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Motif   Listen
noun
Motif  n.  
1.
Motive. (archaic)
2.
In literature and the fine arts, a salient feature or element of a composition or work; esp., the theme, or central or dominant feature; specif. (Music), A motive (3). See also leitmotif. "This motif, of old things lost, is a favorite one for the serious ballade." "The design... is... based on the peacock a motif favored by decorative artists of all ages."
3.
(Dressmaking) A decorative appliqué design or figure, as of lace or velvet, used in trimming; also, a repeated design.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books



... other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at last dominate all ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... secret cabinets finally irritated him. It appeared to him the reverse of recreation to contemplate so many childish fantasies of sculpture and painting having the antique symbol of masculinity as its principal motif. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... and at once the strain abandoned the woods-note and took another motif. At first it played softly in the higher notes, a tinkling, lightsome little melody that stirred a kindly surface-smile over a full heart. Then suddenly, without transition, it dropped to the lower ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... us a passionate humanity lying behind line and colour. Theirs was the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran's little story, in which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should be a literary character! And you ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... performance of the Ataboi, a dance descriptive of the growth and blossoming of the alova flower. This was performed by seven beautiful girls to an accompaniment of song and clapping. The plaintive love-motif was unmistakably introduced by a deep-chested dame who played on the bazoola, a primitive instrument fashioned from the stalk of the figwort (Scrophulariaceae). It may interest music lovers to know that the Filbertines employ the diatetic ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... merchandise. But once a gibbet stood on Wapping Wharf, and pirates were hanged upon it. It was the first convenient harborage for inbound ships to dispose of this dirty deep-sea cargo. So it was the somber motif of a pirate's life—his moment of reflection after he had ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks

... unless I find in it some association with a woman's feeling. It isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it doesn't matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn't until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if you like to call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness or pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes in and breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even rest until a woman makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I do without women and that ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... "I am very glad of that! Do you think you would recognise a motif if I wrote one ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... poems. They are divided into quatrains, whose four verses rhyme among themselves. The Filipino rhyme, however, consists in the last letter being a vowel or a consonant.... They read all their verses in a singing tone, and the quatrains of the twelve-syllable verse are read with the motif of the comintan, which is their national song. The custom of singing when reading poetry is a practice of China, and of all the Asiatic peoples whom I have visited. The kind of versification which I have just cited is evidently anterior ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... carry away with you a whiff of real sweetbriar. To-morrow the whole town will be in bloom. It is now I think if we could only see it." Rose Mary had gained her composure and the poignant wistfulness in her voice was but a part of the motif of the briar roses in ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess

... time, there is a fellow in a green canoe, and the muscles of his body play into the movement of the waves until he and his green canoe and the white capped waves are all one motif of the whole symphony. Men play around the yacht club like a lot of school boys, and now—"Shoot," they push a long slim racer into the water. Dainty white yachts go dipping to the waves and seem like lovely young girls in ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... indeed, are those hangings which pertain to the earlier date, but a study of those few, taken in conjunction with the still fewer that remain of the 16th century, prove the gradual growth of the designs that have the tree motif which makes ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands

... more—something still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. "What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... place in the manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found—it had been put there for him by Amanda—among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... (east end) - Edith Woodman Burroughs Snugly placed inside the abutting walls, east of the Tower of Jewels. Naive in character and simple in treatment, without any further symbolical meaning than that suggested by the name. Motif in side ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... was sitting in the company of the young couple. Andreas Doederlein, being in an unusually happy mood, went to the piano, and began playing the shepherd's motif from ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... play a noisy Strauss waltz, which started with such a mighty and rapid trill as made even Gedeonovsky start; in the very middle of the waltz, she abruptly changed into a mournful motif, and wound up with the aria from "Lucia": "Fra poco."... She had reflected that merry music was not compatible with her situation. The aria from "Lucia," with emphasis on the sentimental notes, greatly affected ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff

... man, but music snared me away from a worldly career. Music and—a woman; but never mind that part of it. Do you know Hunding's motif in "Die Walkuere"? Ha! ha! I will give it to you. Listen! Is it not beautiful? The stern, acrid warrior approaches. And Wagner gave it to me, to the tympani. Am I crazy, am I arrogant, to feel as I do about ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... elsewhere, there have been legends similar to the story of Audunn, where a man, after having been to the Norwegian king with a tame bear, decides to present it to the king of Denmark. However, we know of no earlier source for this motif than the story of Audunn. Whatever its value as historical fact, it could well be the model to which the other versions might be traced. This story is preserved in the Morkinskinna, an Icelandic manuscript written in the second half of the thirteenth century, as well ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... had the devil of a time getting rid of her," was the motif of the men's conversation. The women said, "And I just couldn't ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... heads, Mme. Giry's three teeth were clashing in a noisy contest, full of hideous interjections. But all that could be clearly distinguished was this LEIT-MOTIF: ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... j'ai employe tout mon pouvoir a maintenir la tranquillite. Sur les frontieres je n'ai rien neglige pour eloigner tout motif de collision, pour calmer les animosites seculaires qui separent les deux peuples, en un mot, pour donner a la Turquie les preuves les plus irrefragables de ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral; the color motif was green—the presiding shade at the creation ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... the episode of Just's dog, as the servant relates it in the 8th scene of the 1st act, could have adorned the Sentimental Journey, but the similarity of motif here in the treatment of animal fidelity is pure coincidence. Certainly the method of using the episode is not reminiscent of any similar scene in Sterne. Just's dog is not introduced for its own sake, nor like the ass at Nampont to ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes—that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very good ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... but curiously enough, I have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called Michael Scott's Wooing, not the one I proposed beginning now—and also have long designed a picture under the same title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote a romance called Sir Michael Scott, but I never ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine



Words linked to "Motif" :   figure, obligato, design, musical theme, obbligato, pattern, motive, theme, idea, thought, melodic theme, topos



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