Yielding

ˈjiːldɪŋ

adjective

producing or capable of producing crops, products, or profits

One interesting aspect of the word 'yielding' is its association with both the concept of productivity and flexibility. In a literal sense, it can refer to something that produces, like a yielding crop. Figuratively, it can suggest a willingness to give way or adapt, combining the ideas of production and flexibility.

You and I, we must endure with patience the hours of waiting.’ She did not answer, but as he looked at her it seemed to him that something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of spring.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Return of the King

It is I believe too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good.

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Hushing signs she made, And breathed a sister’s sorrow to persuade A yielding up, a cradling on her care.

John Keats

Poetry

It was the story of a girl who had been seduced, and to whom her poor mother (sa pauvre mère) appeared, and reproached her for yielding to a man without being married.

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Your sons died honorably on a battlefield, with swords in their hands.” “They died,” said Rickard Karstark, yielding no inch of ground.

George R. R. Martin

A Storm of Swords

Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding.

King, Stephen

The Stand

But Oliver’s patience was not proof against this new trial; and yielding to his first impulse, he sprang into her arms.

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

“The lad doesn’t know our rule.” Then, to Paul: “There can be no yielding in the tahaddi-?challenge.

Herbert, Frank

Dune

The dusk is yielding to dark by the time they find Grandfather’s house, in the lee of a city gate.

Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister

Our yielding will be taken as a sign of appalling weakness and the addition of the Imperial Cruiser will just about double the strength of Wienis’ navy.

Asimov, Isaac

Foundation 1 - Foundation

Stay with these friends who will watch over you!” Her expression became frantic as she spoke; and, he yielding to her, she pulled him down sitting on the bed side, and clung to him fiercely.

Bram Stoker

Dracula

Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left.” To whom, with count’nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: “Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there.” A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl’d it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv’d the wound: Imperial Juno turn’d the course before, And fix’d the wand’ring weapon in the door.

Virgil

The Aeneid

Perhaps severity and craft are more favourable conditions for the development of strong, independent spirits and philosophers than the gentle, refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized in a learned man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own.

Stephen King

Wolves of the Calla

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

After you had bought me you brought me to this place to kill me; but then, yielding to a feeling of compassion, you preferred to tie a stone round my neck and to throw me into the sea.

Carlo Collodi

The Adventures of Pinocchio

yielding to an unrestrained appetite.” —Conway ↩︎ The French work has aveugle et (“blind and”) preceding “dismal.” —Conway ↩︎ The French work has frédaine (“prank”).

Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason

Barefaced, the Lord of Casterly Rock raised his hand in salute and dismounted, yielding the match.

George R.R. Martin

The Tales of Dunk & Egg

Madame de Morcerf had lived there since leaving her house; the continual silence of the spot oppressed her; still, seeing that Albert continually watched her countenance to judge the state of her feelings, she constrained herself to assume a monotonous smile of the lips alone, which, contrasted with the sweet and beaming expression that usually shone from her eyes, seemed like “moonlight on a statue,”—yielding light without warmth.

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

“I can’t understand your yielding her to me like this; I don’t understand it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot

After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that mysterious power which said to him: “Think!” as it said to another condemned man, two thousand years ago, “March on!” Before proceeding further, and in order to make ourselves fully understood, let us insist upon one necessary observation.

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

“It isn’t safe.” Piper thought about the way the ground had pulled at her feet in the dream, and what King Boreas had said about the earth yielding up more horrors.

Rick Riordan

The Lost Hero

Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle, I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand, Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds, (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,) Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious, After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color, Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers, Thou yieldest up thyself.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone.

James Joyce

Ulysses

Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual coefficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort.

T. E. Lawrence

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

I should have been more strange, I must confess, But that thou overheard’st, ere I was ’ware, My true-love passion; therefore pardon me, And not impute this yielding to light love, Which the dark night hath so discovered.

William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet

Mountains are islands on the land; and their inhabitants have yielded to those produced within the larger areas of the north, just in the same way as the inhabitants of real islands have everywhere yielded and are still yielding to continental forms naturalised through man’s agency.

Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species

From Apollonius7 I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly in a living example that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, and not peevish in giving his instruction; and to have had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in expounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are esteemed favours, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass unnoticed.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

As the slow beast, with heavy strength endued, In some wide field by troops of boys pursued, Though round his sides a wooden tempest rain, Crops the tall harvest, and lays waste the plain; Thick on his hide the hollow blows resound, The patient animal maintains his ground, Scarce from the field with all their efforts chased, And stirs but slowly when he stirs at last: On Ajax thus a weight of Trojans hung, The strokes redoubled on his buckler rung; Confiding now in bulky strength he stands, Now turns, and backward bears the yielding bands; Now stiff recedes, yet hardly seems to fly, And threats his followers with retorted eye.

Homer

The Iliad

“Her sister would have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by yielding to them.

G. K. Chesterton

The Innocence of Father Brown

The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

The dry land Earth, and the great receptacle Of congregated waters he called seas; And saw that it was good, and said, ‘Let the Earth Put forth the verdant grass, herb yielding seed, And fruit-tree yielding fruit after her kind, Whose seed is in herself upon the Earth!’ He scarce had said when the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorned, Brought forth the tender grass, whose verdure clad Her universal face with pleasant green; Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flowered, Opening their various colours, and made gay Her bosom, smelling sweet; and, these scarce blown, Forth flourished thick the clustering vine, forth crept The smelling gourd, up stood the corny reed Embattled in her field: add the humble shrub, And bush with frizzled hair implicit: last Rose, as in dance, the stately trees, and spread Their branches hung with copious fruit, or gemmed Their blossoms.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

It did not occur to Lothario that this man he had seen issuing at such an untimely hour from Anselmo’s house could have entered it on Leonela’s account, nor did he even remember there was such a person as Leonela; all he thought was that as Camilla had been light and yielding with him, so she had been with another; for this further penalty the erring woman’s sin brings with it, that her honour is distrusted even by him to whose overtures and persuasions she has yielded; and he believes her to have surrendered more easily to others, and gives implicit credence to every suspicion that comes into his mind.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote

The temptation to smuggle consequently is to many people irresistible, while at the same time the rigour of the law, and the vigilance of the farmer’s officers, render the yielding to that temptation almost certainly ruinous.

Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations