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Stimulus   /stˈɪmjələs/   Listen
Stimulus

noun
(pl. stimuli)
1.
Any stimulating information or event; acts to arouse action.  Synonyms: input, stimulant, stimulation.



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"Stimulus" Quotes from Famous Books



... is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his unguided fancies, or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions." It is the teacher's business to know what is striving for utterance and to supply the needed stimulus ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... be well within the mark, that I was consumed that night with a fever of suspicion and curiosity; exhausted my fancy in solutions, which I still dismissed as incommensurable with the facts; and in the mystery by which I saw myself surrounded, found a precious stimulus for my courage and a convenient soothing draught for conscience. Even had all been plain sailing, I do not hint that I should have drawn back. Smuggling is one of the meanest of crimes, for by that we rob a whole country pro rata, and are ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... to serve" tables. This variety of genius, of wit, of skill, of willingness to serve, is laid at the altar of pleasure for the worthy purpose of making new again the weary body, the languishing spirit, the lonely heart. Let the right management and stimulus be given to this resourceful company, and the hours will pass as moments, the surest sign of ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... Woollen Manufactures.—Yorkshire is the ancient seat of a great woollen manufacture, founded on the coarse wools of its native hills; but coal and cheap conveyance, with the stimulus mechanical inventions have applied in the neighbouring counties to cotton, have given Yorkshire such advantages over many ancient seats of manufacture, that it has transplanted and increased a considerable portion of the fine cloth trade formerly carried on in the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... here and live in this deathly quiet, away from even such amusement as the camp offered? Submit to all his tiresome religious conversations, and, above all, give up those feverish nights of excitement? the hazard and the stimulus of the long tables and the little heaps of gold dust? and her free life, her incomings and outgoings, with no one to question her? No, it was ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross

... national character, I grant; nay, that they actually do possess such a character, under limitations, I am ready to maintain. Irishmen, setting aside their religious and political prejudices, are grateful, affectionate, honorable, faithful, generous, and even magnanimous; but under the stimulus of religious and political feeling, they are treacherous, cruel, and inhuman—will murder, burn, and exterminate, not only without compunction, but with a satanic delight worthy of a savage. Their education, indeed, was truly barbarous; they were trained ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great thirteenth century renaissance which is forever associated with the names of Giotto ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... nothing these ladies enjoyed so keenly as a delicate dish of gossip, seasoned with wit, and stuffed with epigrams. This talk was exactly to their taste. The silence and seclusion of their surroundings were an added stimulus to confidence and to a freer interchange of opinions about their world. Paris and Versailles seemed so very far away; it would appear safe to say almost anything about one's dearest friends. There was nothing to remind them of the restraints ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... outward peace was made, but it was no real peace. Yemuka was as envious and jealous of Temujin as ever, and now, moreover, in addition to this envy and jealousy, he felt the stimulus of revenge. Things, however, seem to have gone on very quietly for a time, or at least without any open outbreak in the court. During this time Vang Khan was, as usual with such princes, frequently engaged in wars with the neighboring hordes. In these ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... show an extraordinary stimulus to commerce, on a line of railway. The length of the entire line will be less than half that which is proposed to be made from Cincinnati and other cities to San Francisco; yet, will pass through varieties of production, which that line cannot have. In two days, every inhabitant ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... In the natural world we absorb heat, breathe air, draw on Environment all but automatically for meat and drink, for the nourishment of the senses, for mental stimulus, for all that, penetrating us from without, can prolong, enrich, and elevate life. But in the spiritual world we have all this to learn. We are new creatures, and even the bare living has to be acquired. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... excitement of the circulation thus induced lasts for a considerable time, but at length the heart flags from its overaction, and requires the stimulus of more spirit to carry it on in its work. Let us take what we may call a moderate amount of alcohol, say two ounces by volume, in form of wine, or beer, or spirits. What is called strong sherry or port may contain as much ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur

... his salvation only in the writing of textbooks, which were at last to throw open the door of freedom. Already he had set to work, under the powerful stimulus of Duruy, preoccupied as he always was by his incessant desire for freedom. The first rudiments of his "Agricultural Chemistry," which sounded so fresh a note in the matter of teaching, had given an instance and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... watchfulness in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by asking: "are you a man of regular life?" And I would charge my penitent to go ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... celebrities, and panegyrical solemnities with mathematical and physical truth? Yet on a closer attention to the subject, it is found that not even scientific thought can dispense with the suggestions, the instruction, the stimulus, the sympathy, the intercourse with mankind on a large scale, which such meetings secure. A fine time of year is chosen, when days are long, skies are bright, the earth smiles, and all nature rejoices; a city or town is taken by turns, of ancient name ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... forms a remarkable epoch in the annals of trade. This people, so outraged by the loathsome bigotry which Christians have not blushed to call religion, so far from being depressed by the general persecution, seemed to find it a fresh stimulus to the exertion of their industry. To escape death in Spain and Portugal they took refuge in Holland, where toleration encouraged and just principles of state maintained them. They were at first taken for Catholics, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... The strongest stimulus to arouse this instinct is the little, helpless baby. The older child has to take second place with the mother, so soon as there is a little baby there. After a child is weaned, and after he is able to get about and do for himself to quite an extent, he has ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... a parish hop A sacred feast for both of us Burst into flame without a drop Of alcoholic stimulus; And love that thrives on lemonade Can ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... exquisite—her way of speaking!" cried Hilda from the bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... facts. No conviction can equal that which arises from an assertion of God directly to ourselves. The force of the argument lies not in the question whether he did address us, but whether we believe he did. As a stimulus to action, prayer thus rises to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... stimulus of the harvest movement and colour, Cameron found himself growing weary of the life on the Haley farm. It was not the long days, and to none on the farm were the days longer than to Cameron, who had taken ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... doctor or architect, in order to support his family? Were he to trouble his head because impetuous people frowned, his wife, Amelia, and infant son, Tesla, would be the sufferers—a thought which was a constant stimulus to enterprise. His "job" required "cheek" perhaps, but nine people out of ten were not sensible enough to realize that he was a modern necessity, and to ask themselves, "Is this man doing his work ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between the two men there exist differences besides those of their general fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... perhaps it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, ...
— Progress and History • Various

... literature, which would in itself lead to the reading of standard works and would sustain the reader until he had finished his task, we have often tried to replace such an interest by a fictitious and temporary stimulus, due to appeals to duty, or to that vague and confused idea that one should "improve one's mind," unaccompanied by any definite plan of ways and means. There is no more powerful moral motor than duty, but it loses its force when ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... night, watching all their movements, and waiting for a favorable moment when they should be off their guard. The menace of Mr. Stuart, in their first interview, to shoot the giant chief with his pistol, and the fright caused among the warriors by presenting the rifles, had probably added the stimulus of pique to their usual horse-stealing propensities. And in this mood of mind they would doubtless have followed the party throughout their whole course over the Rocky Mountains, rather than be disappointed in ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... scriptures of millenniums, and yet their brain-surfaces are fresh for earth's newest concept.... What are they whispering? Their voices falter with emotion over vague bits of dreaming. They ask no greater stimulus to fly to the uttermost bounds of their limitations—than each other and the night. Reason dawns upon their stammered expressions, and farther they fly—thrilling like young birds, when their wings for the first time catch the sustaining ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... see the hounds throw off; but it happened that none of them were present this morning to abstain from following, while Mrs. Gadsby, with her doubtful antecedents, grammatical and otherwise, was not visible to make following seem unbecoming. Thus Gwendolen felt no check on the animal stimulus that came from the stir and tongue of the hounds, the pawing of the horses, the varying voices of men, the movement hither and thither of vivid color on the background of green and gray stillness:—that utmost excitement of the coming chase which consists in feeling something like ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... commensurate remedy, was to ancient Rome a perpetual foundation and well-head of public strength and enlarged resources. With us of modern times, when population greatly outruns the demand for labor, whether it be under the stimulus of upright government, and just laws, justly administered, in combination with the manufacturing system (as in England,) or (as in Ireland) under the stimulus of idle habits, cheap subsistence, and a low standard of comfort—we think it much if we can keep down insurrection ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... what in our happy childhood it had ever been, just instead of all the world to me. If one thing was wanting, and wanting it was, to knit us in a tie more enduring than any of this world's bonds could possibly be, that very sense of want furnished a stimulus to more importunate prayer on his behalf. Some of the good people who for lack of a relay of ideas borrow one of their neighbors and ride it to death, treated me to a leaf from the book of Job's comforters, ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... consequences to the want of the vine as is usually attributed to the circumstances by political economists; though I am of opinion that serious physical evils may be traced to this cause. Men will seek some stimulus or other, if it be attainable, place them in what situations you will, although wine is forbidden by the Koran, the Mahomedan is often intoxicated; and my own eyes have shown me how much drunkenness exists in the vine-growing countries of ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... result? I need not point to the successive conquests of the Saracens with such a mighty stimulus. They were loyal to the truth for which they fought. They never afterwards became idolaters; but their religion was built up on the miseries of nations. To propagate the faith of Mohammed they overran the world. Never were conquests more rapid and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... themselves. I required, it was said, to break through the usual routine of my life, to relinquish for some time my sedentary habits, and seek a complete change of air and scene, in order to give me that stimulus and energy that my tropical nature required, and which it had lost in the cold and misty atmosphere of Paris. My husband did not hesitate one moment between the hope of prolonging my life and the happiness of keeping me near him. As he could ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... profession; the spirit of men fighting for a republic, a commonwealth of brothers! that government most glorious, where God alone is king! that government most pleasant, where men make and obey their own laws! and that government most prosperous, where men, reaping as they sow, feel the utmost stimulus to every virtue that can exalt the human character and condition! This government, the glory of the earth, has ever been the desire of the wise and good of all nations. For this, the Platos of Greece, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... all the other arts, depend for its improvement upon the investigations of science. Now, every one knows, that although the cultivation of chemistry, and other branches of natural science, has, of late years, given an extraordinary stimulus to the arts, yet the science of education, from which the art of teaching can alone derive its power, is one, beyond the threshold of which modern philosophy has scarcely entered. Changes, therefore, both in the theory and ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... the elements of the fine arts, which were already in very early times received from the Hellenes. For it was the Hellenes alone, and not the Phoenicians or the Etruscans, that in this respect exercised an influence on the Italians. We nowhere find among the latter any stimulus of the fine arts which can be referred to Carthage or Caere, and the Phoenician and Etruscan forms of civilization may be in general perhaps classed with those that are hybrid, and for that reason not further productive.(9) ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... of light, air, and water, in short the absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter, the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome relaxation, the craving for some stimulus and excitement, not less needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training, generally applied. This was consistently Dickens's "platform" throughout the years he was known to me; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... and introduction proved so interesting that it delayed the dance for a few moments. Then Osh Popham and the master fiddler tuned their violins and Mrs. Carey assisted Susie Bennett at the piano, so that there were four musicians to give fresh stimulus ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... found that in Louisiana the State Suffrage Association, formed in 1896 by the union of the Portia and Era clubs, had lapsed because the former was no longer in existence. The Era Club, however, was flourishing under the stimulus and prestige gained by the successful Drainage, Sewerage and Water Campaign of 1899.[58] Mrs. Catt decided that, while it was a new precedent to recognize one club as a State association, it would be done in this case. Mrs. Evelyn Ordway was made president, Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... been a proud one: to have served and worked with her, to have known the unfailing support of her strength and sympathy, and, best of all, to be permitted to preserve through life the memory and the stimulus of ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren

... pulmonary consumption progressed or remained without any extraordinary symptoms, those with diseased larynx have lived for years, with alternating improvements and diminutions, and also an occasional suspension of all symptoms, till on account of often only a trivial, evil influence a new stimulus is given and the disease found an unexpectedly rapid completion of ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum

... ignorance on subjects connected with natural philosophy, so far from rendering me diffident of my own ability to comprehend what I had read, or inducing me to mistrust the many vague notions which had arisen in consequence, merely served as a farther stimulus to imagination; and I was vain enough, or perhaps reasonable enough, to doubt whether those crude ideas which, arising in ill-regulated minds, have all the appearance, may not often in effect possess all the force, the reality, and other inherent properties, of instinct or intuition; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... that at this period of his life, young Otis gave strong evidence of the excitable temperament with which he was endowed. In the intervals of his study his nervous system, under the stimulus of games or controversial dispute, would become so tense with excitement as to provoke remark. Nor may we in the retrospect fail to discover in this quality of mind and temper the premonitions of that malady which ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... It should perhaps be added that while the boy's action is not consciously intelligent, it is by no means purposeless, and is therefore not quite parallel with the insect's. By vigorously irritating the sensory nerves of the hand the boy imparts a stimulus to his muscular system. His act belongs to a large group which has been especially studied by Fere. See his Sensation et Mouvement (1887), and Pathologie des ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... water that he had drunk and the stimulus of renewed hope, Clayton found strength to stagger through the shallow water to the shore with a line made fast to the boat's bow. This he fastened to a small tree which grew at the top of a low bank, for the tide was at flood, and he feared that the boat might carry them all ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... in his eyes, I didn't shine. Failing any other stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did not ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... attacked through her own tutor, the Abbe Vermond. A cabal was got up between the Abbe and Madame Marsan, instructress of the sisters of Louis XVI. (the Princesses Clotilde and Elizabeth) upon the subject of education. Nothing grew out of this affair excepting a new stimulus to the party spirit against the Austrian influence, or, in other words, the Austrian Princess; and such was probably its purpose. Of course every trifle becomes Court tattle. This was made a mighty business of, for want of a worse. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... shiploads of settlers were at times gathered and sent to Quebec. The seigneurs, by the terms of their grants, should have been active in this work; but very few of them took any share in it. Nearly the entire task of applying a stimulus to emigration was thrust on the king and his officials at home. Year after gear the governor and intendant grew increasingly urgent in repeated requests for more settlers, until a rebuke arrived in a suggestion that the king was ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro

... popular poetry any discussion of Sir Walter properly begins. The love of Scottish minstrelsy first awakened his literary sense, and the stimulus supplied by ballads and romances never lost its force. We may say that the little volumes of ballad chap-books which he collected and bound up before he was a dozen years old suggested the future editor, as the long poem on the Conquest of Grenada, which he is said to have ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... eleven people sat down to partake of the excellent repast furnished by Mrs. Smithers under the stimulus of pleasant talk. Harlan was at the head, with Miss St. Clair on his right and Mrs. Dodd on his left. Next to Miss St. Clair was the poet, whose deep sorrow did not interfere with his appetite. The twins were next to him, then Mrs. Holmes, then Willie, then Dorothy, at ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... pressing as to prevent them from giving full place to the impressions of the strange and eventful scene round them, with its grandeur, its sadness, its promises. In such a state of things there is everything to tempt poetry. There are its materials and its stimulus, and there is the leisure to use ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... and attempts, mainly futile, to control wages and to force labour into particular channels, continued. In one direction however the artificial encouragement of one industry may have had a beneficial effect. Navigation laws tended, per se, to check general commerce; but they gave a stimulus to the English marine at a time when its rapid development was of the utmost national importance; not directly increasing the interchange of commodities as a whole, but encouraging the English carrying-trade, and advancing the growth of the sea-power which made a more extended commerce possible; ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause; viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert. To assist Reason by the stimulus of Imagination is the design of the following production. In the execution of it much may be objectionable. The verse (particularly in the introduction of the ode) may be accused of unwarrantable liberties, but they are liberties equally homogeneal with the exactness of Mathematical ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... arrangements, annuities are in all cases paid, amounting in some instances to more than $30 for each individual of the tribe, and in all cases sufficiently great, if justly divided and prudently expended, to enable them, in addition to their own exertions, to live comfortably. And as a stimulus for exertion, it is now provided by law that "in all cases of the appointment of interpreters or other persons employed for the benefit of the Indians a preference shall be given to persons of Indian descent, if such can be found who are properly qualified ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson

... readers of our language. I found that he himself was a better guide for me than all his critics and commentators. I learned to understand the grand individuality of his nature, and his increasing importance as an intellectual force in our century. I owe as much to him in the way of stimulus as to any other poet whatever. Except Shakespeare, no other poet has ever so thoroughly inculcated the value of breadth, the advantage of various knowledge, as the chief element of the highest human culture. Through the form of his creative activity, Shakespeare ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... soon. We English speakers, in 1904-1906, were beginning to read plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival, and the plays we read were successful on the stage. As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much of it at least was busied with the form of the drama, its great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel—a mistake. We ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... they have sought they dress closely, and cause pain; on the lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents: urged by latent stimulus the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... quantity, and at a less costly rate. In demolishing some furnaces employed in making soda, by means of decomposing sulphate of soda, some earth had been found impregnated with a light blue, which was proved to have so close a resemblance to ultramarine as to foster hopes of success. As a stimulus, there was offered a prize of six thousand francs or 500 for the production of artificial ultramarine by the Socit d'Encouragement of Paris, which was won in 1828 by M. Guimet. It is fitting that the discoverer of a colour should ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... to make pressure on the subclavian above the clavicle, is a most advisable precaution, too much must not be trusted to this pressure above, as the struggles of the patient and the spasmodic movements of the limb, which are so apt to occur under the stimulus of the knife, are apt to render futile the best ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... Under this stimulus Hogan managed to work better than he had done since he came out to California, or indeed for years preceding his departure. Bickford and Joe had both been accustomed to farm work and easily lapsed ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... from the bench and the prisoner turned from his steadfast contemplation of the throng, a psychic wave overflowed and lifted all the great assembly. This was spectacle, this was drama! The oldest of all the first principles stirred under the stimulus, and with savage naturalness sucked ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields, she was cold and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted. The dark removed the stimulus of human companionship, and a tear actually slid down her cheek, accompanying a sudden conviction within her that she loved Ralph, and that he didn't love her. All dark and empty now was the path where they had walked that morning, and the sparrows silent in the bare trees. But the lights ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... adventurers to the mines: for so many hands were employed in searching for gold, that few remained to cultivate the soil, and provide the necessaries of life. Yet that insatiable thirst of gold is a stimulus which has led to useful and to honourable things: it is not the love of the metal, but the possession of it gives power, and that is the real object of most men's ambition: it is certainly that of the ambition of all nations, and this object is held legitimate: we account those base or wicked ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... sentimental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical. They had more sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the Romans; but, like the Romans, they had too high a spirit not to like a noble intellectual stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region of the merely prosaic. Their foible,—the bad excess of their characterising quality of strenuousness,—was not a prosaic flatness, it was ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... preserve this unquenchable torrent of animal spirits into middle life. I was only seventeen; they were from twenty to thirty years my seniors, yet I do not think that we mutually bored each other the least. They did not need the stimulus of alcohol to aid this flow of spirits, for, like most Frenchmen of that class, they were very abstemious, although the "Patron" always produced for us "un bon vieux vin de derriere les fagots," or "un joli petit vin qui fait rire." It was sheer "joie de-vivre" ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... the fierce stimulus of anxious thought. She knew very well that notwithstanding his quiet manner, she had reason to fear the man who sat by her side. She feared his self-restraint, she feared the light which sometimes gleamed in his eyes when he fancied himself unobserved. He gave her no cause for complaint. All ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Congress, embodied "nearly every material change suggested by Virginia;"[415] and that it was distinctly due, in no small degree, to the bitter and implacable urgency of the popular feeling in Virginia, under the stimulus of Patrick Henry's leadership, that Congress was induced by Madison to pay any attention to the subject. In the matter of amendments, therefore, Patrick Henry and his party did not get all that they demanded, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... said. One motive for his agreeing to undergo the danger was devotion to his young mistress; another to stand well with Pepita, who had a power over him, and as he knew had entered upon her part with an ardent alacrity. But there was a third stimulus to keep up his courage, should it feel like failing—this having to do with the Condesa. Drawing out her grand gold watch—good value for a hundred dollores, and holding it up before his ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... work done in this spirit with that accomplished under the stimulus of financial gain, or for the end of mere selfish display. The latter is a species of artistic prostitution. Superficially the performances may seem something alike, the difference may be intangible, but it exists and ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... reflect that every article they sell is to be a gift from one thoughtful and loving heart to another they must forget the mere fatigue of the flesh and just feel the stimulus, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... outer room, where Meta was waiting, and forced upon his unwilling conviction that it was no case for the law. The child had not been killed by any one dose, but had rather sunk from the want of stimulus, to which she had been accustomed. As to any pity for the woman, George would not hear of it. She was still, in his eyes, the destroyer of his child; and, when he found the law would afford him no vengeance, he insisted that she should ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... of New France is all parts and no whole; brilliant ideas and thwarted execution; government stimulus and government repression; deeds of daring by adventurers afloat and deeds of various kinds by officials ashore: everything unstable and changeable; nothing continuous and strong. It cannot, therefore, make a coherent narrative, only a collection ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood

... wight more joys than one received, If our narrator of the tale's believed; (In bed a muleteer is worth three kings, And value oft is found in humble things.) The queen began to think her husband's rage Had proved a stimulus such wars to wage, And made him wond'rous stout in pleasure's sport, Though all the while his thoughts were-'bout ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine

... the servile herd—have either insolently trampled liberty under foot, or deserted its cause in cowardly indifference; and they preach to them a doctrine which deprives them of every pledge of future progress, every stimulus to affection, every noble aspiration towards sacrifice,—they take from them the faith that inspires confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... at the same time he loved to say how unutterably tiresome he found it. Who will ever understand why Carlyle trudged many miles to attend parties and receptions at Bath House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what stimulus he discerned in it? I have a belief that Carlyle felt a quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected place among a semi- feudal circle, just as I have very little doubt that his migration to Craigenputtock was ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... signal for the reopening of this vexed question.—Though the public lands have been the cause of intestine strife, they have been a great source of national wealth. Their sale has brought large sums into the treasury. They have been given to settlers as a stimulus to emigration. They have been granted to endow colleges and schools, to build railroads, to reward the soldiers and support their widows and orphans. In every township to be incorporated hereafter in the great west, a portion of the land must be reserved for school purposes. By the Homestead Act ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.

... naturally be expected, the rate of growth will depend on various influences. Any stimulus to the secreting structures of the coronet, such as a blister, the application of the hot iron, or any other irritant, results in an increased growth. Growth is favoured by moisture and by the animal going unshod, as witness the effects of turning out ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... Melrose's agent, and was now the inheritor of his goods; to the alert and clean-shaven face of Undershaw, listening with the concentration of the scientific habit to the voice from the witness-box. And through the strained attention of the room there ran the stimulus of that gruesome new fact—the presence overhead of yet another dead man, dragged only some twenty-four hours earlier from the swollen ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of a lock of hay tied six inches before his nose. The method is nothing,—it is the pace which kills. Probably the fact is, that for every extra hour directly required by the teacher, another is indirectly extorted in addition by the general stimulus of the school. The best scholars put on the added hour, because they are the best,—and the inferior scholars, because they are not the best. In either case the excess is destructive in its tendency, and the only refuge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... conditions the work of the Navy Commission was particularly timely and important, and that of Mr. Camp was of conspicuous value through the physical training and mental stimulus which it provided for patriotic, yet half homesick young Americans, from whom not only material comfort and luxury, but entertainment of all kinds, including recreational ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... velocity, the others, fifteen in all, followed, looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor's deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and—we heard the whistle of the ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his words. "Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost uncontrollable, expressiveness; that's what you want in your ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... were about fifty persons in the gang—the majority females—under two inspectors or superintendents, men who take the place of the quondam drivers, though their province is totally different. They merely direct the laborers in their work, employing with the loiterers the stimulus of persuasion, or at farthest, no more than the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... with the side of her ample slipper, and then went into the house, where she kindled a fire in the kitchen stove, and made herself a cup of Japan tea: a variety of the herb which our country people prefer, apparently because it affords the same stimulus with none of the pleasure given by ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... know, swim the first time they find themselves in the water. They do not have to be taught: it is a matter of instinct. It is what we should expect from our knowledge of their lives. Not so with man; he must learn to swim as he learns so many other things. The stimulus of the water does not at once set in motion his legs and arms in the right way, as it does the animal's legs; his powers of reason and reflection paralyze him—his brain carries him down. Not until he has learned to resign himself to the water ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... to which I must call attention, because, when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest lines. It is this. Whatever general, national or state plans prove the most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at the same time ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... the stimulus of Charlemagne's word's and of his example, that all his men do wonders. The aged emperor himself finally engages in a duel with the emir, in the midst of which he is about to succumb, when an angel bids him strike one more blow, promising he shall triumph. Thus stimulated, Charlemagne ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... Shall we stifle thought, uproot living ideas? That would mean the castration of man's brain, the loss of his chief stimulus in life; but nevertheless the eau-de-vie of his mind contains a poison which is the more to be dreaded because it is spread broadcast among the masses, in the form of adulterated drugs.... Rouse thee, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... before his eyes, he had worn an armour of selfishness on a life which had no deep problems, because it had no deep feelings—a life never rising to the intellectual prowess for which it was fitted, save when under the stimulus of liquor. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... shopkeepers, talking of local things. But it is not to be supposed that because his life was from end to end a humble one, though prosperous even outwardly after its kind, Crome was deprived of the companionship most fitted to his genius, the stimulus that he most needed. The very existence of the Norwich Society of Artists settles that question. The local men hung on his words; he knew that he was not only making pictures, but a school. And in the quietness of a provincial city a coterie had been ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... my acquaintance started out with the intention of constructing a telephone by means of which it would be possible to speak directly to the spirit world! He had in mind great delicacy of apparatus, a system of "relays," by means of which it would be possible to augment an initial stimulus, however slight, a magnifying apparatus which would greatly increase the volume of sound, on the lines of the ampliphone and the microphone, etc. I do not believe that very definite results were ever achieved, and he is still at work upon the problem. ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... go to Lady Hardwicke's, [1] but won't. I always begin the day with a bias towards going to parties; but, as the evening advances, my stimulus fails, and I hardly ever go out—and, when I do, always regret it. This might have been a pleasant one;—at least, the hostess is a very superior woman. Lady Lansdowne's [2] to-morrow—Lady Heathcote's [3] Wednesday. Um!—I must spur myself into going to some of them, or it will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... great question; but wished rather to share with it the benefit which the true solution of the Problem offers—the solution prescribed by those who propounded it to the future. It seemed better to save to the world the power and beauty of this demonstration, its intellectual stimulus, its demand on the judgment. It seemed better, that the world should acquire it also in the form of criticism, instead of being stupified and overpowered with the mere force of an irresistible, external, historical proof. Persons incapable of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... and chafed her. She fretted under them as a caged bird frets. Gradually, too, she was awakening to the limitations of the life which would be hers when she married Roger, realising that, much as he loved her, he was quite unable to supply her with either the kind of companionship or the mental stimulus her temperament craved and which the little coterie of clever, brilliant people who had been her intimates in town had given her in full measure. The Trenbys' circle of friends interested her not at all. The men mostly of the sturdy, sporting type, bored her ineffably, and ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... advice, the clergyman counselled him to go to work, to let competition become an incentive to action, instead of paralysing his energy. He then told him how the advent of these foreign divines had been a stimulus to him and to his brethren in the ministry. The result was that to-day there is a higher standard of pulpit eloquence in New York than in any other city of ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman

... chief result obtained in the field of inquiry just now under consideration during the eighteenth century. But before it closed, its cultivation had received a powerful stimulus through the invention of an improved method. The name of Olbers has already been brought prominently before our readers in connection with asteroidal discoveries; these, however, were but chance excursions from the path of cometary research which he steadily pursued through life. An early ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... unlucky sort between them; and from their first meeting, as undergraduates at Jesus, until the premature death of the elder, they continued to supply each other's minds with precisely that sort of occupation and stimulus of which each by the grace of nature stood least in need. That their close intimacy was ill-calculated to raise Sterne's reputation in later years may be inferred from the fact that Hall Stevenson afterwards obtained ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... aneurism of the arch of the aorta may cause suffocation in two ways—viz., either by pressing directly on the tracheal tube, or by compressing and irritating the vagus nerve, whose recurrent branch will convey the stimulus to the laryngeal muscles, and cause spasmodic closure of the glottis. This anatomical fact also fully accounts for the constant cough which attends some forms of aortic aneurism. The pulmonary arteries and veins are also ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought of Europe, alike by sympathy ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... day in and day out. Now, what you call inspiration may be communicated in many ways—by the spectacle of a mob, by a panorama of nature, by sudden and violent contrasts of points of view; but, above all, as a continual stimulus, it comes from that state of mental madness ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... everyone, of course, knew already a little something about his insides and how they worked, one ought to be able to find out a little more from some textbook, and that the two littles might make enough for passing purposes. Thereupon with that prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which has been conspicuously characteristic of him all his life, he got a book, read it hard all of the day and night before ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... and sorrows of that institution. When in family council it was decided to send me to that intellectual Mecca, I did not receive the announcement with unmixed satisfaction, as I had fixed my mind on Union College. The thought of a school without boys, who had been to me such a stimulus both in study and play, seemed to my imagination dreary ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... days—Canada is within nine—of Japan against Great Britain's month by the Atlantic-C.P.R.-Pacific route and eight weeks by Suez. There are more American visitors than British to Japan. It was America that first opened Japan to the West, and the debt of Japan to American training and stimulus is immense. But British services to Japan have also been substantial. Great Britain was the first to welcome her within the circle of the Great Powers, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance did more for Japan than some Japanese have been willing to admit. The problem of Japan is ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... space, to indicate more than their general features. In the famous "war-dance,"—which was frequently danced, as it still is, for amusement,—speeches, exhortations, jests, personal satire, and repartee were commonly introduced as a part of the performance, sometimes by way of patriotic stimulus, sometimes for amusement. The music in this case was the drum and the war-song. Some of the other dances were also interspersed with speeches and sharp witticisms, always taken in good part, though Lafitau says that he has seen the victim so pitilessly ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... Take him for all in all, he was the most extraordinary example of natural faculties that I have ever known. All the chief orators of that proud day of oratory had owed much to study, much to circumstances, and much to the stimulus of great topics, a great cause, and a great theatre for their display. When Burke spoke, he had the world for his hearers.—He stood balancing the fates of empires; his voice reached to the bosom of all the cabinets of civilized nations; and with the office of a prophet, he almost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... gleaned from the applications considered in the preceding pages. But to all these classes of men the photographic art derives its chief glory from its application to the stereoscope; and if, for elucidating the principles of vision by means of this application, we have in any degree given a stimulus to the practice and improvement of the photographic processes, our pains have been happily and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various

... recovered from the hands of the Jews, and began a career of rapid and beneficent expansion. It was in an especial manner promoted by the magnificent prospects unfolded to colonial and mining enterprise in the discovery of the New World, by the stimulus and the facilities afforded to industrial skill by the researches of natural science, and by the emancipation won for all the activities of the human mind through the free principles of the Reformation. Thus, by degrees, credit came to intervene in nearly every operation of commerce ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord's answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... delightfully with Lili at Offenbach; his letters speak of nothing but her. He wrote some scenes in Faust—the walk in the garden, the first conversation with Mephistopheles, the interview with the scholar, the scene in Auerbach's cellar. Egmont was also begun under the stimulus of the American Rebellion. A way of escaping from his embarrassments was unexpectedly opened to him. The duke of Weimar passed through Frankfort both before and after his marriage, which took place on October 3. He invited Goethe to stay at Weimar. It was not for his happiness or for Lili's ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... circumambulator of the earth. He says, that having no money, they kick him from place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked round the globe. Are you become a great walker? You know I preach up that kind of exercise. Shall I send you a conte-pas? It will cost you a dozen louis, but be a great stimulus to walking, as it will record your steps. I finished my tour a week or ten days ago. I went as far as Turin, Milan, Genoa; and never passed three months and a half more delightfully. I returned through ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... indeed, the affair ever looked in the direction of marriage. She married another, and Beethoven does not seem to have been seriously disturbed. It may be that, like Goethe, he valued the love of woman not for itself or its direct results, but as an art-stimulus which should enrich and fructify his own ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... methods used by the laity for the relief of constipation is the rectal injection, or enema. Enemas habitually given to unload the bowels are productive of much harm by overdistending the rectum, so that in time the rectum fails to react to the normal stimulus— namely, the presence of the feces— as it otherwise would. But by some means or other the bowels must be well moved once every twenty-four hours. And it is much better to use an enema than to go to bed without a bowel movement. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... Hetherington and Brace in broad daylight, without any jury-trial; and, soon after, they quietly disbanded. As they controlled the press, they wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community? Indeed, in San Francisco, as soon as it was demonstrated ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... is this subjective element in the great objective aesthete—that James writes novels like an essayist, like some epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the lines and colours of mediaeval art. This essayist attitude accounts largely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such a clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... protection in the one section and free-trade in the other. And this was not an unnatural distinction. Zeal against slavery was necessarily accompanied by an appreciation of the dignity of free labor; and free labor was more generously remunerated under the stimulus of protective laws. The same considerations produced a directly opposite conclusion in the South, where those interest in slave labor could not afford to build up a class of free laborers with high wages and independent opinions. The question was indeed one of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... one organized and commanded by the sons and relatives of Ragnar, whom, it will be recollected, the Saxons had cruelly killed by poisonous serpents in a dungeon or den. The relatives of the unhappy chieftain thus barbarously executed were animated in their enterprise by the double stimulus of love of plunder and a ferocious thirst for revenge. A considerable time was spent in collecting a large fleet, and in combining, for this purpose, as many chieftains as could be induced to share in the enterprise. ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... not supply the needed stimulus to use of the mental faculties, by a demand for present work, the mother may keep before the mind of her daughter the great duty of preparation for contingencies that may arise, and show her how the rapid changes now taking place in our social system may at ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... deny us even the stimulus of an argument," he observed. "Besides, after all, men find it more difficult to get ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of shading not being much varied in direction or curved at all, a minimum amount of that "form stimulus" is conveyed. The curving of the lines in shading adds considerably to the force of the relief, and suggests much stronger modelling. In the case of foreshortened effects, where the forms are seen at their fullest, arching one over the other, some curvature in the lines of shading is of considerable ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... I had had neither time for rest nor appetite for food. I loved my amiable and excellent wife with all the warmth of a youthful husband united to the object of his affections. I am very fond of little children, and the idea of having one of my own to pet and work for had given a stimulus to all my labours. My first-born seemed dearly purchased now at the cost of his poor mother's peril. Still, my ardent temperament led me to hope that my dear wife would be spared. Her loss seemed an event too dreadful to realize, for the boy-husband had had no experience in sorrow then, and his buoyant ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... in force, he had a high moral ideal for his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to hold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: "If the devil knew he had horns the cherubim would offer him their place." And though it was only in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... Tylor's Primitive Culture—Klausen, Preuner, Preller, Kuhn, and many others, who worked on the comparative method but with slender material for the use of it—we see at once what an immense advance has been effected by that monumental work, and by the stimulus that it gave to others to follow the same track. Now we have in this country the works of Lang, Robertson Smith, Farnell, Frazer, Hartland, Jevons, and others, while a host of students on the Continent are writing in all languages on anthropological ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... and Mahoning Railroad gave a strong stimulus to the coal trade of northern Ohio, and was one of the most important events in the history of Cleveland. By this time the beds of the valuable Briar Hill, or block coal, were tapped, which has proved the best fuel for manufacturing iron from the raw ore, and has no superior, if it ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... writing; but of course they present pitfalls for the unwary. He was Vicar of Ludgvan for fifty years. The curious fogou of Pendeen Vau was actually in the garden of his birthplace, so that he had an early stimulus to research. Pendeen has now its own church, which is of remarkable interest although quite recent. In plan and exterior it is modelled on Iona Cathedral, and was built by the Cornish missioner, Robert Aitken, who influenced his people so powerfully that the granite was both given and ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... the great Teacher as pictured by the writer is one to be dreamed over and capable of imparting both knowledge and stimulus to that inner life which is in so many ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... After the stimulus of a cold shower and a hearty breakfast, he resumed his crusade against the entrenched forces of Ignorance, but in spite of the utmost effort in concentration, the memory of the lonely figure by the Thames intruded constantly on his mind. It was not only that Dick was the brother ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... recognized. Flight, instant and permanent, had been his original intent. Now it would not do. Bolder measures must be devised. He appealed to the head-waiter to help him carry out a joke, and that functionary, developing a sense of humor under the stimulus of a twenty-dollar bill, procured him on the spot an ill-fitting coat and a black string tie, and gave him certain simple directions. When the patroness of Art next observed the object of her patronage, he was ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the rate of wages would tend to adapt itself to the necessities of the wage earner, that in proportion as his necessities were met from other sources his wages would fall, that accordingly the apparent relief would be in large measure illusory, while finally, in view of the diminished stimulus to individual exertion, the productivity of labour would fall off, the incentives to industry would be diminished, and the community as a whole would be poorer. Upon the other hand, it was conceived that, however deplorable the condition ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... a terrible stimulus. Hannah unfastened the lace gown with fingers trembling with haste. She stepped out of the shimmering circle which it made; she was in her own costume in an incredibly short space of time, and the lace gown was in ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... public debt, or the burden of the debt, both bonds and notes rose in value. Within one year, the bonds rose to par in gold, making it practicable to commence the refunding of six per cent. bonds into five per cent. bonds. The notes rose under the stimulus of this new promise, in one year, from seventy-six cents to eighty-nine cents in gold, but no steps whatever were made to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... was how Panhandle Smith, at the mature age of five, received the stimulus that set the current of his life in one strong channel. He called himself "Tex." If his mother forgot to use this thrilling name he was offended. He adopted Tex's way of walking, riding, talking. And all the hours of daylight, ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... latter had undergone, these seemed of small importance; and dinner passed without any allusion to his own affairs. And now the chances of his speaking out were slight; he could have been entirely frank only under the first stimulus of meeting. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimate fruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignified with the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping—a perfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I have an idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... almost to the ground; but, having taken careful note of his prices, I felt secure in commending him, even to the verge of extravagance; and, besides, does not the artistic nature demand the stimulus of praise to enable it to put ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... one another and blaming one another for our wasted lives. Oh, what a hell! And there was no escaping it. I tried often enough ... but in vain. The broken bonds became tied again. Only this summer, under the stimulus of my love for Genevieve, I tried to free myself and did my utmost to persuade the two women whom I call mother. And then ... and then! I was up against their complaints, their immediate hatred of the wife, of the stranger, whom I was proposing to force upon ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... Department and of frequent inspections, indicate the relative merit of postmasters of each class. They will be appropriately indicated in the Official Register and in the report of the Department. That a great stimulus would thus be given to the whole service I do not doubt, and such a record would be the best defense against inconsiderate ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... only child. It was not requisite that I should follow any business, for my wealth was great; yet, to avoid remark, I followed that of my father, who was a longanizero. I have occasionally dealt in wool: but lazily, lazily—as I had no stimulus for exertion. I was, however, successful in many instances, strangely so; much more than many others who toiled day and night, and whose whole ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... photographs from each lot, which were chosen to become a part of the farm exhibit to be displayed on the walls of the library, hall of education and the school-rooms. This monthly award for meritorious work acted as a wonderful stimulus to all the club members, so increasing their ambition, industry and artistic invention, that an ever increasing number of delightful surprises followed each monthly examination. In considering the selections as a class, the extent and variety of the subjects treated ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay's head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. "Pansay went off the handle," says Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & O. flirtation. He certainly was engaged ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... drily; "I suppose there is a certain stimulus in saving England before breakfast. Most of my own work in that line is accomplished in the afternoon." Then, with a sudden slight change in his manner, he took a step forward and again held ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... power from Tahoe's waters, forests, mountains and snow-fields. It means a purifying of the blood, a clearing of the brain, a sending of a fuller supply of gastric juices to the stomach, of digestive sauces to the palate, and a corresponding stimulus to the whole body, which now responds with vim, energy, buoyancy and exuberance to all calls made upon ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... miro-miro, [signifying] 'To be found by the sharp-eyed little bird.' Lit. 'For the miro-miro's eye.' Used as a stimulus to a person searching for anything lost. The miro-miro is the little petroica toi-toi, which runs up and down trees peering for ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... complicated. Here it must be sufficient to say that the idea of sexual processes produces dilation of blood vessels in the sexual sphere, and that this physiological change itself becomes the source and stimulus for more vivid sexual feelings, which associate themselves with more complex sexual thoughts. These in their turn reinforce again the physiological effect on the sexual organ, and so the play goes on until the irritation of the whole sexual apparatus and the corresponding ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... of knowledge, even a not unfavorable opinion of one's own merits, these, even when kept within just bounds, though guarded and moderated by Christian humility, and directed toward a good end, have in them, doubtless, something of selfishness, but they may serve as a stimulus and a support to the noblest and most constant resolutions. The scruples that trouble my conscience now, therefore, have not their source in pride, in an overweening self-confidence, in a desire for worldly fame, or in a too great love of knowledge. Nothing of this nature it is that troubles ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... parties admit the necessity of a reduction in the rates of duties, if for no other reason, in order to reduce the surplus of Government receipts over expenditures, which is a constant stimulus to congressional extravagance. The Republican policy is in general to retain the principle of protection in the reduction; while the Democratic policy, so far as it is defined, is to deal as tenderly as ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... and private duties have prevented me from reading your work on THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, throughout. But such portions as I have had time to read, convince me that as a stimulus to noble effort it has much value. It is also a grand monument of the past struggles of the Angel Spirit of Liberty with the Demon of American Slavery. It serves also as a Beacon Light for our future progress in the upward movement. It deserves a ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... drunkard's vulgar proverb recommending 'a hair of the dog that bit you,' is but a coarse expression of a common fault. He is wretched until 'another glass' steadies, for a moment, his trembling hand, and gives a brief stimulus to his nerves. They say that the Styrian peasants, who habitually eat large quantities of arsenic, show symptoms of poison if they leave it off suddenly. These are but samples, in the physical region, of a tendency ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... glanced into Shock's face and at once grew calm again. Soon, under the stimulus of the brandy, the old ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... and stalwart men idle on Saturday at e'en, after their week's hard labor—clustering at the street-corners, merely to stare at our unpretending selves. Except in some remote little town of Italy (where, besides, the inhabitants had the intelligible stimulus of beggary), I have never been honored with nearly such an ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... absence, and so discourage one's clients, needs greater moral principle than all men possess. Another temptation to which several great mediums have succumbed is that of drink. This comes about in a very natural way, for overworking the power leaves them in a state of physical prostration, and the stimulus of alcohol affords a welcome relief, and may tend at last to become a custom and finally a curse. Alcoholism always weakens the moral sense, so that these degenerate mediums yield themselves more readily to fraud, with the result that several who had deservedly won ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... as a fresh, new, apt and rather clever thing to say. He really believes, no doubt, that it is original—it is, at any rate, neat, as he indicates by his evident expectation of applause. The remark follows upon the physical or mental stimulus as the night the day; he cannot, then, be true to any other impulse. Originality was inhibited in him since his great-grandmother's time. He has "got ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess

... full of tributes to the power of music as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso themselves. Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,—itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... the United States that has not so felt it. It is plainly evident that by the progressive dearness of money, the lower standard of living that will result in Europe, the effect on immigration, and other processes which I will touch upon at greater length later, any temporary stimulus which a trade here and there may receive will be more than offset by the difficulties due to financial as apart ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... It might be going a step too far with her young friend to utter the thought that was coming to her lips. Irene did not question her as to what more she was about to say. There was stimulus enough in the words already spoken. She felt all the strength of ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... tells us at the same time, that he will admit the slave grown cotton and the slave grown sugar of the United States. I am utterly at a loss to understand how he can vindicate his consistency. He tells us that if we adopt my noble friend's proposition, we shall give a stimulus to the slave trade between Africa and Brazil. Be it so. But is it not equally clear that, if we adopt the right honourable Baronet's own propositions, we shall give a stimulus to the slave trade between Virginia and Louisiana? ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... it is not to be supposed that Louis was tranquil; for, though naturally of an indolent temperament, there was in him a fund of latent emulation, which only wanted a stimulus such as the present to rouse him to action. Louis was a boy of no mean ability, and now, fired with the hope of distinguishing himself, and gaining a little honor that might efface the remembrance of past idleness, and give some pleasure to his dear parents, ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May

... beginning to tell on the lives of our women. They lean too much on their slaves, have too much irresponsible power in their hands, are narrowed and compressed by the routine of plantation life and the lack of intellectual stimulus." ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... for six whole hours to tear himself away from a book that so few men to-day, save under some compulsion, could persuade themselves to read through. On great wholesome minds the grossness left no stain, and the interest of Diderot's singularities worked as a stimulus to a happier originality in men of more disciplined endowments. And let us add, of more poetic endowments. It is the lack of poetry in Jacques that makes its irony so heavy to us. We only willingly suffer ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... millennium arrived and society was reorganized, money, he admitted, would remain the lever of the world, the great stimulus to effort. Money supplied not only the necessities of life but also its luxuries, everything the material desire craved for, and so long as money had this magic purchasing power, so long would men lie ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... that in Appetite the object of pursuit is not the pleasure of eating, but the food: consequently, eating is not properly a self-seeking act, it is an indifferent or disinterested act, to which there is an incidental accompaniment of pleasure. We should, under the stimulus of Hunger, seek the food, whether it ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... Louis XIV. suggests ultra-lavishness in life and taste; a time when French society, surfeited with pleasure, demanded a stimulus of continual novelty in current literature. The natural result was preciosite, hyperbole, falsetto sentiment, which ranked the unusual above the natural, clever conceit above careful workmanship. It was tainted with artificiality, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping; and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes's ascetic face, and the brooding of ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... plenipotentiary representative of an Efficiency Company, to introduce economic reforms into his motherless household during his temporary absence, we regarded it as a most reasonable experiment. And for a time it made excellent fun. But after a while it began to wear thin for lack of fresh stimulus, and by the end of the Second Act there was a general feeling in the audience that something would have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various



Words linked to "Stimulus" :   information, stimulate, turnoff, cue, reinforcement, elicitation, induction, reinforcer, negative stimulation, turn-on, aversive stimulus, stimulation, kick, evocation



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