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Gravitate   Listen
verb
Gravitate  v. i.  (past & past part. gravitated; pres. part. gravitating)  To obey the law of gravitation; to exert a force or pressure, or tend to move, under the influence of gravitation; to tend in any direction or toward any object. "Why does this apple fall to the ground? Because all bodies gravitate toward each other." "Politicians who naturally gravitate towards the stronger party."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gravitate" Quotes from Famous Books



... picture is food for admiration, even the atmosphere that envelops it and those innumerable and endless legions of cherubin that gravitate around the Virgin and the Word of God. The aureole that encircles the divine group shows nothing at first but dazzling and golden light; then, as it recedes from the centre, this light gradually pales and insensibly merges from the most intense ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... the cause hinged upon a question of law, or the moral distinctions of good and evil, no man possessed such a fund of argument, and happy illustration. Crasso nihil statuo fieri potuisse perfectius: erat summa gravitas; erat cum gravitate junctus facetiarum et urbanitatis oratorius, non scurrilis, lepos. Latine loquendi accurata, et, sine molestia, diligens elegantia; in disserendo mira explicatio; cum de jure civili, cum de aequo et bono disputaretur, argumentorum et similitudinum copia. De Claris Orat. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus

... there was, Zedekiah thought, a reasonable hope that the yoke of Babylon might be thrown off and Hebrew autonomy re-established. The infatuated monarch did not see that, do what he would, his country had no more than a choice of masters, that by the laws of political attraction Judaea must gravitate to one or other of the two great states between which it had the misfortune of lying. Hoping to free his country, he sent ambassadors to Uaphris, who were to conclude a treaty and demand the assistance of a powerful contingent, composed of both foot and horse. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... it at all, no appetite for it, but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share. Such people tend to gravitate to early Italian painting, because of its historical associations, and because it can be categorically studied. They become what is called 'purists,' which means little more than a learned submissiveness. In literature they are found to admire Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning, not because of ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the footstool of this triumphant wickedness, everything venal and sordid in the yet Free States would inevitably and intensely gravitate: commerce seeking customers; manufactures eager for markets; shipping greedy of cargoes and freights; but, above all, Democratic politicians hungry for power and pelf, and having the strong instinct of American unity and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... reluctantly paid. They were ripe for rebellion; and when after long years of conflict with the Livonian and Teutonic Orders, Latin Christianity obtained some foothold in their land, they began to gravitate toward Catholic Poland instead of Greek Russia; and when a marriage was suggested which should unite Poland and Lithuania under their Prince Iagello, who should reign over both at Cracow, and at the same time give them their own Grand Prince, they consented. The forces ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... SAMUELEM JOHNSON, in omni humaniorum literarum genere eruditum, omniumque scientiarum comprehensione felicissimum, scriptis suis, ad popularium mores formandos summa verborum elegantia ac sententiarum gravitate compositis, ita olim inclaruisse, ut dignus videretur cui ab Academia sua eximia quaedam laudis praemia deferentur [deferrentur] quique [in] venerabilem Magistrorum Ordinem ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... do it, but he used to see me at the window looking out; and I being one lonely boy in the big pond of life, and he being another lonely boy in the same big pond, and both floating about like bits of stick, he seemed as if he wanted to gravitate towards me as bits of stick do to each other, and in his uncouth way he would do all sorts of things ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... didn't. I have tried to behave like a father to her but she doesn't seem to notice it," Jerry returned humorously. "You see they all gravitate straight to Marjorie. There's something about her that inspires confidence in the breasts ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... acceptable one to superior souls. He alone brings man into immediate communion with God, he gives a thirst for God, he has freed the majesty of God from the trappings in which other human dogmas have disguised Him. He left Him where He is, making His myriad creations and creatures gravitate towards Him through successive transformations which promise a more immediate and more natural future than the Catholic idea of Eternity. Swedenborg has absolved God from the reproach attaching to Him in the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... of his school, he substituted a formula, the terms of which suggest the possibility of an accurate quantitative comparison of different sums of happiness. In Bentham's mind the difference between this and the more general formula was like the difference between the statement that the planets gravitate towards the sun, and the more precise statement that the law of gravitation varies inversely as the square of the distance. Bentham hoped for no less an achievement than to become the Newton of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... gravitate; collapse, founder, slump, tumble, topple; subside, decrease, decline, settle, moderate; sin, do wrong, go ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... quoties uter utro fit prior; aufert Pacuvius docti famam senis, Actius alti: Dicitur Alfrani toga convenisse Menandro; Plautus ad exemplar siculi properare Epicharmi, Vincere Coecilius gravitate, Terentius arte Hos ediscit, et hos areto stipata theatro Spectat Roma potens: habet nos numeratque poetas Ad nostrum tempus, LIVI ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various

... we are truly the friend of all, shall we be truly the friend of every one; and, as we find the living peace of this principle, and a greater freedom from selfishness,—whether of affection or dislike,—those who truly belong to us will gravitate to our sides, and we shall gravitate to theirs. Each one of us will understand his own relation to the rest,—whether remote or close,—for in that quiet light it will be seen to rest on intelligible law, which only the fog and confusion ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... around him, the bias given to his moral character in early life is of immense importance. Place even the highest-minded philosopher in the midst of daily discomfort, immorality, and vileness, and he will insensibly gravitate towards brutality. How much more susceptible is the impressionable and helpless child amidst such surroundings! It is not possible to rear a kindly nature, sensitive to evil, pure in mind and heart, amidst ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... because it has nothing accidental, and it is substantially united to the eternal word. It is that reason toward which all blest intelligences will finally gravitate. Hence, we see that what already partakes of the celestial life repels reasoning as a cause of imperfection or infirmity. It is thus, by its exclusion of reasons, that the Gospel supremely proves its celestial origin. It is, indeed, a thing well worth remark, especially ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... favored them, that they were productive of the earthly end toward which the sublime doctrines of Christianity pointed; and the other believed that scientific social organization alone would act so powerfully as a stimulant and teacher to humanity, that mankind and human nature would gravitate to their own sublime places at once if an organization was presented suitable to their needs. They were Albert ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... argumento." Besides, the disposition of the subject was the very art attributed by the critics of those days to Terence, and which Horace mentions in the very same line with the gravity of Caecilius, distinguishing them as the several characteristics of each writer, "Vincere Caecilius gravitate, Terentius arte."] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... secured; but whenever he places his interest in anything else than friends, country, family and justice, then these all give way, borne down by the weight of self-interest. For wherever I and mine are placed, thither must every living being gravitate. If in body, that will sway us; if in our own will, that; if in externals, these. If, therefore, I rest my personality in the will, then only shall I be a friend, a son, or a father, such as I ought. For in that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... bring about the desirable adjustment between the healthy social organism and the environment of machine-production. Full free trade would supply, quicken, and facilitate the operation of those large economic forces which we have seen at work: the tendency of capital to gravitate into larger and fewer masses, localised where labour can be maintained upon the most economical terms: a correspondent but slower and less complete organisation of labour in large masses: the flow of labouring population into towns, together with ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... and that the coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of home-influence, which is the result of the unfavourable position in life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the calumnies uttered against ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... way above. "We're like those stars, honey. All our lives we have been drifting around, but all the time it had been decided by the God-of-things-as-they-are that our orbits were going to run together and gravitate into the same one when the right time came. It has ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... police. His situation in Pisa became, in consequence, irksome; and he resolved to remove to Genoa, an intention which he carried into effect about the end of September, 1822, at which period his thoughts began to gravitate towards Greece. Having attained to the summit of his literary eminence, he grew ambitious of trying fortune in another ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... instead of discouraging social desires it has multiplied them ten thousand fold. Every city in the land has its own Mrs. Anstruthers Leason or Mrs. Corporation, to form the local constellation, towards which the active-minded women of a certain type will always strive or gravitate, as you choose to put it. This being so, the American husband, one might suppose, would sigh for an absolute monarchy, where there is but one fixed social firmament, admission to which is determined by a despot's ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... professions through the agency of great and sober papers—in England the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the already great periodicals of the engineering trades, foreshadow something, but only a very little, of what these papers may be. The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting centres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated, adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we have considered so far, the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... follow a car to some distant roadhouse, or go to the outlying summer pavilions where popular dances were given. More than once, late at night, he was an unseen and unbidden guest at one of the gay bathing parties. Strange and startling incidents seemed to gravitate toward Lane. He might have been predestined for this accumulation of facts. How vain it seethed for wild young men and women to think they hid their tracks! Some trails could ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... mathematically proved that all bodies gravitate or incline to the centre. It is on this principle only that we can account for our being fixed to the earth; that we are surrounded by the atmosphere; and that we are constantly attended by, and seem constantly to attend, the planets ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various

... sympathetic gravitation that is the sustaining bond of the material universe. It is ponderable substance beyond all question, and held by that chain of physical connection which it was the glory of Newton to discover. If the comet were not a material and ponderable substance it would not gravitate round the sun, and it would not move with increasing velocity as it neared the mighty mass until it had gathered the energy for its own escape in the enhanced and quickened momentum. In the first instance, the ready obedience to the attraction, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... 187) is worth transcribing, as it seems fair and impartial Victorino qui Post Junium Posthumium Gallias rexit neminem existemo praeferendum; non in virtute Trajanum; non Antoninum in clementia; non in gravitate Nervam; non in gubernando aerario Vespasianum; non in Censura totius vitae ac severitate militari Pertinacem vel Severum. Sed omnia haec libido et cupiditas voluptatis mulierriae sic perdidit, ut nemo audeat virtutes ejus in literas mittere ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... every European country, there is much less positive rusticity also. There, the extremes of society are widely separated, repelling rather than attracting each other; while among ourselves, the tendency is to gravitate towards a common centre. Thus it is, that all things in America become subject to a mean law that is productive of a mediocrity which is probably much above the average of that of most nations; possibly of ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... things which are really for thee gravitate to thee." One is tempted to add the World's Congress ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... that made him attractive. This child, Mary Rochefort, quite alone in the world, largely untrained, adrift, imperiously demanding from an imperious husband something to which she had not as yet found the key, might very naturally gravitate toward any one presenting Pollen's appearance of security; his attitude of complacence in the face of feminine authority. But was he complacent? Mrs. Ennis had her doubts. He was very vain; underneath his urbanity there ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... poverty with dignified truthfulness; it is the moral coward who seeks to hide these limitations by a greater display than his circumstances warrant. And he reaps as he sows. His "entertainments" fill an idle hour for the class of visitors who gravitate mainly to the supper-room, while the giver of the feast, under the tension of this social effort, suffers a weariness of the spirit as well as of the flesh, and gives a sigh of relief when the door closes upon the last guest, and the pitiful farce is declared "over." We ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton

... first use to which writing is put and through which the writer is trained. For this, abundant material is indispensable, as much as clinical material for a medical school. As the medical schools gravitate to cities, and the rural institutions flicker out one by one, so in the end the effectively trained reporter will gravitate to a large city. Towns of under 20,000 population furnish a very tame sort of reporting, and those who get this training in them find reporting ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... awkward. Douglas was small, round and graceful—he came to be known as "the Little Giant." Douglas was a Democrat and favored slavery. Lincoln was a Whig, and strongly opposed that dark institution. Even in petty discussions in Speed's store, the two men seemed to gravitate to opposite sides. A little later they were rivals for the hand of the ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple

... carefully on my kitchen table, as on any part of the house. If I find later that the winning plans include these things I shall believe that Henry Anderson is a mind reader, or that lost plans naturally gravitate to him. But there is no use to grouch further. I seem to be born a loser. Anyway, I haven't lost you and I still ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... in tribal affairs aroused apprehensions on the part of the other strong clans; it also caused the greater number of the weaker clusters to gravitate toward the growing element of power held by the Turquoise people. A schism was slowly and imperceptibly preparing itself among the people of the Rito. That schism was not the work of circumstances, it was being systematically prepared by two crafty ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... Divine? A love that sees the good beyond the evil, The serial life beyond the eclipsing death,— That tracks the spirit through eternities, Backward and forward, and in every germ Beholds its past, its present, and its future, At every stage beholds it gravitate Where it belongs, and thence new-born emerge Into new life and opportunity, An outcast never from the assiduous Mercy, Providing for His teeming universe, Divinely perfect not because complete, But because incomplete, advancing ever Beneath the care Supreme?—heights whence the ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... toward immortality and the names of his patients are nearly all found on the moss-covered stones of the cemetery, he may abandon the profession with safety and take hold of politics. Then, should his tastes lead him to the inquest, let him gravitate toward the office of coroner; but the two ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... of their argument demands; and their doctrine of Implicit[4] (or Virtual) Faith entirely supersedes intellectual perception as well as intellectual conviction. The theory of each church is the force which determines to what centre the whole shall gravitate. However men may talk of spirituality, yet let them once enact that the freedom of individuals shall be absorbed in a corporate conscience, and you find that the narrowest heart and meanest intellect sets the rule of conduct ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... of other men; he is pinned down to a personal practical duty. "A certain man went down from Jerusalem," &c. It is a narrow, dreary mountain pass. By nature it is fitted to be a haunt of robbers; if there are any robbers in the country, they will certainly gravitate to this spot. In point of fact it was notoriously unsafe for travellers in that day, and it is equally dangerous still. A particular portion of the road acquired the name of the path of blood, and under the feeble government of the Turks, as well ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... to the conviction that "what now characterizes the exceptionally high may be expected eventually to characterize all. For that which the highest human nature is capable of is within the reach of human nature at large." "We gravitate towards the ideal," she writes, "and this gravitation is infinite, as is the ideal itself." And her place remains among those few great intelligences who can be said to have given humanity an appreciable impulse in the direction ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... a sort of dessert she tells us about the Danas, the Aikens and the Carnahans, who are, in various relationships, her progenitors. We gravitate into the other room, and presently she shows us, in the plush album, the portraits of various cousins, aunts and uncles. And by-and-by Harriet warms up and begins to tell about the Scribners, the MacIntoshes, and the Strayers, who ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... indispensable. "There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation," he said; and "Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom." If Cuba is incapable of self-support, and could not therefore be left, in the cheerful language of Congress, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... has he training nor interest to study any subject but the law. The profounder and more important matters affecting life and conduct are a sealed book which he could not open if he would. Very soon under our political system the expert business would gravitate into the hands of politicians, the last group that should handle any scientific problem. I am free to confess the difficulties of the present system, but some other way may be even worse. It must always be remembered that this country is governed by public ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... experienced by merchants in ascending the Guadalquivir, ships were given permission to load and register at Cadiz under the supervision of an inspector or "visitador," and thereafter commerce and navigation tended more and more to gravitate to that port. After 1529, in order to facilitate emigration to America, vessels were allowed to sail from certain other ports, notably San Sebastian, Bilboa, Coruna, Cartagena and Malaga. The ships might register in these ports, but were ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring

... delighting in the fresh sweetness of the old thorns, laughing at the freaks of the scampering groups of children, gaily exchanging pleasant talk with one friend after another, and most of all with Rachel, who seemed to gravitate back to her whenever any summons had for a time interrupted their affluence ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was going on. Hermione Roddice was thinking only of Birkin. He stood near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards him. She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be sure he was near her, if she did not touch him. Yet she stood subjected through ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... worst heroes without any of their attractions. The interest of the play, such as it is, depends upon the varying moods of the chief actors, who become so eloquent under a sense of wrong or a reflection upon the charms of virtue, that they approach the bounds of vice, and then gravitate back to respectability. Everybody becomes perfectly respectable before the end of the play is reached, and we are to suppose that they will remain respectable ever afterwards. They avoid tragic results by their want of the overmastering passions ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... heaviest of the work falls upon the kindergartner. That is why I am convinced that we should do everything that sympathy and honor and money can do to exalt the office, so that women of birth, breeding, culture, and genius shall gravitate to it. The kindergartner it is who, living with the children, can make her work an integral part of the neighborhood, the centre of its best life. She it is, often, who must hold husband to wife, and parent to child; she it is after all who must interpret ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... 1859.—I have just read "Faust" again. Alas, every year I am fascinated afresh by this somber figure, this restless life. It is the type of suffering toward which I myself gravitate, and I am always finding in the poem words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, ghost of my own torment, image of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Goodloe is failing to mix his oil and water," Nickols whispered to me, as we observed all of the Settlement groups gravely gravitate to the left side of the walk while all the Town in chattering parties took seats on the right. "That's right, Burns, take off my last summer coat," he added, still in a whisper to me as the Burns parent struggled out of the unendurable gift garment and thus gave a signal ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviously his pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour boy complex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which will require them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; the smartest of them will fall for the most ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton

... get their diversions it is well to examine a cross-section of city life on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. Family quarters are crowded. Tenements and apartments have little spare space inside or outside. Children find it decidedly irksome indoors and naturally gravitate to the street, to the relief of their elders and their own satisfaction. There they quickly find associates and proceed to give expression to their restless spirits. It is the child's nature to play, and he uses all his wits to find the materials and the room for sport. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... corresponds likewise to the tendency ever present in the mind of man, to compare the infinitely small with the infinitely great. The atom may be regarded as a sort of solar system in which electrons in considerable numbers gravitate round the sun formed by the positive ion. It may happen that certain of these electrons are no longer retained in their orbit by the electric attraction of the rest of the atom, and may be projected from it like a small planet or comet which escapes towards the stellar spaces. The phenomena ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... heat will both of them displace magnetism, and this shows that they may gravitate on each other; and hence when too great a quantity of the electric fluid becomes accumulated at the poles by descending snows, or other unknown causes, it may have a tendency to rise towards the tropics by its centrifugal force, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... when, to divine what any known person will do in a case stated, we go boldly by his character, his habits, or his interest: for these are great forces, towards which men gravitate through various and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... ago there were a good many thousands of highly respectable mediocrities living on this side of the river, but now I am told that the glory has departed from the very best of its localities, and given them up to various degrees of squalor. Vice, poverty, and misery seem to gravitate naturally southward in London. I don't know why, but they do. Well, here is the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith

... fixed upon the eternal and pathetic normalities of the human situation, Anatole France has himself, like Voltaire, a constant tendency to gravitate towards politics and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... soul, which has been given by the liberality of the Gods to the human race, everything is mortal, and tends to dissolution; but above the moon all is eternal. For the earth, which is the ninth globe, and occupies the centre, is immovable, and, being the lowest, all others gravitate towards it. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... contribute to racial harmony. Although candidates were supposed to attend the NROTC school of their choice, black candidates were restricted to institutions that would accept them. If a black school was added to the program, all black candidates would very likely gravitate toward it. Several black spokesmen, including Nelson, took this attitude and urged instead a campaign to increase the number of Negroes at the various integrated schools in the NROTC system.[9-46] Whatever the ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... be possible that several from among the Republicans, honest leaders, gravitate towards Lincoln, and already begin to agitate for Lincoln's re-election? If it is so—if the people submit to such an imposition—O, then, genius of history, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... course. I never knew a fool that sooner or later didn't gravitate to chickens. He will ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his drama tended to gravitate. In The Return of the Druses Browning's native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better illustrated than in ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... know about the corona can be summed up in a few words. It is certainly not a solar atmosphere. It does not gravitate upon the sun's surface and share his rotation, as our air gravitates upon and shares the rotation of the earth; and this for the simple reason that there is no visible growth of pressure downwards (of which the spectroscope would ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... come to him; it is the lesson we expect one to learn on reaching his age, and learning how futile is the fret and urge of life, how infinitely better is the attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... discoverable by dulness on percussion, and, as might be expected, by the absence of the respiratory murmur at that locality which the fluid occupies. Fluid, when effused into the pleural sac, will of course gravitate; and its position will vary according to the position of the patient. The sitting or standing posture will therefore suit best for the examination of the thorax in reference to ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that almost every matter of business that required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... would never be allowed to affect the general tenor of her existence. If one came to Paris, where could one go but to Ritz's? Did he see her in some grubby hole across the river? Or in a family pension near the Place de l'Etoile? There was no affectation in her tendency to gravitate toward what was costliest and most conspicuous. In doing so she obeyed one of the profoundest instincts of her nature, and it was another instinct which taught her to gratify the first at any cost, even to that of dipping ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... irresistibly strong. Though made up of many conflicting elements, Republicans, Whigs, Tories, zealous Presbyterians, bigoted Prelatists, it acted for a time as one man, and drew to itself a multitude of those mean and timid politicians who naturally gravitate towards the stronger party. The friends of the government were few and disunited. Hamilton brought but half a heart to the discharge of his duties. He had always been unstable; and he was now discontented. He held indeed the highest place ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... so long trained in the filthy ruts of vice that they run there automatically, and naturally gravitate downward—such a one must exercise especial care to secure the most simple, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... wish, good sir, to seek The seismocosmic state; And why this strange amphibian Should slowly gravitate ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... corners of his mouth an inexplicable hidden imp of laughter as he gravely listened, cup in hand, to the remarks of the beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth about the inevitable promiscuity of democracy, and he continually displayed a tendency to gravitate into the background, away from the center of the stage where their deference for his name, fortune, and personality would have placed him. Sylvia's impression of him was far from being one of social brilliance, but rather of an almost wilful negligence. She quite grew used ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... consolidate herself. Something like a desire for consolidation would seem to have come over the people; and Tyre, the leading city in all but the earliest times, appears to have been recognised as the centre towards which other states must gravitate, and to have risen to the occasion. If there ever was such a thing as a confederation of all the Phoenician cities, it would seem to have been at this period. Sidon forgot her ancient rivalry, and consented to furnish the Tyrian fleet with mariners.[14193] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... all the conscientiousness of a beneficed Christian, but who prizes his glebe and tithe, rushes to Cambridge to swell the majority for Mr. Raikes. Gentlemen of the long robe who make politics a vocation gravitate for some reason or other towards Liberalism; but the lower branch of the profession displays an opposite tendency. The county lawyer, who makes two-thirds of his income out of the mysteries of conveyancing, has reason to dislike such things as the registration of titles, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... working up with them the thoughts suggested by them, the author has labored to form of them a compact and easily perused whole. For the ideas selected are essentially related, and, scattered as they may have hitherto been, naturally gravitate round a common centre. No longer drifting apart through the chaos of multitudinous pages, they are now formed into a system of order, a galaxy of which the central sun is—the Divine attributes as manifested through ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... every consideration in life, emotional and other, to a dollar-and-cents basis. Sentiment, ambition, common judgment of right and wrong, all gravitate to the same level. You have a single standard of measurement that you apply to all alike, which alike condemns or justifies. Summer and Winter, morning, noon, and night—it's the same. Your little yardstick is ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... fly order and thrift. They will fly them when order and thrift are held as the more desirable. A woman is often slow to learn that good housekeeping alone cannot produce a milieu in which family happiness thrives and to which people naturally gravitate. She looks at it as the fulfillment of the law—the end of her Business. It is the exaggerated place she gives it in the scheme of things, which brings disaster to her happiness and gives substance to the argument that woman's lot in life is fatal to her development. Housekeeping ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... that of Stanton to be swayed by feeling and passion. All the higher faculties of his mind gave their voice for this woman with increasing emphasis. His heart undoubtedly would slowly and surely gravitate in ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... abiding place, Charmian and I decided it was about time we knew what we had in our own county and the neighbouring ones. How to do it, was the first question. Among our many weaknesses is the one of being old- fashioned. We don't mix with gasolene very well. And, as true sailors should, we naturally gravitate toward horses. Being one of those lucky individuals who carries his office under his hat, I should have to take a typewriter and a load of books along. This put saddle-horses out of the running. Charmian suggested driving a span. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... very little to justify Ardan's hope. Barbican's theory of the elliptic orbit was unfortunately too well grounded to allow a single reasonable doubt to be expressed regarding the Projectile's fate. It was to gravitate for ever around the Moon—a sub-satellite. It was a new born individual in the astral universe, a microcosm, a little world in itself, containing, however, only three inhabitants and even these destined to perish pretty soon for want of air. Our travellers, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... examples, in one of which the antecedent is the sum of many homogeneous, in the other of heterogeneous, parts. The weight of a body is made up of the weights of its minute particles; a truth which astronomers express in its most general terms when they say that bodies, at equal distances, gravitate to one another in proportion to their quantity of matter. All true propositions, therefore, which can be made concerning gravity, are derivative laws; the ultimate law into which they are all resolvable ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... now is: What part of that exploded Past, the ruins and dust of which still darken all the air, will continually gravitate back to us; be reshaped, transformed, readapted, that so, in new figures, under new conditions, it may enrich and nourish us again? What part of it, not being incombustible, has actually gone to flame and gas in the huge world-conflagration, and is now GASEOUS, mounting ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... to the romantic appetites and it. But to the man himself, this quality of mind is of immense moment and advantage; and forms truly the basis of all he was good for in life. Once for all, he has no pleasure in dreams, in parti-colored clouds and nothingnesses. All his curiosities gravitate towards what exists, what has being and reality round him. That is the significant thing to him; that he would right gladly know, being already related to that, as friend or as enemy; and feeling an unconscious indissoluble ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... that the combination of money and the city proved the undoing of the moonshiner, and that he came to his legitimate and logical end among the dives and haunts of his kind, to which he would surely gravitate. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright



Words linked to "Gravitate" :   run, tend, gravity, be, move



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