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More "Assertive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them, just within the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and yellow hat had taken his stand. He was a diminutive person, a mere homunculus, Byrne describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet assertive attitude, a corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over his left shoulder, muffling his chin and mouth; while the broad- brimmed yellow hat hung on a corner of his square little head. He stood there ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... see you then; you talk so much!" And Penrod handed the weapon scornfully to Sam, who at once became less self-assertive. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... was talking brightly and charmingly to a woman. Men usually talk their best to women. When I turn over my memories of him, it seems that his grave courtesy was only gay when he was talking to women. His talk to women had a lightness and charm. It was sympathetic; never self-assertive, as the hard, brilliant Irish intellect so often is. He liked people to talk to him. He liked to know the colours of people's minds. He liked to be amused. His merriest talk was like playing catch with an apple of banter, which one afterwards ate ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... found, when the night superintendent finally entered the office and he had the chance of introducing himself. Newer to authority than the superintendent of the dayshift, he was also of a more active temperament and much more self-assertive. He was not impressed by the detective's years or even by his errand. It was a busy night, a very busy night—new hands in every department. To take him through the building at present was quite out of the question. Perhaps later it might be done; ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... the collected villagers murmur their approval; but I answer the mudir's beckoned invitation by a negative wave of the hand, signifying that I can't bother with him any further. The common herd around regard this self-assertive reply with open-mouthed astonishment, as though quite too incredible for belief; it seems to them an act of almost criminal discourtesy, and those immediately about me seem almost inclined to take me back to the threshing-floor like a culprit. But the mudir himself is not such a blockhead but that ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... William gravely—he was the more assertive of the two and always spoke for both—"we dreamed that there were fireworks hidden in the basement of the carriage house; lots and lots ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... each other in the driving snow they seemed, intuitively, to turn to Ruth Fielding. She was the youngest of the six girls; but she was at this moment the more assertive and held herself better under control ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... fear of Negro uprising, and well were her fears grounded, for here the Negro was most assertive against his mistreatment. The population of Bahia in the first decade of the nineteenth century is estimated by Henderson as being in the neighborhood of 110,000, two thirds of which was slave. Once ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... compared with a gigantic park, and there are residences sufficiently imposing to please the lover of architectural beauty, even if there is no assertive Clock Tower to emphasise by contrast the hovels of Singapore's region of slums. The idea of keeping the various races to their Kampongs may be contrary to British ideas, but in Java it appears to work satisfactorily ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... was at once soft and desolate stole upon her, and made her cry a little. It sprang, perhaps, from a sense of the many barriers she had heaped up between herself and happiness. The waves of feeling, half self-assertive, half repentant, ebbed and flowed. One moment she yearned for the hour when Marcella was to come to her; the next, she hated the notion of it. So between dream and misery, amid a maze of thought without ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... young to come to such a determination; yet Ruth's experiences since her parents had died were such as would naturally make her self-assertive. She knew what she wanted, and she went ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... not claim to have 'added up' Constance yet. She considered that her sister was in some respects utterly provincial—what they used to call in the Five Towns a 'body.' Somewhat too diffident, not assertive enough, not erect enough; with curious provincial pronunciations, accents, gestures, mannerisms, and inarticulate ejaculations; with a curious narrowness of outlook! But at the same time Constance was very shrewd, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... have taken their chance: few inspectors ask to see whether children know how to "play the game," and yet they are so soon to play the independent game of life. But the individual output of reading and sums of a sneaking and cowardly, or assertive and selfish child, is as good probably as that of a child that has the makings of a hero in him. And then we wonder at the propensities of the "lower classes." It is because we have never made sure that they can ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... He becomes assertive, confident, dominating; the male taking a male's place. He discovers that his intellectual processes are more scientific than hers, therefore he concludes they are superior. He finds he can outargue her, draw logical conclusions as she cannot. He can do anything with her but convince ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... in the White House six months the country was divided substantially into Jackson men and anti-Jackson or administration men. The elements from which Jackson drew support were many and discordant. The backbone of his strength was the self-assertive, ambitious western Democracy, which recognized in him its truest and most eminent representative. The alliance with the Calhoun forces was kept up, although it was already jeopardized by the feeling of the South Carolinian's ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... right. Thomas stood in front of the mirror, shining with cleanliness, knotting a red silk tie. He had reached that stage in a young man's life when clothes were temporarily of supreme importance. Gone was the shy and shabby ploughboy of a year before. This self-assertive young gentleman was clad in a checked suit in which green was a predominating color, a black-and-white striped shirt, and chocolate-colored shoes. His hair, still dripping with moisture, was brushed straight back from his ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... to all seeming, she moved toward the boat. With clumsy and assertive gallantry her father stepped before her, offering his hand,—his hand which she did not touch; for, in the act of descending, she remembered and swung ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... assented without enthusiasm, handed her into a hansom, and took his place beside her. She wore a very large hat, untidily put on; some of the paint seemed still to be upon her face; her voice, too, seemed to have become louder, and her manner more assertive. There were obvious indications that she no longer considered brandy and soda an unladylike beverage. Peter Ruff was not pleased with himself or proud ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they took the elevator. Duane was seated in an easy chair by the fire, Grandcourt in another, the decanter stood on a low table between them, when, without formality, the door opened and young Quest appeared on the threshold, white, self-assertive, and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Mrs. Marvelle, stepping into the hall, and beginning to walk across it, in her own important and self-assertive manner. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... man was excited and on edge. Daphne Floyd—and the thought of Daphne Floyd—had set his pulses hammering; they challenged in him the aggressive, self-assertive, masculine force. The history of the preceding three weeks was far from simple. He had first paid a determined court to her, conducting it in an orthodox, English, conspicuous way. His mother, and her ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... promises, the minority is deprived of all power. Representative democracy, on the other hand, deprives the people of the personal exercise of political power, in order to save them from the free play of their self-assertive passions, but still leaves to every man an equality of influence in deciding the direction of progress. Thus every man is induced to express his opinion as to the direction of progress; and the party policy is the resultant direction of progress of all the party electors, and therefore ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... up, the Cure and his vicar were sitting on their gallery, and a man of strong frame stood upon the crier's rostrum looking round with the assertive consciousness that he was a recognized figure. His face wore a beard of strong but thin black wisps, which would have been Vandyke in form had it been heavier, but allowed the forcible outlines of his chin and cheek to be visible; and his locks, imitated by many a follower throughout the Province, ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... gratitude. "That one again," she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance: "Number 74. She has much the same thin hair—sparse, weak, and colourless. She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features. Looks capable, doesn't she? A born housewife!... Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... his words and I admitted the correctness of his contentions, but rebuked him for his self-assertive manner. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of her borrowed motherhood. Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming assertive and definite. She no longer represented the negative side of his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to inconvenient affirmations. She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it included his own share in the relation, and he suddenly found ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... and out of the second fact, as we shall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits. He is a man vexed, at one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex; he is both egotistical and subservient, assertive and politic, blatant and shy. Most of the errors about him are made by seeing one side of him and being ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... may be, to his flagrant Gascon nationality, tended to an extravagance of exaggeration that made him seem almost like a caricature of the others. His hat was bigger, his cloak more voluminous, his boots more assertive, his sword longer, his taste for colors at once more pronounced and more gaudy. If the others might be likened in their coloring to faded wild flowers, this man seemed to blaze like some monstrous exotic. He was a ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cigar between his finger and thumb, he is courageous and kind to animals (or whatever it may be), and if he holds it between his first and second fingers he is impulsive but yet considerate to old ladies, and if he holds it upside down he is (besides being an ass) jealous and self-assertive, and if he sticks a knife into the stump so as to smoke it to the very end he is— yes, you have guessed this one—he is mean. You see what a useful thing ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... fathom deep in sleep I lie With old desires, restrained before, To clamor lifeward with a cry, As dark flies out the greying door; And so in quest of creeds to share I seek assertive day again... But old monotony is there: Endless ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... entered. He noticed at once strange garments hanging on the rack and a bright purple umbrella which belonged, as he knew, to a certain Mrs. Alweed, a friend of his mother's and a faithful servant of the Chapel, stiff and assertive in the umbrella-stand. There was a tea-party apparently. Well, he could not face that immediately. He would have to go in afterwards ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... condescend, from the height of their superiority, to correct them, on the supposition that Christ meant to express precisely their own ideas, but did not succeed in doing so. They behave to his teaching much as self-assertive people talk to those whom they consider beneath them, often supplying their companions' words: "Yes, you mean to say this and that." This correction is always with the aim of reducing the teaching of the higher, divine conception of life to the level of the lower, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... mental poise permitted the paradox of detached attachments. At first he had regarded Stanford Beale as a smart police officer, the sort of man whom Pinkerton and Burns turn out by the score. Shrewd, assertive, indefatigable, such men piece together the scattered mosaics of humdrum crimes, and by their mechanical patience produce for the satisfaction of courts sufficient of the piece to reveal the design. They figure in divorce suits, in financial swindles and occasionally in ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... timorous mind, in some moods, had been almost relieved at declaration of the girl's engagement to another. But now the tremendous task of storming a virgin heart lay ahead of him, as he imagined. Torments unfelt by those of less sensitive mould also awaited Martin Grimbal. The self-assertive sort of man, who rates himself as not valueless, and whose love will not prevent callous calculation on the weight of his own person and purse upon the argument, is doubtless wise in his generation, and his sanguine temperament enables him to escape oceans of unrest, hurricanes of torment; ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... recover quickly or slowly from fatigue, sexual potency and impotence, apathy and enthusiasm are endocrine qualities. We know also that the thyroid dominant tends to be irritable and excitable, the pituitary deficient to be placid and gentle, the adrenal dominant to be assertive and pugnacious, the thymus-centered to be childish and easy-go-lucky and the gonad deficient to be secretive and shy. This brings us to the relation of the internal secretions to the type ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... distributed over the country As wealth is attained the capacity of enjoying it departs Assertive sort of smartness that was very disagreeable Attention to his personal appearance is only spasmodic Boy who is a man before he is an infant Bringing a man to her feet, where he belongs Chief object in life is to "get there" quickly ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... Violet, and make your up-strokes finer, and not cross your T's so undeviatingly," Mrs. Tempest murmured amiably. "A lady's T ought to be less pronounced. There is something too assertive in your consonants." ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... assertive ego into insensibility. A man may smile and smile and be a villain still, as the old saying has it, and so may a woman smile and smile when her heart is tortured, when every nerve in her is strained to the snapping point. Stella went back to the living room and sang ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... growing delight in the sensuous side of things; or rather, he would have become convinced that temptations of this sort, which had previously been in the main creatures of his own brain, postulated in obedience to the doctrines and literature in which he had been bred, had become self-assertive realities; and that what had been set up only to be triumphantly knocked down had now taken a strong root of its own, and refused to be displaced by spiritual exercises or physical mortifications. Had he been able to pursue the analysis ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... torrents flung down its slopes made fertile the little fields, and bestowed a lilting song on the silence, and took a turn at the mill-wheel, and did not disdain the thirst of the humble cattle. It gave pasturage in summer, and shelter from the winds of the winter. It was the assertive feature of his life; he could hardly have imagined ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... bustle at the door in the wall heralded the entrance of two policemen. The Squire went forward to meet them. The prospect of immediate action seemed to pull him together and his manner changed to one of assertive superintendence of things. ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... self-assertive child cut in, "and you know there is really no use in taking me if I do not want to go. You know how much trouble it will make for both ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... came into her life. What she had lost in strength, she had gained in tenderness. Her very manner was gentler, her mode of speech less assertive. At least, this was the criticism of those who had liked her but little before ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... coalition of government with trade, of politics with commerce, of the monopolists of economic power with the dictators of life and death, of peace and war, which is manifested to the highest conceivable degree to-day in the states most assertive of their leadership in the vanguard of civilization. I said that with the use of fire came the enslavement of men; but government and enslavement were one and the same thing. Neither, however, was as yet ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... much—everything. If a man could not boast of these, then he must have money; and even money would not always fetch him everything. The Court musicians were classed lower than domestic servants, and generally paid less. Now and again a triumphant, assertive personality like Handel would break through all the rules of etiquette; but even Handel could have done little without his marvellous finger-skill—for he was reckoned finest amongst the European players of his time—and with his fingers Haydn—we ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... expected as one of the first developments of the twentieth century in maritime traffic. Steam, which for oversea trade made its entrance cautiously in the shape of a mere auxiliary to sail power, had taken up a much more self-assertive position long before the close of the nineteenth century, and has driven its former ally almost out of the field in large departments of the shipping industry. Yet a curious and interesting counter movement is now taking place on the Pacific ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... unhappy of all the many youths, who were intrusted to my care," said Ameni, "and I believe I know why,—he never had a childlike disposition, even when in years he was still a child, and the Gods had denied him the heavenly gift of good humor. Youth should be modest, and he was assertive from his childhood. He took the sport of his companions for earnest, and his father, who was unwise only as a tutor, encouraged him to resistance instead of to forbearance, in the idea that he thus would be steeled to the hard ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I continue, 'feel tired and sleepy. They are fast closing' repeating in a soothing tone the words 'sleepy, sleepy, sleep.' Then in a self-assertive tone, I emphasize the suggestion by saying in an unhesitating and positive ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... chose to live this life. There was an entire absence of the self-spirit, that is the self-assertive, the self-confident spirit. There was a remarkable confidence in action, but it was confidence in His Father's unfailing response to His requests or needs. This sense of utter dependence was natural to Him; as indeed it is natural to man unhurt by sin. And then He carefully cultivated ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... slowly along beside her wooer shot a rapid sidelong glance at his white face, and for the first time in their acquaintance felt a thrill of respect akin to fear, sweep in his direction across her gay self-assertive nature. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... was too otherworldly when He preached the Sermon on the Mount. What is the use of saying, Blessed are the Meek, when the whole world knows that "Blessed are the Self-Assertive"? He was too otherworldly when He spoke of Heavenly Bread. What is the use of speaking of Heavenly Bread when it is earthly food that men need first of all? He was too otherworldly when He remained in the country on the feast day. If He be the Christ, let Him be practical and ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... taking his leave too. All his old loathing of Oliver had suddenly returned. His cousin stood for everything he detested—swagger, arrogance, self-assurance. He hated the shabby rakishness of his attire, the self-assertive aquiline beak of a nose which he had inherited from his father, the Rector. He dreaded his aggressive masculinity. He had come back with the same insulting speech on his lips. His finger-nails were dreadful. Marmaduke desired as little as possible ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... in these formulas, where almost every paragraph contains one or more such verbs. It implies that the subject has just come and is now performing the action, and that he came for that purpose. In addition to this, many of these verbs may be either assertive or imperative (expressing entreaty), according to the accent. Thus hat[^u]['][n]gani[']ga means "you have just come and are listening and it is for that purpose you came." By slightly accenting the final syllable it becomes "come at once to listen." ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But when his hilarity had exhausted itself, he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... became suddenly self-assertive. The rustle of squirrels along the pine-stems, the monotonous music of the cuckoo, varied by a charge of toy pistol-shots when an inexperienced monkey alighted on a dead twig. Brutus, standing squarely between them, eyed each in turn with critical speculation, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... him was a new experience. The first characteristic that struck me was that whereas the French writers were all assertive, he listened attentively to counter-arguments; it was only when his attitude in the woman question was broached that he would not brook contradiction and overwhelmed ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... two languages being entirely different, I give the sense of the first line of 14 separately, without seeking to connect it, in the assertive form, with the second half ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... lighthouse at Galle was duly sighted, and the Mahanaddy was in the Bay of Bengal. The last dinner was duly consumed, and the usual speech made by the usual self-assertive old civilian. And, for the last time, the Mahanaddy passengers said good night to each other, seeking their cabins with a pleasant sense of anticipation. The next day would ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... so, while the corrodies, the daily hospitality, the employment of labour, and such things, lay either out of sight, or affected only certain individuals. Characters too that were chiefly stirred by such arguments, were those of the noisy and self-assertive faction; while those who saw a little deeper into things, and understood the enormous charities of the Religious Houses and the manner in which extreme poverty was kept in check by them,—even more, those who ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... The or has assertive force. The introductory words of the Upanishad, 'Hidden in the Lord is all this,' show knowledge to be the subject- matter; hence the permission of works can aim only at the glorification of knowledge. The ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... more patience than we under very trying circumstances, and will turn the other cheek to the enemy when we rush into gross sin by our haste and ire. His is one of the hemispheres of a full-orbed character. Ours of the West is the other. Let us not flatter ourselves too positively that our assertive, aggressive part is the more beautiful or the more important. Yea, more, I question whether ours is the stronger and more masculine part of life and character; for is it not to most of us an easier thing to fling ourselves in vehemence against ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... a few seconds, and then went on quietly: 'You will forgive me, sir, if I seem assertive, but I look on you as my friend—and—and you know all about me—that I know myself. As I have said before, I naturally look at things differently from others. I have to be always beginning de novo. But tell me, sir, ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... relieved by the confession he had made, and readily answered all the questions put to him. His assertive manner had left him entirely, and he ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... apparently, spent a most enjoyable evening, for he seemed in good spirits—or, rather, perhaps had a pretty good amount of spirits or beer in him—as he reeled somewhat in his gait, and, although it was Sunday, was trying in his cracked falsetto voice to chant a Bacchanalian ditty assertive of the fact that he wouldn't "go home ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Rosemary McClean's back. Whenever she turned a corner in the crowded maze of streets, he would spur on in a hurry until she was in sight again, and then his handsome, swarthy face would light with pleasure—wicked pleasure—self-assertive, certain, cruel. He would rein in again to let ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... station, and Mitchell thought he had better go himself and beard the overseer for tucker. His mates were for waiting till the overseer went out on the run, and then trying their luck with the cook; but the self-assertive and diplomatic Mitchell decided ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... a stranger the moment he entered the Square. "Whose place is that?" was his natural question. A house that challenges regard in that way should have a gallant bravery in its look; if its aspect be mean, its assertive position but directs the eye to its infirmities. There is something pathetic about a tall, cold, barn-like house set high upon a brae; it cannot hide its naked shame; it thrusts its ugliness dumbly on your notice, a manifest blotch upon the world, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Navy owed the brig "Oneida", the most formidable vessel on Ontario when war came. All this restrictive service was of course extremely unpopular with the inhabitants; or at least with that active, assertive element, which is foremost in pushing local advantages, and directs popular sentiment. Nor did feeling in all cases refrain from action. April 19, the President had to issue a proclamation against combinations to defy the law in the country ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... young Italian lost his heart at sight to her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart of her own—at least, none for him—he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized with him. The object of a popular poet's ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... rollways were piled high, and it was time for them to team to the river. To reach the river they must pass through the Bottleneck and over the farm belonging to Old Man Plumm. There was another road into the valley—a public road—but it was a fifteen-mile haul. Old Man Plumm was a non-assertive person, and good-natured. His farm was a ramshackle, down-at-heels, worthless place, off which he gleaned the meagerest of livelihoods, so that he had not been averse to permitting Crane & Keith to traverse his land for a nominal consideration. It was cheaper for ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... I'll train my voice to mouth out short, thick words, As Bosh! Trash! Fudge! Rot! And I'll cultivate An Abernethian, self-assertive style, That men may think there is a deal more in My solid head than e'er comes out. My hair I'll cut ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... overstocked with men of strong minds and assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never have left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed opinions regarding some of the most important aspects of religious and social life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the details of their Puritanism they ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... of disappointment. His clothes were not the exquisite raiment that he had worn as an exhibit in the window. The white spats, the sponge-bag trousers with the knife-edge crease, the gold-rimmed eye-glass, the well-cut morning coat, the too assertive waistcoat—all were the property of the Auto-extensor Co. and not to be worn out of business hours. He now wore a shabby tweed suit and a cap. But he was still a noticeable figure; a happy smile came into the faces of little ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... Jefferson. The matter was thrown into the House of Representatives, and Jefferson was given the office, with Burr as Vice-President. Burr considered, and perhaps rightly, that were it not for Hamilton's assertive influence he would have been President ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... not surprising to learn from the guide-book that Cassel has the most extensive view of any town in Europe: one felt at once that it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from every other town, and would be almost sure to have the best things going in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon is exactly the best to set ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations, and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation, recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... man was so assertive and over-bearing that it amused the chums from Tillbury to hear ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... such prejudices and peculiarities, no less than of his gifts, Borrow was ridiculously proud. In certain respects he was as vainly, querulously, and childishly assertive as Goldsmith himself; while in the haughty self-isolation with which he eschewed the society of people with endowments as great or even greater than his own, he was quite the opposite of "poor Goldy." If the latter had regarded his interlocutors straight in the eyes with a look that ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... student's judgment is not called into play; he learns to take knowledge on the authority of the instructor. The sense of comfort and security experienced in a lecture hour is fatal even to aggressive and assertive minds. Sooner or later the students succumb to the inertia ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a majority of the Board and the Teachers' Federation had become an epitome of the struggle between efficiency and democracy; on one side a well-intentioned expression of the bureaucracy necessary in a large system but which under pressure had become unnecessarily self-assertive, and on the other side a fairly militant demand for self-government made in the name of freedom. Both sides inevitably exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and both felt that they were standing by ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... same spirit of assertive independence was evidenced in the building of stone crosses in all parts of the city, which lasted until 1562, and recorded that their Duke, Richard had bought the manor of Andelys and the rock for his Chateau ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... companion and friend. He saw her sitting year after year in her shop, putting money into the savings bank, keeping a cheerful front before the world, never assertive, kindly, in her own way sure of herself. "We could go on forever as we are now and she be none the ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... the child. This weakness of the moral scheme, this rude strength of human nature, this sense of a larger solution, are most felt when Hawthorne approaches the love element, and throughout in the character of Hester, in whom alone human nature retains a self-assertive power. The same thing is felt vaguely, but certainly, in the lack of sympathy between Hawthorne and the Puritan environment he depicts. He presents the community itself, its common people, its magistrates and clergy, its customs, temper, and atmosphere, as ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... she never recovered—five milestones behind on the road of Anglicization! It was enough to keep down a more assertive personality than poor Hannah's. The mere danger of slipping back unconsciously to the banned Yiddish put a curb upon her tongue. Her large, dark eyes had a dog-like look, and they were set pathetically in a sallow face that suggested ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the top of the staircase that led down to the front door, when she saw that some one had preceded her. It was Madigan, who was on his way down to dinner; poor old Madigan, with his slippered, slow, but positive tread, his straight, assertive back expressing indignation, as it always did when his door-bell was rung. Oh, that familiar old back! Something swelled in Split's throat and held her choking, as she grasped the banister and gazed yearningly down upon ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... cried Ridge, amazed to hear his usually fearless and self-assertive parent adopt this tone. "I thought that ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... spoke in every line of his clean-cut, self-contained face, with its straight, thin nose, closely drawn mouth, strong chin and clear gray eyes; in every movement of his erect, trim, well-groomed figure; in every detail of his faultless attire; in every tone of his assured, assertive, incisive speech. As some one said of him, he always looked as if ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... inspire, to transmit enthusiasm to others, and thus he was responsible for much of the improvement in decorative art, the re-establishment of that art upon an intellectual basis. Designs from his hands were full, splendid and self-assertive; harmony and proportion were there. A study of the Antony and Cleopatra series and of the plates given in this volume will establish and ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... worthy of our serious consideration. It is a bold, rocky headland, standing out into the tossing sea of the Unknown. Assertive? Yes. Stubborn? Most surely. Proud? By all means. Twice as many pilgrims visit the grave of Burns as that of Shakespeare. Buckle declares Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" has had a greater influence on civilization than any other book ever writ—save none; and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of course, the war of 1870, with its resounding triumphs, that brought these visions, so to speak, within the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful, pushful, self-assertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... manifestation of prejudice until custom has adjusted things to the new condition. When all Negroes were poor and ignorant they could be denied their rights with impunity. As they grow in knowledge and in wealth they become more self-assertive, and make it correspondingly troublesome for those who would ignore their claims. It is much easier, by a supreme effort, as recently attempted with temporary success in North Carolina, to knock the race down and rob it of its rights once for all, than to repeat ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... be a little wanting in animation," said Lady Torrington, "but that is a fault which one can forgive nowadays when so many girls run into the opposite extreme and become self-assertive." ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... conquered land, and I knew from my own experience what endless cases there were of patient, humbled, and crushed-down men, no higher in position than slaves, ill-used, and treated with contempt by my insolent, overbearing countrymen of that self-assertive class who cannot hold power without ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... baby, which a nurse in the adjoining cottage was endeavoring to put to sleep. She was a disagreeable little woman, no longer young, who had quarreled with almost every one, owing to a temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the rights of others. Robert prevailed upon her without any too ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... person's immature feet, certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather was more ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... of Oswald becoming a partisan of this creed. He is impressed with its defects, though appreciating the sublimity of general tenets. Oswald does not like the doctrine of "Merger." This assertive Briton has no desire to lose identity in "Brahm." Oswald Langdon as dissolved dewdrop in shoreless sea ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... thick, creamy-white object she offered and found himself considering it with a curious disfavour. It was a strictly 'fashionable' make of envelope, and was addressed in a particularly bold and assertive hand-writing to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... little the English passion for winning. What we admire and look for in Russian literature is its truth and its profound and comprehending tolerance. I am credibly informed that what Russians admire and look for in our literature is its quality of "no nonsense" and its assertive vigour. In a word, they are attracted by that in it which is new to them. I venture to hope that they will not become infected by us in this matter; that nothing will dim in their writers spiritual and intellectual honesty of vision or tinge them with self-consciousness. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Maidie's pistol happened to be picked up on the Calle Real and why one or two assertive officers lately connected with the provost-marshal's and secret-service department concluded that it might be well for them to try regimental duty awhile. That was how it happened, too, that Lieutenant Stuyvesant was prevailed on to take a short leave and run over to Hong Kong. But he ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... culture in an asparagus, but probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise. His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive. There was certainly no Semitic blood in Lucas's parentage, but his appearance contrived to convey at least a suggestion of Jewish extraction. Clovis Sangrail, who knew most of his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a case of ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... foaming—the cherry blossom, the white farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses—and the tall upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate bareness of the fells, like some passionate self-assertive life.... ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not help enjoying the thought of how surprised his sister would be. Marie-Anne had doubtless pictured Mrs. Bailey as belonging to the rather hard, self-assertive type of young Englishwoman of whom Paris sees a great deal. But Sylvia looked girlishly simple, ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the little glass thermometer round in his mouth until it stuck up at an assertive angle, as some men hold a cigar, and glanced mischievously at his nurse. "Why don't ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... later she and the child— A blue-eyed, self-assertive mite— Were at the camp, She carrying it (the nurse was left behind) And the passports that allowed her to see him One hour, with a guard five yards away. Some of his polite impudence was gone, Yet he threw back his head ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... at Paul with curiosity without addressing him. Paul saw a man with an olive face set with dark, almond-shaped eyes beneath a pair of oblique and finely-pencilled brows; his nose was aquiline and assertive, his mouth shrewd and mean and scarcely hidden by a carefully-trained and very faintly-waxed moustache. He was exceedingly tall and astonishingly spare ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... an early breakfast, for he had to be off with the mail. Mr. Jones had been up late, for him, and he was grouchy. In the matter of the warfare on Pharaoh his mood seemed to be less assertive than it had been the night before. Mr. Files detected that much after some conversation while ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... instinct awakens, and the mental, like the physical, changes are profound. There is great general instability, the child, at one time shy and reticent, is at another, boisterous and self-assertive. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... with the towering mountains of rock timbered with dark sentinels to the very skyline, alternate verdant, peaceful, prosperous, valleys glowing with wild flowers, in which the bonny harebell is more assertive by the waysides, I was much interested in the cut timber strewing the half-dried river bed whose course we followed. The logs are of no great size, mere sticks of pine, averaging a foot diameter and in lengths varying between twelve and forty feet. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... the chapel door leading to a small, well-kept graveyard, wondering what it was that kept quiet for so long a time his two most assertive men, when he had momentarily expected to hear more or ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also, must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying youth is naturally disliked as ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... thermometer round in his mouth until it stuck up at an assertive angle, as some men hold a cigar, and glanced mischievously at his nurse. "Why don't ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... language gives the opening of this letter an interesting look. The first three paragraphs are strong. The fourth paragraph is merely assertive, and is weak. A fact or two from some advertiser's experience would be ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... boast of these, then he must have money; and even money would not always fetch him everything. The Court musicians were classed lower than domestic servants, and generally paid less. Now and again a triumphant, assertive personality like Handel would break through all the rules of etiquette; but even Handel could have done little without his marvellous finger-skill—for he was reckoned finest amongst the European players of his time—and with his fingers Haydn—we have his own confession for it—was never extraordinary. ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... unsympathetic audience, composed mainly of men whose brains were larger and of tougher fibre. Here, too, came occasionally the mighty and the omniscient Joe Allday, and when he did, the discussion sometimes became a little more than animated, the self-assertive Joe making the room ring again, as he denounced the practices of those who ruled the destinies of the town. Here one night, lifting his right hand on high, as if to appeal to Heaven, he assured his audience that they "need not be afraid." He would "never betray the people of Birmingham!" ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... applied to Cephas's wounds, they began to heal. In the course of a month the most ordinary observer could have perceived a physical change in him. He cringed no more, but held his head higher; his back straightened; his voice developed a gruff, assertive note, like that of a stern Roman father; he let his moustache grow, and sometimes, in his most reckless moments, twiddled the end of it. Finally he swaggered; but that was only after Phoebe had accepted him and told him that if a girl traversed the entire length of the Saco River (which she presumed ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he was glad of it. He beheld on a hill to his right, about a half mile away, four horsemen, and the color of their uniforms was blue. He bent low over his horse that they might not see him, and rode on, the pulses in his temples beating heavily. He was glad that gray was not an assertive color, and he was glad that his own gray had been faded by ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... along beside her wooer shot a rapid sidelong glance at his white face, and for the first time in their acquaintance felt a thrill of respect akin to fear, sweep in his direction across her gay self-assertive nature. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... continued Lucina, tremulously, for she was beginning to falter, being nerved to such length of assertive speech only by her wish to comfort and reassure Jerome, "don't you know—don't you know, Jerome, that—a woman's giving is all her taking, and—you wouldn't take the gingerbread, dear, and the money for the shoes, when we were both children—but, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... any importance. Yet through it all—from my Virginia rearing—there lurked a wavering belief that some day, in some manner, these lands and cattle would have a value. But my faith was neither the bold nor the assertive kind, and I drifted along, clinging to ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at http://www.acm.org/classics). Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization that both sides ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... collected villagers murmur their approval; but I answer the mudir's beckoned invitation by a negative wave of the hand, signifying that I can't bother with him any further. The common herd around regard this self-assertive reply with open-mouthed astonishment, as though quite too incredible for belief; it seems to them an act of almost criminal discourtesy, and those immediately about me seem almost inclined to take me back to the threshing-floor like a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... mould. His effectiveness was to lie in the fact that he could disregard many ordinary motives. He could frankly admire other methods of work, and yet be quite sure that his own powers did not lie in that direction. But though he was modest and not at all self-assertive, he never had the least submissiveness nor subservience; nor was he ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... she looked down at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... early breakfast, for he had to be off with the mail. Mr. Jones had been up late, for him, and he was grouchy. In the matter of the warfare on Pharaoh his mood seemed to be less assertive than it had been the night before. Mr. Files detected that much after some conversation while the breakfast ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... spoke, pressing it into my hair in its course in a fashion that was anything but reassuring. I have often thought since of how I expected the thing to go off at any second, and how I was—for it's a fact—more curious than frightened about it. But the sense of self-preservation was on me, self-assertive enough, and I obliged him, stumbling in at the door under the pressure of his strong arm and of the revolver, and beginning to boggle at the first steps—old and much worn ones, which were deeply hollowed in the middle. ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... seeking to make him more of a woman than a man, Mrs. Corfield had defeated her design and destroyed her own influence. During his early growth the boy had yielded to her without revolt, because he was more modest than self-assertive—had no solid point of resistance and no definite purpose for which to resist; but after his college career he developed on an independent line, and his soul escaped altogether from his mother's hold. Had she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... conditions prevail, whilst in religion remaining staunchly loyal to their faith and its teachers, when it comes to a question of political principle there is no man in all the world who can be so independently self-assertive as the Irish Catholic. There is nothing to fear for Ireland, either now or in the future, from what I may term clericalism in politics, whilst on the other hand it is earnestly to be hoped that nothing will ever happen to intrude unnecessarily the question or authority of religion in ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... out the starlight—gave him a sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what. He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his train of self-communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact: ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather was more than usually ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... kindly, sympathetic, and very droll in her passing comments on men and events. She was in her early thirties, handsome, and a not quite natural blonde, her mouth sophisticated, her eyes set in circles of a leaden pallor. An assertive, masterful little woman, born and reared in decent poverty, still Thorny claimed descent from one of the first families of Maryland, and talked a good deal of her birth. Her leading characteristic was a determination ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... marked the boxes and barrels and sacks of mountains of supplies along the tote roads; it designated as the property of the Comas Company all sorts of possessions from log camps down to the cant dog in the hands of the humblest Polack toiler. Those nested C's were dominant, assertive, and the folks of the north were awed by the everlasting reduplication along the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... 1848, the slave power had been masterful in Washington, while its despotic temper had grown continually more assertive. The intellectual and moral atmosphere became increasingly repulsive to those who believed in freedom, and such people would not therefore choose that city ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... other cheek to the enemy when we rush into gross sin by our haste and ire. His is one of the hemispheres of a full-orbed character. Ours of the West is the other. Let us not flatter ourselves too positively that our assertive, aggressive part is the more beautiful or the more important. Yea, more, I question whether ours is the stronger and more masculine part of life and character; for is it not to most of us an easier thing to fling ourselves in vehemence ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... immediately," he said in an assertive voice quite different from his futile and inane pleadings of a short while before. "Hurry, Eveley, I want you. Dress for motoring, my car is here. I shall wait in the garden—give ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... the carpet, where he let it remain. They stared at Stanley as though they were looking upon a ghost. Both men seemed somehow to have lost their confident bearing— seemed to have shrunken into smaller, less assertive, meaner beings. ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wanting in animation," said Lady Torrington, "but that is a fault which one can forgive nowadays when so many girls run into the opposite extreme and become self-assertive." ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... goes on to complain that the Society did not advertise itself, made the election of new members difficult, and maintained a Basis "ill-written and old-fashioned, harsh and bad in tone, assertive and unwise." The self-effacive habits and insidious methods of the Society were next criticised, and the writer exclaimed, "Make Socialists and you will achieve Socialism; there is no other plan." The history of the Fabian motto was made use of to enforce the view that victory ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... against Jock. And Jock is well known to all of us. Nobody likes him, and nobody knows why they don't like him. In many respects he is a paragon of goodness. He loves his church, or he would not have stuck to it year in and year out as he has done. He is not self-assertive; he is quite willing to efface his own personality and be invisible. He is generous to a fault. Nobody is more eager to do anything for the general good. And yet nobody likes him. The only thing against ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... France intended to threaten us with war, I waited for some days expecting that the Spanish declaration of war against France would follow that of the French against us. I was not prepared to see a self-assertive nation like Spain stand quiet behind the Pyrenees with ordered arms, while the Germans were engaged in a deadly struggle against France on behalf of Spain's independence and freedom to choose her king. The Spanish sense of honor which proved so sensitive in the Carlist question simply ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... tragedy, which, of course, had been patent to him in its uttermost nakedness. Even Vere had guessed something of it. Do we ever really hide anything from every one? And yet each one breathes mystery too. The assertive man is the last of fools. Of that at least Artois just ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... power to inspire, to transmit enthusiasm to others, and thus he was responsible for much of the improvement in decorative art, the re-establishment of that art upon an intellectual basis. Designs from his hands were full, splendid and self-assertive; harmony and proportion were there. A study of the Antony and Cleopatra series and of the plates given in this volume ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... fairly comfortable circumstances, as the term is understood in Compton. Donald was a fair-haired boy, whose white forehead his mother had often kissed in pride as she prepared him, with shining morning face, for the village school. Donald was the pride of the village. Strong for his years and self-assertive, the boys feared him. Handsome and fearless, and proud and masterful, his little girl school-mates adored him. They adored him all the more that he thought it beneath his boyish dignity to pay ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... mind." He believed this condition could be deliberately induced by a kind of relaxation of the will, and by a stilling of the busy intellect and striving desires. It is a purifying process, an emptying out of all that is worrying, self-assertive, and self-seeking. If we can habitually train ourselves and attune our minds to this condition, we may at any moment come across something which will arouse our emotions, and it is then, when our emotions—thus purified—are excited to the point of passion, that our vision becomes sufficiently clear ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... stairs as they took the elevator. Duane was seated in an easy chair by the fire, Grandcourt in another, the decanter stood on a low table between them, when, without formality, the door opened and young Quest appeared on the threshold, white, self-assertive, and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Antonovna. And at once, her black eyes turned to Razumov, her mind tried to get at the heart of that outburst. It had some meaning. No one is born an active revolutionist. The change comes disturbingly, with the force of a sudden vocation, bringing in its train agonizing doubts, assertive violences, an unstable state of the soul, till the final appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She had seen—often had only divined—scores of these young men and ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for himself and ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... fit, sir,' he says, an' I'm dum'd," said David, with an assertive nod, "when I looked at myself in the lookin'-glass. I scurcely knowed myself, an' (with a confidential lowering of the voice) when I got back to New York the very fust hard work I done was to go an' buy the hull rig-out—an'," he added with a grin, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... in the way of intercourse, the masses, so far indeed as they possessed the suffrage at all, were not politically self-assertive. Devoted primarily to the pursuit of agriculture and commerce, essentially rural in their distribution, the people had neither the desire nor the means, nor yet the leisure, to engage in active politics. Politics was the occupation of those who commanded ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... girl had developed bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but she was not of a self-assertive nature, and when Mrs. Cayhill, who felt her world toppling about her ears at the mention of such a thing, said: "Not while I live!" she yielded, without a further word; and the fact that such an emphatic expression of opinion had been drawn from the mild-tempered mother, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... with his words and I admitted the correctness of his contentions, but rebuked him for his self-assertive manner. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... and eyes that fixed one's attention almost immediately. Here, Mr. Day saw, was a capable, energetic spirit—a woman who would carry through whatever she undertook could it be carried through at all, yet who was not objectionably self-assertive-like Miss Peckham, ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... but poor judges of true 'form or comeliness,' and what is lustrous with perfect beauty in God's eyes may be, and generally is, plain and dowdy in men's. Our tastes are debased. Flaunting vulgarities and self-assertive ugliness captivate vulgar eyes, to which the serene beauties of mere goodness seem insipid. Cockatoos charm savages to whom the iridescent neck of a dove has no charms. Surely this part of the description fits Jesus as it does no other. The entire absence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... pushed back the hall-door and entered. He noticed at once strange garments hanging on the rack and a bright purple umbrella which belonged, as he knew, to a certain Mrs. Alweed, a friend of his mother's and a faithful servant of the Chapel, stiff and assertive in the umbrella-stand. There was a tea-party apparently. Well, he could not face that immediately. He would have to go in afterwards ... ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... memoirs of Nehemiah. Some of the phrases peculiar to the Chronicler are loosely connected with the context. The nucleus which remains has the vigorous style of Nehemiah and many of his peculiar idioms. Its courageous, assertive spirit is very different from that of the other writings of the Chronicler. It is also doubtful whether this later writer, with his strong, priestly interests, would have made Nehemiah, the layman, a religious ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... recognised, and from that moment onward he had much prosperity, and his nature expanded and grew calmer, sweeter, and brighter under its influence. But the habit of warfare had got into his acting, and more or less it remained there to the last. The assertive quality, indeed, had long since begun to die away. The volume of needless emphasis was growing less and less. Few performances on the contemporary stage are commensurate with his embodiments of Harebell and Gringoire, in softness, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Crusades, is indeed enough to bid us pause and reconsider the justice of our stereotyped ideas about that period. This literature makes it manifest that the ineradicable appetites and natural instincts of men and women were no less vigorous in fact, though less articulate and self-assertive, than they had been in the age of Greece and Rome, and than they afterwards displayed themselves in what ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... admit to himself, occasionally reckless. One evening a discussion took place in Mary O'Dwyer's room which startled and shocked him. Excitement ran high over the events of the war. The sympathies of the 'Independent Irelanders,' as they called themselves, fiercely assertive even in their name, were of course entirely with the Boers, and they received every report of an English reverse with ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... for a moment, they exchanged a few whispered sentences. Then one of them walked over toward the window. Orme repressed an exclamation, for the figure that came into view was the figure of Poritol—dapper, assertive. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... pleased at his own boldness, and for his victory over his wife. He had no idea that she would calm down so soon. Had he made a mistake in always giving in to her? he asked himself. Perhaps if he had been a little more assertive it might have ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... blossom, the white farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses—and the tall upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against the delicate bareness of the fells, like some passionate self-assertive life.... ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the child— A blue-eyed, self-assertive mite— Were at the camp, She carrying it (the nurse was left behind) And the passports that allowed her to see him One hour, with a guard five yards away. Some of his polite impudence was gone, Yet he threw back his head ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... sign of intensive culture in an asparagus, but probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise. His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive. There was certainly no Semitic blood in Lucas's parentage, but his appearance contrived to convey at least a suggestion of Jewish extraction. Clovis Sangrail, who knew most of his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a case ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... sincerity. But now—whether it was the slight hint dropped by Sir Francis Vesey on the previous night as to Mrs. Sorrel's match-making proclivities, or whether it was a scarcely perceptible suggestion of something more flippant and assertive than usual in the air and bearing of Lucy herself that had awakened his suspicions,—he was certainly disposed to doubt, for the first time in all his knowledge of her, the candid nature of the girl for whom he had hitherto entertained, half-unconsciously, an almost parental affection. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... first sight that in Germany and Japan there would be danger of a lack of co-ordination between the civil and the naval authorities, and a tendency for the navy to become unduly self-assertive. Of course, one reason why there is no such danger is that the governments of those countries are controlled by men who, though civilians, have great knowledge of international affairs, and of military and naval subjects; another reason is that the navy is so vital a matter, accurate knowledge ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... pretty evenly distributed over the country As wealth is attained the capacity of enjoying it departs Assertive sort of smartness that was very disagreeable Attention to his personal appearance is only spasmodic Boy who is a man before he is an infant Bringing a man to her feet, where he belongs Chief object in life is to "get there" quickly Climate which is rather worse now than ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... "You might," that self-assertive child cut in, "and you know there is really no use in taking me if I do not want to go. You know how much trouble it will make for both ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... made one mistake in his analysis of the defence. Sir Henry, at least, believed in his own evidence and took himself very seriously as a specialist. Like most stupid men who have got somewhere in life, Sir Henry became self-assertive under the least semblance of contradiction, and he grew violent and red-faced under cross-examination. He would not hear of the possibility of a mistake in his diagnosis of the accused's symptoms, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... been in the White House six months the country was divided substantially into Jackson men and anti-Jackson or administration men. The elements from which Jackson drew support were many and discordant. The backbone of his strength was the self-assertive, ambitious western Democracy, which recognized in him its truest and most eminent representative. The alliance with the Calhoun forces was kept up, although it was already jeopardized by the feeling of the South Carolinian's friends that they, and not Jackson's friends, should lead in the coming ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... then was still not eighteen, a soft white slip of being, tall, slender, brown-haired and silent, with very still deep dark eyes. She and your three aunts formed a very gracious group of young women indeed; Alice then as now the most assertive, with a gay initiative and a fluent tongue; Molly already a sun-brown gipsy, and Norah still a pig-tailed thing of lank legs and wild embraces and the pinkest of swift pink blushes; your uncle Sidney, with his shy lank moodiness, acted the brotherly part of a foil. There were several stray ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... after dozens of fluent and delightful letters, that he must encounter the old bashfulness again.... Plainly the Captain showed the years. There was the dark dry look of some inner consuming, and the trembling mouth was lined and assertive where formerly it was unnoticed in the general cheer. There was a break in rotundity. Perhaps this, more than anything else, put a strange hush upon the meeting. Bedient was glad he had not delayed longer; and he saw he must break through the embarrassment, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Then followed a week of a rather faultfinding, self-assertive state, during which she demanded to be allowed to go home, saying indignantly that she was not a wicked woman, had done nothing to be kept a prisoner here; she wanted justice because another patient had called her crazy. But in this period also she said that after the robbery (at home) she felt ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... domestic story, in which we see the failure of an essentially self-seeking and self-assertive nature to secure happiness to itself or bestow it upon others, and the triumph of gentleness, love, and unselfish service, in the person of ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... point, which evokes a new manifestation of prejudice until custom has adjusted things to the new condition. When all Negroes were poor and ignorant they could be denied their rights with impunity. As they grow in knowledge and in wealth they become more self-assertive, and make it correspondingly troublesome for those who would ignore their claims. It is much easier, by a supreme effort, as recently attempted with temporary success in North Carolina, to knock the race down and ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... me, seems to be the basis of sympathy. We stoop to conquer in that we are not self-assertive and self-assured, for if we "know" that we are right we can not know how others think or feel. We can ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... made a much noisier, less peaceable household; but they would have been a much jollier and really more harmonious one. Mr. Copperhead himself somewhat despised his elder sons, who were like himself, only less rich, less vigorous, and less self-assertive. He saw, oddly enough, the coarseness of their manners, and even of their ways of thinking; but yet he was a great deal more comfortable, more at his ease among them, than he was when seated opposite his trembling, deprecating, frightened little wife, or that huge youth who cost ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... traders, who did not wish to disclose the amount of their wealth, by agreeing that the whole town should pay to the Exchequer a sum to be raised by the Mayor and Corporation. The middle class achieved its aims politically by transformation from within. Instead of making a direct assertive attack, these master-traders usually so developed their own interests within the established institutions (such as the guilds) that they ultimately gained their object quietly and shrewdly. This class established ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... did. People in those times were prepared for anything on the part of an Englishman, who was a far more self-assertive and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... business, and my first feelings were of disappointment. His clothes were not the exquisite raiment that he had worn as an exhibit in the window. The white spats, the sponge-bag trousers with the knife-edge crease, the gold-rimmed eye-glass, the well-cut morning coat, the too assertive waistcoat—all were the property of the Auto-extensor Co. and not to be worn out of business hours. He now wore a shabby tweed suit and a cap. But he was still a noticeable figure; a happy smile came into the faces of little boys as he ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... But for a capable ruler, even more than for a radiantly stupid monarch, the price a nation must finally pay is heavy. Most energetic and capable people are a little intolerant of unsympathetic capacity, are apt on the under side of their egotism to be jealous, assertive, and aggressive. In the present Empire of Germany there are no other great figures to balance the Imperial personage, and I do not see how other great figures are likely to arise. A great number of fine and capable persons must be failing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... them on the black-board, she copied them diligently. And as the time went on, Emmy Lou went on copying digits. And her one endeavor being to avoid the notice of Miss Clara, it happened the needs of Emmy Lou were frequently lost sight of in the more assertive ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... their best to women. When I turn over my memories of him, it seems that his grave courtesy was only gay when he was talking to women. His talk to women had a lightness and charm. It was sympathetic; never self-assertive, as the hard, brilliant Irish intellect so often is. He liked people to talk to him. He liked to know the colours of people's minds. He liked to be amused. His merriest talk was like playing catch with an apple of banter, which ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... member of the happy woodland family. His indulgent sisters tolerated his bouncing, familiar manners as if they were born to be his playthings—he was so serious and yet so droll, so stupidly self-assertive and yet so irresistibly affectionate! He seemed to take his pleasures sadly, wearing, if such be possible to a fox, an air of melancholy disdain; and yet his beady eyes were ever on the lookout for mischief, and for ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... work of any of the rest of us to our brethren, however beautiful, disinterested, self-oblivious, and self-consuming it may be, seems to me—I say it with deference, though I must here remember considerations of brevity and be merely assertive—entirely to ignore the unique special characteristic of the work of Jesus Christ—viz., that it was the atonement for the sins of the world. He could not bear away our sins, unless the burden of them was laid on His own back, and He carried our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... weekend, and so they could not go far from London; and for some reason Gaga could not stand the sea itself. Strong air made him ill, and even sight of rolling waves made him feel sick. Sally, still elated and not as yet very confident or assertive, immediately agreed when he suggested this country town; but she had no real notion of what was in store for her. She was all half-amused trepidation. The scuffled marriage-ceremony, after which the registrar's clerk hurried to call for her for the first ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... way to the train, thought of his hat. He had not been able to feel confidence in that hat. There was a trimness about it, an assertive glamour, an air of success, that should not stamp one of the oppressed. He had gone to the purchase of it with vague notions that a labouring man, at least while actually labouring, wears a square cap of paper which he has made himself. So he was crowned in all cartoons. But, of course, this paper ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... old city," answered Mr. Sumner. "First of all, the striking changes through which it has passed. Once Pisa was on the sea, possessed a fine harbor, and in rich commerce was a rival of Genoa and Venice. She was a proud, eager, assertive city; of such worth that she was deemed a rich prize, and was captured by the Romans a few centuries B.C. Now the sea has left her and, with that, her commerce and importance in the world of trade. She is to-day so poor that there is nothing to tempt travellers to come to her save a magnificent ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... herself now occupied a poor little lodging not very far away—Eve beheld sundry improvements. By the fireside stood a great leather chair, deep, high-backed, wondrously self-assertive over against the creaky cane seat which before had dominated the room. Against the wall was a high bookcase, where Hilliard's volumes, previously piled on the floor, stood in loose array; and above the mantelpiece hung a framed engraving ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... fanned it within him. She had spent her young life couched rosily on his love for her and hers for him; at home she was lonely; at home Madeira was well-nigh perfect, and the girl's imagination made all her ideals live in the big, handsome, assertive man who was at once father to her and hero. Perceiving this, Madeira, with her, entered into a sort of world of make-believe, and, with her, was sometimes able to take himself for what she held him, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... every paragraph contains one or more such verbs. It implies that the subject has just come and is now performing the action, and that he came for that purpose. In addition to this, many of these verbs may be either assertive or imperative (expressing entreaty), according to the accent. Thus hat[^u]['][n]gani[']ga means "you have just come and are listening and it is for that purpose you came." By slightly accenting the ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... first of all, a gentleman, usually modest, never arrogant, and only assertive when pushed. He does not by instinct take himself seriously, as the 'poet-ape' doth, though if he meets with recognition it becomes, of course, his duty to acknowledge his faculty, and make good Scriptural ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... known as ginger, and a face which told in his favour. Vicious he could assuredly not be, with those honest grey eyes; but one easily imagined him weak in character, and his attitude as he stood just within the room, half respectful, half assertive, betrayed an embarrassment altogether encouraging to Miss Rodney. In her pleasantest tone she begged him to ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... he found, when the night superintendent finally entered the office and he had the chance of introducing himself. Newer to authority than the superintendent of the dayshift, he was also of a more active temperament and much more self-assertive. He was not impressed by the detective's years or even by his errand. It was a busy night, a very busy night—new hands in every department. To take him through the building at present was quite ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... with them enthusiastically, like children who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say: "See! I am a liberal woman—a woman of the new type. I meet men on their own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and sex attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how much I know about Brieux, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... being done of a less assertive but equally commendable nature. The lines of section grew vague when the social Georgian sat side by side with the genial woman from Michigan. Mrs. Johnson of Minnesota and Mrs. Cabot of Massachusetts, ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... ladylike but inoffensive superiority. He stood near the table with the "Zakuska," and his eyes rested there. I do not now remember many of the Markovitch and Semyonov relations. There was a tall thin young man, rather bald, with a short black moustache; he was nervous and self-assertive, and he had a high, shrill voice. He talked incessantly. There were several delightful, middle-aged women, quiet and ready to be pleased with everything—the best Russian type of all perhaps, women who knew life, who were generously tolerant, kind-hearted, with ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... must confess to you, Mr. Herrick, that I am rather prejudiced against Mr. Jacobi. I do not like either his face or his manners; his eyes are too close together, and this, in my opinion, gives him rather a crafty look; and in manner he is self-assertive and ostentatious." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mean station, and Mitchell thought he had better go himself and beard the overseer for tucker. His mates were for waiting till the overseer went out on the run, and then trying their luck with the cook; but the self-assertive and ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... unwilling to own to the name of Reginald, as being too aspiring and self-assertive a name. In his signature he used only the initial R., and imparted what it really stood for, to none but chosen friends, under the seal of confidence. Out of this, the facetious habit had arisen in the neighbourhood surrounding Mincing Lane of making christian names for ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... in a tone which was still more aggressive in its dominant and self-assertive power—"my draft was drawn twenty ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... to such a determination; yet Ruth's experiences since her parents had died were such as would naturally make her self-assertive. She knew what she wanted, ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... let slip. What had been the cause of his sudden pulling up of his starting tongue? Would he have spoken too much of that acquaintance? Perhaps a closer look at the loose lips, the high cheeks, the narrow, close-set eyes of young Woodhull, his rather assertive air, his slight, indefinable swagger, his slouch in standing, might have confirmed some skeptic disposed to analysis who would have guessed him less than strong of soul and character. For the most ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... singular to find the inevitable flaw of "Paradise Lost" prefigured here, and the wicked enchanter made the real hero of the piece. These defects are interesting, because they represent the nature of Milton as it was then, noble and disinterested to the height of imagination, but self-assertive, unmellowed, angular. They disappear entirely when he expatiates in the regions of exalted fancy, as in the introductory discourse of the Spirit, and the invocation to Sabrina. They recur when he moralizes; and his morality is too interwoven with the texture ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... into her life. What she had lost in strength, she had gained in tenderness. Her very manner was gentler, her mode of speech less assertive. At least, this was the criticism of those who had liked her ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... the lady had entered, he walked further along the platform. He was much less self-assertive in his progress. He threaded his way instead of elbowing it through the crowd. The most fragile peeress might have jostled him, and he would not have ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... Government business. Fills the part excellently. Ten days ago SPEAKER cheered House by announcement that there should be no more Supplementary Questions. Welcome resolution either forgotten or deliberately ignored. Supplementary Questions, almost exclusively argumentative, assertive, or personally offensive, buzzed about Treasury bench like bees at mouth of hive. HOME SECRETARY, alert, self-possessed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... had of late come over Gilbert Gildersleeve. The big, bullying lawyer was growing nervous and diffident, where of old he had been coarse and self-assertive and blustering. He was beginning at times almost to doubt his own absolute omniscience and absolute wisdom. He was prepared half to admit that under certain circumstances a prisoner might possibly be in the right, and that all crimes alike did not necessarily ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Baineses does not give place easily; it tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door, insistently as it may knock in the whimsical, assertive personality of Sophia. The romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that Mr. Baines died a premature, though, scientifically speaking, a belated death, is the symbol of the new influence which Mrs. Baines is ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming only a self-assertive, ill-mannered young man, and an unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again a skirmish over the afternoon tea that the girl students had inaugurated left Hill with flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the debating society noticed a new ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Columbus told them. It surprised Danny. Usually, the drunken sailor was not so self-assertive. Then it occurred to Danny that it wasn't merely ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... then, surveying the little beggar's choice company of pets, gazing upon the dam he had built with his own busy hands, inspecting approvingly his prowess in the swimming-hole and with his fish-rods, even noting, in his conscientious appraisal of his heir's assets, the self-assertive quality of the freckles on his nose and the sunburn on the whole of his visage, this perfunctory American parent easily decided that nothing need be changed for another year or two. It was impossible even for a scrupulous ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... of trade unions, even while it has led to higher wages, shorter hours, and a more independent and self-assertive body of laborers, has made labor so much more efficient that, taken in connection with other elements of English economic activity, it has led to no resulting loss of her industrial supremacy. As to the economic arguments against trade unions, they have become less influential with the discrediting ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... man of the gang there was a woman, and there was a woman over, who was easily the central star of the flaunting galaxy. The shabby bravery of the men was matched by the shabby bravery of five out of the six women. Gaudy, painted, assertive strumpets with young, fair, shameless faces—worthy Jills of the ill-favoured Jacks who cuddled them—Jehanneton, the fair helm-maker; Denise, Blanche, Isabeau, and Guillemette, the landlord's daughter, who consorted gaily enough with these brightly-plumaged birds of a rogue's paradise. ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... way out through the dark night into day. It's such a good candlestick, so highly polished. And sometimes the human candlestick itself gets things a bit mixed. It thinks, then it feels, then it knows, with a peculiar quality of self-assertive certainty, that after all it is the light that lighteth every one that is so blessed as to come within the radius of its shining. And brass does take a high polish, and makes an attractive appearance. It does send out a sparkle and radiance if only it is somewhere within range of some ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... that she had no heart of her own—at least, none for him—he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized with him. The object of a popular poet's romantic and unfortunate ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... to Randwick races without him; he is always fat, hairy, and assertive; he is generally one of a party, and takes the centre of the stage all the time—collects and hands over the fares, adjusts the change, chaffs the conductor, crushes the thin, apologetic stranger next him into a pulp, ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... extermination of the sailing ship is popularly expected as one of the first developments of the twentieth century in maritime traffic. Steam, which for oversea trade made its entrance cautiously in the shape of a mere auxiliary to sail power, had taken up a much more self-assertive position long before the close of the nineteenth century, and has driven its former ally almost out of the field in large departments of the shipping industry. Yet a curious and interesting counter movement is now taking place on the Pacific ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... moment he gazed at Paul with curiosity without addressing him. Paul saw a man with an olive face set with dark, almond-shaped eyes beneath a pair of oblique and finely-pencilled brows; his nose was aquiline and assertive, his mouth shrewd and mean and scarcely hidden by a carefully-trained and very faintly-waxed moustache. He was exceedingly tall ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... enthusiasm, handed her into a hansom, and took his place beside her. She wore a very large hat, untidily put on; some of the paint seemed still to be upon her face; her voice, too, seemed to have become louder, and her manner more assertive. There were obvious indications that she no longer considered brandy and soda an unladylike beverage. Peter Ruff was not pleased with himself or proud ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and those queer little dark amber eyes of his watch furtively round him for his fame. His clothes fit perfectly and yet sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made. He speaks in a mumble still, but he says, you perceive indistinctly, enormous self-assertive things, he backs into the rear of groups by instinct if Banghurst drops the line for a minute, and when he walks across Banghurst's lawn one perceives him a little out of breath and going jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched. His is a state of tension—horrible ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... like his hair, in that it was thin, undecided, not really assertive enough to be impressive ... Ah, now I had the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... individual knows very little of his own mental functions: on the whole, he knows them as little as he knows the muscles which be uses when he talks or walks. Among his questions Parsons included such ones as: "Are your manners quiet, noisy, boisterous, deferential, or self-assertive? Are you thoughtful of the comfort of others? Do you smile naturally and easily, or is your face ordinarily expressionless? Are you frank, kindly, cordial, respectful, courteous in word and actions? Do you look people frankly in the eye? Are your inflections ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... career had been a humble one, but it had taught him self-reliance, and when he was thrown into the company of men brought up in a higher station he was not surprised that they accepted him as an equal and a comrade. There was, however, nothing assertive in the man; he knew his powers and their limitations. Now he clearly recognized that he had undertaken a big thing; but the need was urgent, and he meant to see it through. He was of essentially practical ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible reconciliation—at most a compromise—so that in the last analysis it appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that is, contrary to the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the English passion for winning. What we admire and look for in Russian literature is its truth and its profound and comprehending tolerance. I am credibly informed that what Russians admire and look for in our literature is its quality of "no nonsense" and its assertive vigour. In a word, they are attracted by that in it which is new to them. I venture to hope that they will not become infected by us in this matter; that nothing will dim in their writers spiritual and intellectual honesty of vision or tinge ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... another class who are everywhere the aides and ministers of these oppressors. You can tell them at a glance—large, coarse, corpulent men; red-faced, brutal; decorated with vulgar taste; loud-voiced, selfish, self-assertive; cringing sycophants to all above them, slave-drivers of all below them. They are determined to live on the best the world can afford, and they care nothing if the miserable perish in clusters ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... to regard philosophically the practical effects of her borrowed motherhood. Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming assertive and definite. She no longer represented the negative side of his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to inconvenient affirmations. She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it included ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... though he had never known her unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known HER unpleasant, even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing for instance had ever been more striking than that she was affable ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... of reality and appearance. A reality is a term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations, and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation, recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... subjects him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything within ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... came up, the Cure and his vicar were sitting on their gallery, and a man of strong frame stood upon the crier's rostrum looking round with the assertive consciousness that he was a recognized figure. His face wore a beard of strong but thin black wisps, which would have been Vandyke in form had it been heavier, but allowed the forcible outlines of his chin and cheek to ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... to be full of Baines—he was so large and fleshy and assertive. The furniture, even the chest of drawers, was dwarfed into toy-furniture, and Beechinor, slight and shrunken-up, seemed like a cadaverous manikin ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... exemplified. Comely in all respects, with his black-brown wavy hair, finely-cut features, ready and winsome smile, alert luminous eyes, quick, spontaneous, expressive gestures—an inclination of the head, a lift of the eyebrows, a modulation of the lips, an assertive or deprecatory wave of the hand, conveying so much—and a voice at that time of a singular penetrating sweetness, he was, even without that light of the future upon his forehead which she was so swift to discern, a man to captivate any woman of kindred nature and sympathies. Over and above these ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... boy's garment she had been mending and went away, while Mrs. Wade received her visitor with a curious air of equality. It was not such an equality as she might have learnt in the United States. There was nothing assertive about it. It was ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... and experience who had the placid mind that is sometimes, and may more and more become, the characteristic of those who live in flat countries of illimitable horizons, who said that New Yorkers, State and city, all had an assertive sort of smartness that was very disagreeable to him. And a lady of New York (a city whose dialect the novelists are beginning to satirize) was much disturbed by the flatness of speech prevailing in Chicago, and thought something should ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... become convinced that temptations of this sort, which had previously been in the main creatures of his own brain, postulated in obedience to the doctrines and literature in which he had been bred, had become self-assertive realities; and that what had been set up only to be triumphantly knocked down had now taken a strong root of its own, and refused to be displaced by spiritual exercises or physical mortifications. Had he been able to pursue the analysis yet further, it may be that, even ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... are few poets, even those who are chiefly concerned with man and his doings, who do not often turn to mountain scenery at least for similes. And it could not be otherwise; for the immanent ideas here manifested are self-assertive in character and specially rich in number and variety. As it has been well expressed, nature's pulse here seems to beat more quickly. In olden days the high places of the earth associated themselves with myths of gods and Titans. Fully representative of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... their hearts, Such men are never neutral. That word stands Unsexed and impotent in Realms of Speech. When mighty problems face a startled world No virile man is neutral. Right or wrong His thoughts go forth, assertive, unafraid To stand by his convictions, and to do Their part in shaping issues to an end. Silence may guard the door of useless words, At dictate of Discretion; but to stand Without opinions in a world which needs Constructive thinking, ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of police, Magistrate R. H. Bunting, Charles H. Gilbert, Charles McAlister, all white Republicans, and many assertive Negroes, who are considered dangerous to the peace of the community, are now under guard and are to ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... searched their books and examined their various theories; I found them all alike proud, assertive, dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism, to know everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. This last trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... could doubt who saw the two together for five minutes. It would be, in all likelihood, a happy subjugation, for Norbert was of anything but a rebellious temper; his bonds would be of silk; the rewards of his docility would be such as many a self-assertive man might envy. But when Warburton tried to imagine himself in such a position, a choked laugh of humourous disdain ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Perhaps his timorous mind, in some moods, had been almost relieved at declaration of the girl's engagement to another. But now the tremendous task of storming a virgin heart lay ahead of him, as he imagined. Torments unfelt by those of less sensitive mould also awaited Martin Grimbal. The self-assertive sort of man, who rates himself as not valueless, and whose love will not prevent callous calculation on the weight of his own person and purse upon the argument, is doubtless wise in his generation, and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... departed. Marmaduke was for taking his leave too. All his old loathing of Oliver had suddenly returned. His cousin stood for everything he detested—swagger, arrogance, self-assurance. He hated the shabby rakishness of his attire, the self-assertive aquiline beak of a nose which he had inherited from his father, the Rector. He dreaded his aggressive masculinity. He had come back with the same insulting speech on his lips. His finger-nails were dreadful. Marmaduke desired as little as possible of his odious company. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... stranger—and such a stranger! Not very prepossessing, to say the least. But he has a good eye, and will get along with the boys all right. Nothing assertive about him; not enough go, perhaps. Would you like to ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... a series of essays filled with literary charm and individuality, not self-willed or over-assertive, but gracious and winning, sometimes profoundly contemplative, and anon frolicsome and more inclined to chaff than to instruct—but interesting and suggestive always.—New ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Arden," are poems showing how poetry dwells in the hearts of common folks. The verse of books they may not know; the verse of sentiment they are at home with. Birth is not a term in the proportion of worth; and I hold Arthur one of the strongest voices of our century assertive of the sufficiency of manhood. Self-made and greatly made was ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... dreams of world-supremacy. It was, of course, the war of 1870, with its resounding triumphs, that brought these visions, so to speak, within the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful, pushful, self-assertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the increase of her wealth, as was natural, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... weight even in the face of hysterical unreason. He raised his hand and spoke, and there was a hush. Madame Griggs and Minna Eddy remained quiet, like petrified furies, regarding the man's pale face of assertive will. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... must be reckoned the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in whom, as William Dean Howells has said, the Negro "attained civilization." Before Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Negro literature had been either apologetic or self-assertive, but Dunbar "studied the Negro objectively." He represented him as he found him, not only without apology, but with an affectionate understanding and sympathy which one can have only for what is one's own. In Dunbar, Negro literature attained an ethnocentric point ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... contain blue in the ascendancy. Green in its purity, being half yellow and half blue, is almost neutral. In the same way violet, being made up of half red and half blue, is theoretically neutral, although the blue tone is usually more assertive than the red and makes the color recede. Any color or hue possesses advancing or receding qualities according to the ascendancy of red, blue or ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... dark to see, Gemma rolled up her knitting and laid it in the basket. For some time she sat with folded hands, silently watching the Gadfly's motionless figure. The dim evening light, falling on his face, seemed to soften away its hard, mocking, self-assertive look, and to deepen the tragic lines about the mouth. By some fanciful association of ideas her memory went vividly back to the stone cross which her father had set up in memory of Arthur, and to ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... out to the husband and father in India. Mrs. Windemere was a little woman with an habitually scared expression and retiring manner, but her daughters, both well towards thirty, must have taken after the father, for they were domineering with her and self-assertive everywhere. They claimed relationship with some person who bore a title, and were given to talking a good deal about their aristocratic relatives, and they dressed conspicuously, demanded constant attention from any gentlemen present, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
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