Christmas Eve in ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... get it, so far as information is concerned, in a few days, but I think things have to be soaked in by cumulative impressions to get the feel of the thing and the background. When they told me first that this was a great psychological moment, that everything was critical and crucial, I didn't know what they meant, and I could hardly put it in words now, any more than they did, but I know inside of me. There are few external signs of a change, but Japan is nearly in the condition she was in during the first ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... his eighth birthday approached. All this while Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had he money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were never paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the psychological moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community. He must take to the road in a hazard of new fortune. Indiana appeared to him the land of promise. Most of his property—such as it was—except his carpenter's tools, he traded for whisky, four hundred ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... psychological moment I heard behind me a voice of hope,—the song of a grasshopper: not one of those fat-legged, green-winged imbeciles that feebly tumble in the summer fields, but a game grasshopper,—one of those thin-shanked, brown-winged fellows that leap like kangaroos, and fly like birds, and ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... thousand dollars to have prevented this. That damned woman has been enough to put you back a dozen months. Yes, yes. I know she is a fool; but I also know that your nerves aren't in any state to stand her infernal diatribes. Been telling you it rested with you alone to choose the psychological moment for going out to walk, with your bed strapped on your back? Yes; I know, I tell you. No use for you to deny. No sense, either, for that matter. You owe the woman nothing; and, by thunder," he let go the wrist and gently laid his hand on Opdyke's throbbing head; ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... afterward, Hicks' comrades of that cross-country run averred strenuously that their roaring through megaphones, in concert, imitating Caesar Napoleon's savage bark at the psychological moment, flung the mosquito-like youth clear of the cross-bar and won him the event and his B. Hicks, however, as fervidly denied this statement, declaring that he would have won, anyhow, because he had summoned up the determination to do it! So it can not be stated ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... psychological moment was on me and I needed most of all your encouragement, you dashed me with cold water instead. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the veteran and imitating his actions, working gradually from the simpler operations to the more complex, the beginner is able to master technic and methods in the shortest possible time. The psychological moment for such instruction, of course, is the first day or the first week. New men learn much more readily than those who have become habituated to certain methods or tasks; not having had time or opportunity to experi- ment and learn wrong methods, they have nothing to unlearn in acquiring the ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... before striking. But I cannot help thinking that Sun Tzu meant to use the word in a figurative sense comparable to our own idiom "short and sharp." Cf. Wang Hsi's note, which after describing the falcon's mode of attack, proceeds: "This is just how the 'psychological moment' should be seized ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Madison sent Adams to Russia to represent the United States. He arrived at St Petersburg at the psychological moment when the tsar had made up his mind to break with Napoleon. Adams therefore met with a favourable reception and a disposition to further the interests of American commerce in every possible way. On the outbreak of the war between the United States and England in 1812, he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... opening door. But I, who was standing facing that direction, saw him from the first, a dark stern figure, standing as though rooted to the ground, with the doorhandle still in his hand. For the second time in one day he seemed to have intervened at the precise psychological moment. He did not speak to me, nor I to him. Lady Angela, as though wondering at the silence, turned her head at last, and a little gasping cry broke from ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... principal movements were known to the First Born I could not have doubted, in view of the attack of the fleet upon us the day before, nor could the stopping of the pumps of Omean at the psychological moment have been due to chance, nor the starting of a chemical combustion within the one corridor through which we were advancing upon the Temple of Issus been due to ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... reception of me that for three or four weeks I had not the heart to mention the particular object of my mission, and even then I was not permitted to do so because at any time when I felt that the psychological moment had been reached he would talk of other things, his scientific lack of concentration of which I have already spoken enabling him with much grace to be reminded of an experience in the Transvaal by ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... have been something in the old woman's expression as she watched Captain Muller slowly tearing the paper that sent a thrill of excitement through Mr. Snyder. Something seemed to warn him of the approach of a psychological moment. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... demolishing, to reunite instead of severing, to lead erring and foolish ones back into the fold instead of scattering the flock. Often had he by his eloquent and moving appeals sent husband and wife, weeping, back into each other's arms. Frequently he had coached childhood so successfully that, at the psychological moment (and at a given signal) the plaintive pipe of "Papa, won't you tum home adain to me and muvver?" had won the day and upheld the pillars ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... July 31st, and was asked questions about the business, the Old Man, for once, found himself in a difficulty. He had been told that apologies were going to be made; but Mr. Fisher made no sign, and, indeed, it looked very much as if he would do nothing at all. Labby intervened at this psychological moment by reading that extract from the account in the Pall Mall Gazette which fixed Mr. Fisher's responsibility under his own hand, and it was seen that something would have to be done. Then—and not till then—did Mr. Fisher speak and make his apology. Mr. Logan—who had very properly refused ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... compote, half of a delectably browned chicken surrounded by cress, and set in a silver frame was a custard cup filled with the creamiest looking custard that inspired hands had ever snatched from the oven at the psychological moment. It was quarter of one when the sedate nurse left the tray on the desk. At quarter past one Felicia fastened a glove button and sighed. Babiche's eyes were pleading. At quarter of two Felicia finished a Jacob's ladder ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... came some months later. We had been on safari for several weeks and had returned to Nairobi for two or three days. It was the "psychological moment" for something new in the way of food. The stage was all set for it, and it came in the form of a pudding that would have delighted all the gastronomes and epicures of history. We called it the Newland-Tarlton pudding, because ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... distinct style led or inspired by one person. It was a great epoch, with individuality as its leading spirit, led by the inspiration of the Italian artists brought from Italy and molded by the genius of France. This renewal of classic feeling came at the psychological moment, for the true spirit of the great Gothic period had died. The Renaissance movements in Italy, France, England and Germany all drew their inspiration from the same source, but in each case the national characteristics entered into the treatment. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... said Mr. Osgood. "You never saw anything smoother. You young folks certainly struck this town with this library scheme of yours at the psychological moment. The council was all for it. The tax was voted, and directors appointed as though it had been ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... less than Macbeth, is the tragedy of a criminal; but it shows us, instead of the gradual history of the temptation and the fall, followed by the fatal march of consequences, nothing but the precise psychological moment in which the first irrevocable step is taken, and the criminal is made. The method of Macbeth has been, as it were, absorbed by that of the modern novel; the method of Britannicus still rules the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... even cast some bullets the month before under the colonel's direction. That he was present to-night was entirely due to the fact that having made a short cut to the kitchen door in order to hurry some dishes, he had by the merest chance, and at the precise psychological moment, run bump up against the warlike party just before they had reached the duelling ground. This was a well-lighted path but a stone's throw from the porch, and sufficiently hidden by shrubbery to be out of sight of ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... taken on considerable flesh since his friends had seen him last, but there was no mistaking the military attitude. In the water around the sponson floated a number of water wings, tied to the boat, to represent floating ice cakes. The audience applauded vigorously as the skiff drew near. At the psychological moment, when Nyoda had her camera focused for a snap a huge mosquito settled on George's extended calf. He uttered a sudden yell, brought his hand down on his leg and pitched headfirst into the water. The patriots rescued him and set him on the dock, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... the authority of a nationally known and reputable astronomer with a work designed to satisfy a reading public's waiting appetite for the unusual—in short, presenting legitimatized sensationalism at the psychological moment—this must have had irresistible appeal. That Edison's Conquest of Mars was written on editorial commission, perhaps as fast as it appeared, seems, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... for girls should be encouraged as well as those for boys. All the aspects of rural life can thus be made most enjoyable. It is often well to introduce and cultivate one game at a time, letting it run its course, something like a fever, and then, at the psychological moment, introduce and try out another. To introduce too many at one time would not afford an opportunity for children to experience the rise and fall of a wave of enthusiasm on any one, and this is quite important. Usually some direction ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... psychological moment! The duet continued, but Maxine heard no further words. They echoed and re-echoed in her brain, they obsessed her, lifting her to a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... when young, the Calabrian Bacchus has a wild-eyed beaute du diable which appeals to one's expansive moods, he already begins to totter, at seven years of age, in sour, decrepit eld. To pounce upon him at the psychological moment, to discover in whose cool and cobwebby cellar he is dreaming out his golden summer of manhood—that is what a foreigner can never, never hope to achieve, without ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... side. He chattered incessantly. The splash of a canoe, dropped into the water, was exquisite torture. The dip of paddles set him well-nigh beside himself. Then, a few moments later, when the light craft slithered on the mud of the shallows, just beyond the hiding-place, he felt the psychological moment had come. Out he sprang at his victim, who was still ankle ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... jarred; and in the degree of balance between utterance and silence his world of inner forces just then knew, combined to make the invitation irresistible. Moreover, he had wanted to tell it all these days. Stahl was already half convinced. Stahl would surely understand and help him. It was the psychological moment for confession. The two men rose in the same moment, Stahl to lock the cabin doors against interruption, O'Malley to set their chairs more closely side by side so that talking ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... again, we have an example of the over-confidence which for ever possessed that army which set out for "world conquest." As on the Marne, so at Antwerp, they were not prepared to seize the psychological moment and to play boldly for ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... harshly. "And you think I can then step forward and try my luck. Why, you fool, can't you see that for both of us this is the psychological moment—that the man who hangs back now is lost? I am to wait in the background while you go forward and seize the golden minute? Well"—his voice had a bitter ring—"I've agreed, and you've got your way; but for God's sake go before I repent ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes |
