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More "Inventive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing on the subject. History records not a single instance of a gold-mine bubble in Thrace, or a silver ditto in Africa. Apart from this, have we, the descendants of those honest Phoenicians, any of their inventive skill and bold initiative? They taught other nations the art of ship-building; we can not as much as learn from other nations the art of building a gig. They transmitted to the people of the West ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... observe, that when I deny justice to be a natural virtue, I make use of the word, natural, only as opposed to artificial. In another sense of the word; as no principle of the human mind is more natural than a sense of virtue; so no virtue is more natural than justice. Mankind is an inventive species; and where an invention is obvious and absolutely necessary, it may as properly be said to be natural as any thing that proceeds immediately from original principles, without the intervention of thought or reflection. Though the rules of justice be artificial, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... more success. Lost dogs, it may be remembered, had a habit of following Shovel's father, and he not only took the wanderers in, but taught them how to beg and shake hands and walk on two legs. Tommy had sometimes been present at these agreeable exercises, and being an inventive boy he—But as Elspeth was a nice girl, let it suffice to pause here and add shyly, that ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... futile civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then, when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Staff, and so it is among the junior commands, down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on their own, through unbelievable adventures. They are inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the single ideal—to kill—which they follow with men as single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist; when a whole nation goes ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... traditions with regard to the condition and characteristics of their composer. There was the more field for this, inasmuch as even the fables were only handed down orally. Some biographer, formerly supposed to have been Planudes the monk, seems to have fertilized with his own inventive genius many tales which had themselves no better foundation than the conjectures derived from the tone and nature of the fables. AEsop was represented as droll, as a sort of wit, and by a development of the connection in the mind ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... known, previously to the lecture, to let down the skeleton that hangs by a balance weight from the ceiling, and, inserting its thumb in the cavity of its nose, has there secured it with a piece of thread, and then, placing a short pipe in its jaws, has pulled it up again. His inventive faculties are likewise shown by various diverting objects and allusions cut with his knife upon the ledge before him in the lecture-room, whereon the new men rest their note-books and the old ones go to sleep. In vain do the directors of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... structures and enterprises, man is a superb success. The bridge, the triumphs of architecture, the steam engine, the almost intelligent machine are marvellous manifestations of inventive genius, and of the uses ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Scotland and on the Welsh border. Many of the most picturesque bridges in Britain, which every tourist has admired, often without inquiring or thinking of the hand that planned them, were designed by his inventive brain. The exquisite stone arch which links the two banks of the lesser Scotch Dee in its gorge at Tongueland is one of the most picturesque; for Telford was a bit of an artist at heart, and, unlike too many modern railway constructors, he always endeavoured to make his bridges and aqueducts ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... can call it so) his frugal supper as above, when there came a gentle tap at the door; and on opening it he perceived upon the threshold a very old woman dressed in a cloak of faded rags. She was so old and so remarkably ugly that had she been a duchess not the most inventive of reporters could have done better for her than "distinguished looking." So the woodcutter, not unnaturally, regarded his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... his fat lips. It's a trick with your railway kings. "Well, young men are often more inventive than old ones," he answered, slowly. "Youth has ideas; middle age has experience. In a matter like this, my own belief is, the ideas count for most. Yes, if I were you, Tyrrel, I'd ask your friend to ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... its details no less than in its general scope it exhibits the recognition by its builders of the essential characteristics of the best Gothic Art, and shows in the harmonized variety of its parts the inventive thought and the independent execution of many minds and hands presided over by a single will. Gothic architecture in its best development is the expression at once of law and of liberty. The exactest principles of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... themselves enjoy the power of invention in the mechanical and chemical arts, but who are tolerable judges of such inventions, and excellent judges of human character. Such persons might, with great success, employ themselves in finding out inventive workmen, whose want of capital prevents them from realizing their projects. If they could enter into a limited partnership with persons so circumstanced, they might restrain within proper bounds ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... return from Europe, as we have already noted, he was fired to write plays through the success of Royall Tyler, and he began his long career as dramatist, which threw him upon his own inventive resourcefulness, and so closely identified him with the name of the German, Kotzebue, whose plays he used to translate and adapt by the wholesale, as did also ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... characteristics known to arise from traceable hereditary sources may be mentioned factors in musical ability, artistic composition, literary ability, mechanical skill, calculating ability, inventive ability, memory, ability to spell, fluency in conversation, aptness in languages, military talent, acquisitiveness, attention, story-telling, poetic ability; and, on the other hand, insanity, feeble-mindedness of many ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... career in technological journalism by writing descriptions of what he regarded as the most promising inventions which had been displayed in international exhibitions then recently held. From that time until the present it has been his constant duty and practice to take note of the advance of inventive science as applied to industrial improvement—to watch it as an organic growth, not only from a philosophical, but also from a practical, point of view. The advance towards the actual adoption of any great industrial invention is generally a more or less collective ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... polite as I took him to the door to ask after some of his more distinguished patients; he was glad to say that the Archbishop of Armagh's was very vigorous indeed, in spite of the age of her illustrious master. He had rarely known a more inventive or courageous female, but when, as I handed him into his carriage, I asked after that of Mr. Kipling, his face became suddenly grave; and he asked me, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... of the logic of those who, whilst they cry out against the inundation of foreign merchandise, have the courage to declaim equally against the excessive production resulting from the inventive power ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... will, which was the popular view of his case. Turrifs Station had become notorious. Trenholme received jeers and gibes even by telegraph from neighbouring stations. He had given account to no one of the midnight visit, but inventive curiosity had supplied details of a truly wonderful nature. It was not on this account that he gave up his situation on the line, but because a new impulse had seized him, and he had no particular reason for ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Brown may reach the highest range of artistic excellence, he may achieve world-wide fame as an architect, his canvas may glow with the marvellous coloring of Titian or repeat the rare and delicate grace of Correggio, the triumphs of his chisel may reflect honor upon England and his age; the inventive genius of Jones, painfully elaborating, through long and suffering years of obscure poverty, the crude conceptions of his boyhood, may confer inestimable benefits upon his race; the scientific discoveries of Robinson may add incalculable wealth to the resources of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... empire-builders of some description. The philosophical and poetical yield to the practical, when "cui bono?" is the lest question which challenges all comers. This change, if it be an actual one, may bring its losses as well as its gains. We are thankful for all the precious boons which inventive genius has brought to us—for telegraphs, and telephones, and photographic arts, for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid achievements of skillful surgery. But the mind has its ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... chief with transport was possess'd; His panting heart exulted in his breast; Yet, well dissembling his untimely joys, And veiling truth in plausible disguise, Thus, with an air sincere, in fiction bold, His ready tale the inventive hero told: ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... countenance, and says, "I am not here any longer as a delinquent, a receiver of bribes, to be punished for what I have done wrong, or at least to suffer in my character for it. No: I am a great inventive genius, who have gone out of all the ordinary roads of finance, have made great discoveries in the unknown regions of that science, and have for the first time established the corruption of the supreme magistrate as a principle of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... according to their folly. There used to be special houses of correction in those days, mad- houses built upon an approved system, for the special treatment of cases of this kind; mediaeval dungeons, an occasional application of the rack, and other gentle instruments of torture of an inventive age, were wonderfully efficacious in curing a man of his folly. Nor was there any special limit to the time during which the treatment lasted. And in case of a dangerous fit of folly, there were always a few faggots ready, or a sharpened ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... him the unusual combination of genius wedded to sound common sense and practical business capacity. His family moved to Colorado, Texas, while he was still a lad and here his musical talent began to display itself. "The inventive faculties of the small boy, and the innate harmony of the musician, combined to improvise a crude instrument which emitted the notes of the scale. Successful at drawing forth a concord of sweet sounds, he continued ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Wang-li they took no farewell, inasmuch as he was absorbed in a chess problem. Before separating, they agreed to meet on the same spot after thirty years, with the treasure which they doubted not to have acquired by the exercise of their inventive faculties in foreign lands. They further covenanted that if either had missed his reward the other should share his possessions ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... there was only the educational calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... of the balloon lagged, until Count Zeppelin and M. Santos-Dumont consecrated their fortunes, their inventive minds, and their amazing courage to the task of perfecting a dirigible. In a book, necessarily packed with information concerning the rapid development of aircraft which began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and was enormously stimulated ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... surprise at the meagerness of our country's share in the Great Exhibition. Had any other young nation of Twenty Millions, located three to five thousand miles off, sent a collection so large and so creditable to its industrial proficiency and inventive power, it would have been warmly commended by these same journals; but it is deemed desirable to make an impression on the public mind of Europe adverse to American skill and attainment in the Arts, and hence these ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Robbers, the gigantic first-born of a Karl's Scholar, made in Stuttgart, communicated itself to the Mother too; innocently she gave herself up to the delight of seeing her Son's name wondered at and celebrated; and was, in her Mother-love, inventive enough to overcome all doubts and risks which threatened to dash her joy. By Christophine's mediations, and from the Son himself as well, she learned many a disquieting circumstance, which for the present had to be carefully concealed from ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... cartridges which we had stowed away inside some of the huge cheeses. We had about a thousand of them, just two hundred each; but then we wanted rifles, and they must be chassepots; luckily, however, the captain was a bold man of an inventive mind, and this was the plan that ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the Academy of Science an hydraulic machine of his own invention of which the model was the subject of a flattering report, and was placed in Charles's collection. The events of the Revolution soon gave him an opportunity for a further display of his inventive faculty. The war with England deprived France of plumbago; he substituted for it an artificial substance obtained from a mixture of graphite and clay, and took out a patent in 1795 for the form of pencil which still bears his name. At this time he was associated with Monge and Berthollet ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... is modelled on that of the Giralda, at Seville; while the new University Club, on Fifth Avenue, is simply a Florentine fortress-palace of somewhat disproportionate height. But along with a good deal of sheer reproduction of European models, one finds a great deal of ingenious and inventive adaptation, to say nothing of a very delicate taste in the treatment of detail. New York abounds, it is true, with monuments of more than one bygone and detestable period of architectural fashion; but ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... is not the real inventor of the machine: he only carries on the work which others began thousands of years ago. He takes the results of other people's inventive genius and adds his quota. But he claims the whole. And when he has done his work and added his contribution to the age-long development of mechanical modes of production, he must depend again upon society, upon the labor ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Gibbon's elegant library at Lausanne,—the social environment of Hallam, Grote, or Macaulay with the rustic isolation of Wordsworth, the economies of Shelley, or the life-struggle of Jerrold. Of course, there can thence be inferred no general rule; and the very differences in temperament between inventive and reproductive writers suggest a consequent diversity of habits; but the very idea of historical composition, on an extensive scale and as a permanent occupation, implies the leisure which competency alone yields, the means indispensable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... know these things, happy are we if we do them." We know that God orders the lot; and to meet it with the energies it requires and permits, neither more nor less,—to fill it at every available point with the light and action of an earnest and spiritually inventive mind, though its scene be no wider than a sick chamber, and its action narrowed to patient suffering, and gentle, cheerful words, and all the light it can emit the thankful quiet of a trustful eye,—without chafing as though God had misjudged our sphere, and placed us wrong, and did not know ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... In an inventive tour de force that seldom, if ever, has been equalled for its brilliance and far-reaching consequences, James Watt radically altered the steam engine not only by adding a separate condenser but by creating a whole new family of linkages. His approach was largely empirical, as ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... first steps toward the exact subdivisions of time which we now enjoy. Unrest, progress, discontent with things that be, we must acknowledge, have, from the appearance of the first clock to the present hour, been the powers which have driven on the inventive genius of watch and clockmakers to designate some new and more acceptable system for regulating the course of the movement. In consequence of this restless search after the best, a very considerable number of escapements have ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... Emanuel Swedenborg constitute one of the puzzles and marvels of metaphysics and psychology. A man remarkable for his practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versed in all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he has evolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of transcendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparently lifeless practical facts beautiful and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... unwelcome visitors. Obed showed how the concealed bunks could be made ready, and, all of them were loud in their expressions of satisfaction over having such comfortable lodgings for the night. They mentally blessed the memory of the said Mr. Coombs, whose forethought and inventive ingenuity had planned all these wonderful adjuncts ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... this drama of an inventive and exacting faith, Laura Fountain passed like a being from another world, an alien and a mocking spirit. She said nothing, but her eyes were satires. The effect of her presence in the house was felt probably by all its inmates, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about without a small Testament in his pocket, he was able to lighten the time by reading portions of it aloud. After that they took to relating their "lives and adventures" to each other, and then the inventive spirits among them took to "spinning long-winded yarns." Thus a couple of weeks passed away, during which these unfortunate prisoners of war went through every stage of feeling between hope and despair over ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... Anticipating the havoc of endowing all mankind with equal powers, she established a wide diversity in the range of human ability. To one she has given the gift of sagacity to achieve success in the world of trade; to another mechanical skill to create the ideals of inventive genius into reality; to another the highly artistic sense, and withholding these higher attributes from still others, she has chosen to endow them with a wealth of muscular force that the physical requirements of organized human ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... that night care was in the ascendant, and by eleven, when he discerned the red glow of Mr. Travers's pipe set as a beacon against a dark background of hedge, the boatswain was ready to curse his inventive powers. Mr. Travers greeted him cheerily and, honestly attributing the fact to good food and a couple of pints of beer he had had since the boatswain left him, said that he ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... with 5,000,000 square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of only 39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As France had, a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to the backward peoples of Africa ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... of his family, he was destitute of the means;—and there were fewer education societies, and other facilities for obtaining eleemosynary instruction in those days than in the present age of disinterested benevolence. The inventive genius of the woman was therefore not slow to devise a project by which her friend might be served, while at the same time her own favorite design might be furthered—and that, too, without making, even prospectively, any essential encroachment upon the means of her husband. For the attainment ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... the wire of the pasture fence he had to resort to his inventive powers. There are plenty of wire stretchers that can be purchased; but they ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... Japan, before the introduction of the European civilization, but here it had lacked much of its intensity, through its non-originality. The Japanese had no inventive pride, and it was with little reluctance that they abandoned their old theories which they borrowed from China, and adopted new civilization of the West. The Chinese cannot forget that whatever civilization they possess is their own, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... other countries may produce more remarkable work of different kinds, or more uniformly accomplished, and more technically excellent work in the same kind. But for originality, volume, generic resemblance of character, and individual independence of trait, exuberance of inventive thought, and splendour of execution in detached passages—the Elizabethan drama from Sackville to Shirley stands alone in the history of the world. The absurd overestimate which has sometimes been made of its individual practitioners, the hyperbole of the language ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... science, by giving the students a free choice of studies, and by shortening the course when desired. But the mechanical idea in the new education seemed to be the attraction. The boys were seized with a passion for doing something with their hands, and their inventive faculties were quickened, increasing in a remarkable degree their interest in their work ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... incident is parallel to the struggle which a repentant man must wage against his lower nature. When the struggle is over he is a new man, a prince of god. Religion had become real to him and his whole future career is built on a new plan. He is still inventive and ambitious and persevering but is God's man ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... country of progress. Within the last half century the number of States in this Union has nearly doubled, the population has almost quadrupled, and our boundaries have been extended from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Our territory is checkered over with railroads and furrowed with canals. The inventive talent of our country is excited to the highest pitch, and the numerous applications for patents for valuable improvements distinguish this age and this people from all others. The genius of one American has enabled our commerce to move against wind and tide and that of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... rationality. But Hegel's rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself distinguishes from understanding. The latter is analytical, its function is to abstract, to define, to compile, to classify. Reason, on the other hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel's special use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men's insight into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far into the reign of King Charles; ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... slept upon his interview with Ferris, and now sat in his laboratory, amidst the many witnesses of his inventive industry, with the model of the breech-loading cannon on the workbench before him. He had neatly mounted it on wheels, that its completeness might do him the greater credit with the consul when he should show it him, but the carriage had been broken in his pocket, ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... of an indomitable temper, and had strong faith in that maxim of his race, which may be transcribed thus:—"If one effort fail you, try another." To carry out this principle, then, did Finch draw from the cunning inventive of his brain a plan which he could not doubt for a moment would be successful. The reader may blush while we record the fact, of Finch, deeming a partner necessary to the gaining his purpose, finding a willing accomplice in one of Montague's clerks, to whom he disclosed the secret ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... conceal it in a secret place in her heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but would find only a void; still, she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely the fact which she had wished to conceal, which, being the truth, was the one ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... imitation. We have, therefore, less hesitation in referring the more ambitious of our artists to this prohibition in Sir Joshua's Discourse. The greater the authority the more injurious the delinquency. We therefore adduce as examples, works of our most inventive and able artist, his "Macbeth" and his "Hamlet"—they are greatly overloaded with the faults of superabundance of ornament, and want unity; yet are they works of great power, and such as none but a painter of high genius could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... very much of it," declared Ned. "He hired the best part of that made. Andy hasn't any inventive ideas. He probably said he wanted an airship, and his dad put up the money and hired men to build it for him. Andy, Sam and Pete ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... was when he was at this work that Dr. Garnett pictures him so vividly—"the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile, inventive creator, his head an arsenal of expedients and every failure pregnant with a remedy, imperious or suasive as suits his turn; terrible in wrath or exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting, entreating, as like an eminent personage of ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... is interesting to remember that the famous Parrott guns were made at this place, and many implements of warfare during our civil strife. The foundry was started by Gouverneur Kemble in 1828, and brought into wide renown by the inventive genius of Major Parrott. Cold Spring has a further distinction in having the first ground broken, about three miles from the river, for the greatest engineering enterprise of the age—"The Water Supply of the Catskills," when Mayor McClellan, in June, 1907, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... of his presence he was wretched; when with them he left them no peace; he would fling at them paper darts, almost strangle them with an impromptu lasso, demolish their playhouse, decapitate their dolls, and do all the mischief his really inventive genius could suggest. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... itself to our forefathers at the Renaissance or to our fathers fifty years ago. No new continent then rose up beyond the western seas. No forgotten literature suddenly flashed out its long-lost splendours. No vast discoveries of science transformed the universe and the interpretation of it. The inventive freshness and intellectual confidence that are born of such things were denied to the Empire. Its temperament was neither artistic, nor literary, nor scientific. ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... An inventive morning! After waking, and before I had finished dressing, I had devised a new and much neater form in which to work my Rules for Long Division, and also decided to bring out my "Games and Puzzles," and Part iii. of "Curiosa ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... in the mean time, satieted with Melanthe, and as much in love with Louisa as a man of his temper could be, was contriving all the ways his inventive wit could furnish him with to get handsomely rid of the one, and attain the enjoyment of the other. As he had spent many years in a continual course of gallantry, and had made and broke a thousand engagements, he easily found expedients for throwing ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... time must be lost in making my will." Monsieur Crapaud was too wise to express any astonishment; and his master began to hunt for a tidy-looking stone (paper and cambric were both at an end). They were all rough and dirty; but necessity had made the Viscount inventive, and he took a couple and rubbed them together till he had polished both. Then he pulled out the little pencil, and for the next half hour composed and wrote busily. When it was done he lay down, and read it to his friend. This was Monsieur the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities, and according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which were proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own invention. His talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and inventive combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of his grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his instructor's hope,—leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with which he overturned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... meaning and derivation of Artemis, or Artamis, our author knows nothing (ii. 741). I say, 'even [Greek] ([Greek], bear) has occurred to inventive men.' Possibly I invented it myself, though not addicted ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... studying mechanical subjects, or in modelling experimental machines. Amongst his various speculations while at Willington, he tried to discover a means of Perpetual Motion. Although he failed, as so many others had done before him, the very efforts he made tended to whet his inventive faculties, and to call forth his dormant powers. He went so far as to construct the model of a machine for the purpose. It consisted of a wooden wheel, the periphery of which was furnished with glass tubes ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... purposes. Documents were signed in this way by persons who were either too illiterate to write their names or too occupied with business to take the time to sign the great numbers of documents which were brought before them. The peculiar characteristics of the Chinese alphabet early prompted this inventive people to the use of these types, for such these devices were. The Chinese are said to have used movable types made of porcelain at a very early period. The use of the seal or the stamp bearing a single ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... the Negro's mind followed slavishly in the beaten path of imitation. He has demonstrated that he possesses also a high order of intellect by his inventive genius. The "lubricator" now being used on nearly all the railroad engines in the United States was invented by a colored man, Mr. E. McCoy, of Detroit, Michigan. Eugene Burkins, a Negro, was inventor of the Burkins' Automatic Machine Gun, concerning which Admiral Dewey said it was "by far the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Mr. Bell should move from Salem to Boston, take an additional room at the Exeter Place house (which would give him the entire floor where his laboratory was), and unhampered by further teaching plunge into the inventive career for which heaven had so richly endowed him and which he loved with all his heart. You can picture to yourselves the joy these decisions gave him and the eagerness with which he and Watson took up their ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... and give her the best cabin," etc. etc. The Duke wisely abstained from pressing his cause, or asking why she qualified her plans. At last he got away, after promising to do every conceivable and inconceivable thing which she should now or at any future time evolve from the depths of her inventive ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... China was on fire to be her literary self again. A great ball was set rolling; learning went forward by leaps and bounds. The enthusiasm, it must be said, took directions legitimate and the reverse;—bless you, why should any written page at all be considered lost, when there were men in Han with inventive genius of their own, and a pretty skill at forgery? The Son of Heaven was paying well; to it, then, minds and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... we read of a character who was satisfied with nothing, "even pudding would not content him," and this unconscionable fellow worried his family out of all heart with his new ways and ideas. He represents a progressive, inventive race. He was building a great house, but the days were too short; so, like Maui, he determined to catch the sun in nets and ropes; but the sun went on. At last he succeeded; he caught him. The good man then had time to finish his house, but the sun cried and cried "until the island of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... shop was hung round with Latin quotations, and he would frequently point out to his acquaintance the several scenes in Roderick Random, pertaining to himself, which had their foundation, not in the Doctor's inventive fancy, but in truth and reality. The Doctor's meeting with him at a barber's shop at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the subsequent mistake at the Inn, their arrival together in London, and the assistance they experienced from Strap's friend were all of that description. The deceased, to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... other things, he was an Alchemist; and in Wood's Athenae by Bliss (I. 640-1) there is a curious extract from his Mineralogical book, giving an account of a process of his for making pure gold artificially, though, as he says, not with profit. One thinks kindly of this poor inventive spirit hanging on upon Hartlib with his "Schedule of New Inventions," and of Hartlib's interest in him.] Some of my learned friends in France do highly commend one Palissi to be a man of the like ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... to work very hard; as a rule, they could have one holiday in the week. What with Sundays, wakes, and fairs, Irish weavers worked only two hundred days in the year. In England the weaver often had to spend one day out of the six hunting around the country for yarn for weft. So inventive wits were set at work to enlarge the supply of yarn, and spinning machinery was the result. Thereafter the looms and weavers were pushed hard and had to turn to invention. The shuttle had always simply been passed from ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... age, merely because it asserts the sacrifice of a young and beautiful heiress to the jealousy or the avarice of a stepmother. When this is granted, the story of the pie with all its horrors may safely be ascribed to the inventive genius of a minstrel. On the whole, Radcliffe is a place which, not only from its antiquity and splendour, but from the great families which have branched out from it, and the romantic tradition attached to it, can scarcely be surveyed without ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... us have, work done by such men in some out-of-the-way hamlet—where to-day even few strangers ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own doors; in such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so careful, and so inventive, that nothing in its way could go further. And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a third party to the brain that conceived and the hand that fashioned it. Nor are such works rare. The throne of the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... the necessary steps are taken To shield the cattle from dread Winter's rage. Necessity—stern master—does awaken Their full inventive powers, and they engage With ready ardor pens and sheds to wage; And in the absence of commodious barn, They stack with care their straw, and thus are sage Compared with many whom no dangers warn, And who, though often suffering, will not stoop ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... powerful section of the workers, tribunals which boast their ability to paralyse every disobedient manufacturer, {222a} "and so bring ruin on the man who had given them profitable employment for many a year." He speaks of a time {222b} "when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members." A pity that the English working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... curious interest to all visitors. In one end of the long room was the huge pile of seed-cotton which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical English savans discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric which "might be useful but for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... heathendom. The age and period of these crosses, the greater influence of one or other of these schools have wrought differences; the beauty and delicacy of the carving is in most cases remarkable, and we stand amazed at the superabundance of the inventive faculty that could produce such wondrous work. A great characteristic of these early sculptures is the curious interlacing scroll-work, consisting of knotted and interlaced cords of divers patterns and designs. There is an immense variety in this carving of these early ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense—in the sense of inventive gusto and expression—so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still bright with novelty. The architect, a French lay brother, still alive and well, and meditating fresh ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... primitive, archetypal, primordial, pristine; creative, productive, inventive, ingenious. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... harp called 'Kantele,' which was for many centuries the national instrument of Finland. His materials were simple—the bones of a pike, with teeth of the same for tuning pegs, and hair from the tail of a spirited horse for strings. Alas! that harp fell into the sea and was swept away, and so the inventive god set to work to make another, this time of birchwood with pegs of oak, strung with the silky hair of a very young girl. This completed, he sat down to play, with magical results. Wild beasts became tame, birds flocked from the air, fishes from the sea, to hear ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... told, yet ne'er to be forgot, What wanton horrors marked their wreckful path! The peasant butchered in his ruined cot, The hoary priest even at the altar shot, Childhood and age given o'er to sword and flame, Woman to infamy;—no crime forgot, By which inventive demons might proclaim Immortal hate to man, and scorn ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... chosen: this Teacher rightly divides the word of truth, giving to each his portion in due season. In this lesson the diligence of worldly men is employed to rebuke the slothfulness of Christians. Those who make perishing things their portion are thoughtful, inventive, energetic, decisive in prosecuting their object; how thoughtless and slow are the heirs of the kingdom in the work of their ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horuses, and attributes to him a reign of 3226 years. He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a feudal deity. Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing—in fine, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... fragmentary. They owe the full and closely interconnected form which they assume in the Shahna-meh and other modern Persian writings, partly to a gradual accretion during the course of centuries, partly to the inventive genius of Firdausi, who wove the various and often isolated legends into a pseudo-history, and amplified them at his own pleasure. How much of the substance of Firdausi's poems belongs to really primitive myth is ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... work. I will only say this. In my opinion it is highly distinguished of its kind (the second part in particular is full of marvellous beauty); but it must be accepted for what it is. It makes no sort of pretence to display those constructive and inventive artifices which are indispensable to a great masterpiece of impersonal fiction. It is not fiction. It is the exquisite expression of a temperament. It is ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... will say—'Pelargoniums for the hall, Miss Percival, and some nice maidenhair.' He's not inventive, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Swift liked it was a good fight. The clash of diverse interests was the breath of life to the young fellow. And for some years now, always connected in some way with the development of his inventive genius, he had been entangled in battles both of wits and physical powers. Here was the suggestion of something that would entail a struggle of ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... the interest taken in his proceedings, Vane trudged along till it seemed to him that it was time to climb up out of the lane by the steep sand bank, and this he did, but paused half-way without a scientific or inventive idea in his head, ready to prove himself as boyish as anyone of his years, for he had come upon a magnificent patch of brambles sending up in the hot autumn sunshine cone after cone of the blackest of blackberries such as made him drive ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... class to which the world, in the latitude of its expressions, often ascribes genius, but which possess only a superior capacity for the application of other men's notions, unconnected with any unusual portion of the inventive faculty. ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... was one who, owing to his successes and rapid progress, held a place of his own in the school. He was eighteen years old, and even at that early age the philosophical spirit, the concentrated ardour, the passionate love of truth, and the inventive sagacity which have since made his name celebrated were apparent to those who knew him. I refer to M. Berthelot, whose room was next to mine. From the day that we knew each other, we became fast friends. Our eagerness to learn was equally great, and we had both had very different kinds ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... ma'am," said the Virginian, more inventive, "I'll take them. Letters for Judge Henry's." He knew the judge's office ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... not been due to any legislation in America or Europe, nor to any decrees or despotic policy in Asia, but to the inventive faculties of one Charles Burleigh, of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the inventor ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... rather the despotism which supports slavery, has no compassion, and it is one of its characteristics never to think of sparing the sinews of the wretched creature called a slave. Hence it is slow to adopt helps, with which a beneficent Providence has furnished us, by giving to man an inventive faculty for easing his burthens, or by submitting the beasts of the field to his dominion and his use, and it flies to expedients which are contrary to nature and reason. How then can such a system ever answer? Were an English farmer to have recourse to such ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... refresh the thirsty earth, and famine, consequently, visibly on the approach; I say, would such a state of things, as resulting from the constant laws of Nature, be 'reconcilable with the attributes we assign to the Deity,' or with any attributes which in these inventive days could be assigned to him, so as to represent him as anything but the tormenter, rather than the kind benefactor, of his creatures? Life, in such a condition, would be like the unceasingly threatened ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... coming to believe that the most significant fact about man and his civilization is their improvability. Individual inventive genius has added improvement after improvement until it would seem that man's mastery over nature is to be well-nigh complete as these ideas and inventions are socialized and extended to benefit all. We are now entering ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... shy, dreamy, sensitive, inventive, and a liar. He and his brother Dick were together walking in the shabby High Street, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... an inventive genius. He invented things for the pleasure of it rather than with any idea of ultimately profiting from the results of his ingenuity, which may explain why it was that his friends deemed many of his contrivances a sheer waste of time. Among other things that Jarley ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... purpose, formed a case in which he thought that the party calumniated was bound to bring the party so offending under the notice of their lordships. Lord Brougham proceeded to arraign the Daily News for an example of this crime which would have done no dishonor to the inventive faculties of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... of bronze, although they still used polished stone implements also. We find chisels, daggers, rings, buttons, and spear-heads, all made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, and fashioned by the skilled hands of these early Celtic folk. As they became more civilised, being of an inventive mind, they discovered the use of iron and found it a more convenient metal for fashioning axes to cut ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... the latter, "you can easily imagine that they who are placed near the point where the two lines meet, have no sinecures. To speak the truth, they blackguard each other with all their abilities, he who manifests the most inventive genius in this high accomplishment, being commonly thought the cleverest fellow. Now, sir, none but a patriot could, in the nature of things, endure this without some other motive than his country's good, and so ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... meant to represent the idea of a bird or animal. In other words, the first stage of picture-writing did not go beyond the mere representation of an eagle by the picture of an eagle. But this, obviously, would confine the presentation of ideas within very narrow limits. In due course some inventive genius conceived the thought of symbolizing a picture. To him the outline of an eagle might represent not merely an actual bird, but the thought of strength, of courage, or of swift progress. Such a use of symbols obviously extends the range of utility of a nascent art of writing. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the river bottom were gates distressingly crude; clumsy, hingeless panels of board fence, which I must dismount and lift about by sheer brawn of shoulder. Such gates combine the greatest weight with the least possible exercise of man's inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate. This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor—who does the lifting with guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy Sawtelle ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... lunchtime, for it chanced that John Barret was one of those men whose tendency of heart and mind is to turn everything to its best uses, and generally to strive after the highest point of perfection in everything, with a view to the advancement of human felicity. This tendency called into exercise his inventive faculties, inducing him to search after improvements of all descriptions. Thus it was natural that he and Jackman should enter into a keen controversy, as to what was the best method of constructing the raft in detail; and that, when the faithful ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... federal aid be extended to the Atlanta Exposition,[96] the question of the progress of the Negro race, Murray favored such an exposition because, he declared, it would offer opportunity to have registered the facts and statistics of the Negro's achievement since emancipation. As evidence of the inventive genius of his race, he submitted to Congress at this time a list of patents which had been granted by the government for the inventions of Negroes. Murray spoke briefly of what the Negroes were doing and thinking and, in conclusion, gave ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... may fill the shadows with almost anything which caprice or desire may suggest. Our curiously inventive minds have always loved to fill in our ignorances with their creations. We formerly had the shadowed backgrounds of the universe to populate with the creatures of our fear or fancy, but now, strangely enough, since science has let in its light ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... As masqueraders, to disguise,) It yet was hoped-and well that hope Was answered by the young and gay— That in the toilet's task to-day Fancy should take her wildest scope;— That the rapt milliner should be Let loose thro fields of poesy, The tailor, in inventive trance, Up to the heights of Epic clamber, And all the regions of Romance Be ransackt by the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... series of ages to evolve even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now—clever and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies, and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and include all that it contains—in a word, all things in any way related to it. Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks nourish the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... female voices. His cantatas have been greatly admired, and his hymn tunes are unsurpassed for their purity and sweetness, while his anthems, his oratorio of "Jacob," and indeed all that he wrote, show the hand and the inventive gift of ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... they eat; And there's amends for much bereft In better thanks for much that's left! Jane is not fair, yet pleases well The eye in which no others dwell; And features somewhat plainly set, And homely manners leave her yet The crowning boon and most express Of Heaven's inventive tenderness, A woman. But I do her wrong, Letting the world's eyes guide my tongue! She has a handsomeness that pays No homage to the hourly gaze, And dwells not on the arch'd brow's height And lids which softly lodge the light, Nor ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... inventive faculties quickened by the stress of child-bearing and child-rearing, would learn to convert to their own uses the most available portion of their environment. It would be under the attention of the women that plants were first utilised for food. Seeds would be beaten ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... and a little bread, (at the least sixty hours old,) compose the privileged bill of fare for his breakfast. But precisely it is, by the way, in relation to this earliest meal, that human folly has in one or two instances shown itself most ruinously inventive. The less variety there is at that meal, the more is the danger from any single luxury; and there is one, known by the name of 'muffins,' which has repeatedly manifested itself to be a plain and direct bounty upon suicide. Darwin, in his 'Zoonomia,' reports a case ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... vast power, Lord Byron possessed, beyond all question, the greatest degree of originality of any poet of this age. In this rare quality he has no parallel in any age. All other poets and inventive authors are measured in their excellence by the accuracy with which they fit sentiments appropriate not only to the characters they create, but to the situations in which they place them: the works of Lord Byron display the opposite to this, and with the most extraordinary ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... whatever they may be, they will always be colonial. What is colonial necessarily lacks originality. A country that borrows its language, its laws, and its religion, cannot have its inventive powers much developed. They got civilised very soon, but their ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... order that all men may think alike, favours the growth of science alone; and scientific men have the least individuality of all men who become great, because science is not creative like art and literature, nor destructive like soldiering, but inquisitive, inventive and speculative in the first place, and secondly, in our age, financial. In old times, when a discovery was made, men asked, 'What does it mean? To what will it lead?' Now, the first question is, 'What will it be worth?' That does not detract from the merit of science, but ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the adaptation of the glue and molasses roller, to print the first edition of a newspaper that was ever run from a cylinder press—the historic edition of The London Times. The problem of the inking apparatus solved, there was no longer any limit to the exercise of inventive genius in the advancement of the printing art; and it is, therefore, to the printer's roller, more than to any one thing, that that art owes its wonderful ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... industry, though it calls for less capital for a given output; and the striking fact is that this effect may be realized by means of devices which actually save capital at particular points in the industry. If, after power looms were introduced, some inventive genius had made them cost only a quarter as much as on their first introduction they had cost, the profits of the business would have been increased and, in time, far more capital in the shape of spinning machinery, engines, etc., would have been required than had ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... picture-oneself, figure to oneself; vorstellen [G.]. float in the mind; suggest itself &c (thought) 451. Adj. imagined &c v.; ben trovato [It]; air drawn, airbuilt^. imagining &c v., imaginative; original, inventive, creative, fertile. romantic, high flown, flighty, extravagant, fanatic, enthusiastic, unrealistic, Utopian, Quixotic. ideal, unreal; in the clouds, in nubibus [Lat.]; unsubsantial^ &c 4; illusory &c (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, mythological; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... intelligence is good, and in dramatic and literary criticisms it is second only to the Argus in Australia. But its news is comparatively poor, owing to its being only a single-sheet paper, and it caters for a far inferior class than the Argus. Its inventive ability, in which it altogether surpasses the London Daily Telegraph, has brought it the nickname of 'Ananias,' and it is essentially the people's journal. Just as in politics the Argus is not only the organ but the leader of ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... was thus secured, but not nearly enough for the object in view.* Some more potent means, therefore, had to be employed, and the inventive minister evolved a new scheme. If he could only induce foreign capitalists to undertake manufacturing industries in Russia, they would, at one and the same time, bring into the country the capital required, and they would cooperate ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of credit and praise should be awarded to Chief Engineer William W. W. Wood, of the navy, to whose inventive abilities and experience in submarine warfare we owe the contrivance of the torpedo and the successful arrangement by which it is handled and exploded. The one fired by Lieutenant Cushing contained but ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... a freak of the workman rather than as having any particular value along the line of evolution of pottery forms; and it is interesting to note that bowls of this form have been quite recently made by the modern English potters in South Devonshire, as the result of the inventive ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... whose missing left little finger caused him to be nicknamed the Cripple. About what they had originally fallen out was not clear to any one, to themselves least of all. As the case stood when the second lamp was lit, Scholar had called Cripple a something-or-other liar, and Cripple, who was not inventive, had retorted by stigmatising Scholar as another. Further recriminations followed, and their pistols were drawn; but as the audience had a strong objection to indiscriminate shooting, by which it was not likely to benefit, the belligerents were seized. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... more than ever that which the inscrutable future held for me, I sat down and framed an advertisement, which I contemplated putting in all the newspapers, weeklies, and monthly periodicals, offering a handsome reward for any suggestion which might result in ridding me of the cockney ghost. The inventive mind of man has been able to cope successfully with rats and mice and other household pests. Why, then, should there not be somewhere in the world a person of sufficient ingenuity to cope with an obnoxious spirit? If rat -dynamite and rough on June-bugs were possible, why was it not likely ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... to manage kept pace with the rapid growth of the new enterprise, while Ingram's knowledge and inventive talents proved that as superintendent of the steel plant he was the right man in the ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... fumbling"—mere treading of water—in this adjustment of key relationship, see the Recapitulation of the first movement of Brahms's Second Symphony. To secure unbroken continuity and to avoid vain repetitions[100] there is no portion of the Sonata-Form which has been more modified by the inventive genius of modern composers and by the tendency exemplified in the Symphonic Poem (to be explained in due season). The general validity of Restatement, as shown in the Recapitulation of the Sonata-Form, cannot be questioned; for that depends, as so often pointed out, upon ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... over, yet that to be reminded of it was not satisfactory. Of Fakredeen she spoke much and frequently. She expressed with frankness, even with warmth, her natural and deep regard for him, the interest she took in his career, and the high opinion she entertained of his powers; but she lamented his inventive restlessness, which often arrested action, and intimated how much he might profit by the counsels of a friend more distinguished for consistency ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... availed themselves of these resources, which must have led to great improvements in their architecture, and almost entirely reserved the use of stone for ornamental purposes. This would tend to show, at all events, that the Assyrians were not distinguished for inventive genius. They had wandered northward from the lowlands, where they had dwelt for centuries as a portion of the Chaldean nation. When they separated from it and went off to found cities for themselves, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... outfit, a bicycle-lamp with a chimney to read by, guns, gun-oil, gun-cleaners, flannel cloth to take the place of socks for tramping, vaseline to rub on the same—it would be madness to attempt a complete inventory, but he would be inventive indeed who could name anything that Teutonic pack did not contain in some abbreviated form, purchased somewhere second hand at a fourth its original cost. The German had learned that the parish priest of Tzintzuntzan ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... let me see you here sometimes,—walk with you here,—I would be contented if it were only once or twice in a month. That could injure no one's happiness, and it would sweeten my life. Besides," Philip went on, with all the inventive astuteness of love at one-and-twenty, "if there is any enmity between those who belong to us, we ought all the more to try and quench it by our friendship; I mean, that by our influence on both sides we might bring about a healing of the wounds that have been made in the past, if I could know ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... ball itself, thereby adding somewhat to the minus side of his string—"talking about inventions, I had a curious experience last August. It was an experience which was not only interesting from an inventive point of view, but it had likewise a moral, which, will become more or less obvious as I ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Hanbridge smiled cynically at this impasse produced by an idle word, and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to one side nor to the other. At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents recount to their children with such zest in ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... true torpedo idea of an explosive device to be propelled against an enemy's ship, was not designed to be so propelled on its own buoyancy, but by means of a fishing-boat, in which it lay concealed. Had his inventive genius taken a bolder flight and given us a more finished product in place of this crudity, the Whitehead torpedo would have been anticipated, in something more than mere principle, by ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... the vivacity of the comparison, and only remarking, with reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even in what ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocracies—it may be, worshipped after their death ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... should deal with things seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, noting and remembering with unmatched exactitude every detail of gesture, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Ages, by the nominalists, realists, and conceptualists, in their disputes. With Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of inventive methods. Kant called attention to a priori syntheses. The absolute idealists despised the Aristotelian logic. The followers of Herbart, bound to Aristotle, on the other hand, set in relief those judgments which they called narrative, which are of a character altogether different from other ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... been here in the bush I have understood, as never before, the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have. There is that second edition of Far From the Madding Crowd now, with its delicious woodcuts by H. Paterson. It ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... fleur-de-riz for softening the skin," &c. Further, there are the hairdressers, who provide theatrical wigs of all kinds, and advertise the merits of their "old men's bald pates," which must seem a strange article of sale to those unversed in the mysteries of stage dressing-rooms. One inventive person, it may be noted, loudly proclaims the merits of a certain "spirit gum" he has concocted, using which, as he alleges, "no actor need fear swallowing his moustache"—so runs the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... five. There go the carriages,—look alive! Everything that man can drive, Or his inventive skill contrive,— Yankee buggy or English "chay," Dog-cart, droschky, and smart coupe, A desobligeante quite bulky (French idea of a Yankee sulky); Band in the distance playing a march, Footman standing stiff as starch; Savans, lorettes, deputies, ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... forgot what—the king determined to have a masquerade, and whenever a masquerade or any thing of that kind, occurred at our court, then the talents, both of Hop-Frog and Trippetta were sure to be called into play. Hop-Frog, in especial, was so inventive in the way of getting up pageants, suggesting novel characters, and arranging costumes, for masked balls, that nothing could be done, it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... escape, and evidently with the purpose of softening the irritation between them as much as possible, it was finally, though "temporarily," agreed to take Montholon's word for his being at Longwood. On the 21st of September, the priests and Dr Antomarchi arrived. Napoleon, always active and inventive, now attempted to interest the Emperor of Russia in his liberation. It must be owned, that this was rather a bold attempt for the man who had invaded Russia, ravaged its provinces, massacred its troops, and finished by leaving Moscow in flames. But he dexterously limited himself to explaining the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... tendency of their teaching, or by a yet more fatal demerit,—their lack of interest. They are in some respects notably tame and puerile,—with a puerility which is not childish simplicity, but a lack of inventive fancy, and which exhibits itself in bald repetition. The giant, for instance, always complains of a smell of Christian blood, and is always answered by the formula, that a crow flew over the chimney and must have dropped a bone down it; the hero almost always meets three old women, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... since your friend Malicorne is such an inventive genius, let him find me a means of being adored by Monsieur, and a pretext to ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I went to one of the principal Fire Brigade Stations. We all know, or ought to know, the Americans are an inventive race. Much I saw showed great ingenuity, and not only that but high powers of organization. I may mention one instance. The horses for service stand ready harnessed except their collars (the harness is peculiarly simple). The said collars are suspended in front of the fire-engine, as far from ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... proofs that man's inventive genius was at work among farm implements. Worlidge mentions[347] an engine for setting corn, invented by Gabriel Plat, made of two boards bored with wide holes 4 in. apart, set in a frame, with a funnel to each hole. It was fitted with iron pins 5 in. long to 'play ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... ceased at the waist, leaving a Jaeger-like and unmedieval gap thence to the tops of the stockings. The inventive genius of woman triumphantly bridged it, but in a manner which imposes upon history almost insuperable delicacies of narration. Penrod's father was an old-fashioned man: the twentieth century had failed to shake his faith in red flannel for cold weather; and it was while Mrs. Schofield ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her daughter, the Countess of Bute, over a year later [January 1st, 1755], remarked that "my friend Smollett . . . has certainly a talent for invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work." Lady Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly think of as Smollett's was the ability to work over his own experience into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett's vigorous ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... unforeseen occurred, before a full year has passed the job might be done. Were any surprises in store? They didn't seem to think it was probable that the Germans had any surprises in store.... The Germans are not an inventive people; they are merely a thorough people. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... forward those negotiations with the papal court which were of vital importance and of the highest difficulty. In a word, it was he who had convoked this meeting to elect a chief and who asked the proxies of the absent. Are we then to believe that this bold spirit, this far-seeing mind, this astute, inventive, and politic Ignatius, born to rule other minds, and able always to subjugate his own will; that this contriver of a despotism, after having carried the principle of unconditional obedience, after having won the consent of his companions to the proposal that their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... these happy scenes confirms me in the belief, that had my brother WILLIAM not then been interrupted in his philosophical pursuits, we should have had much earlier proofs of his inventive genius. My father was a great admirer of astronomy, and had some knowledge of that science; for I remember his taking me, on a clear frosty night, into the street, to make me acquainted with several of the most beautiful constellations, after we had been gazing at a comet which ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... queer boy. He was of an inventive turn of mind, and given up to science. His experiments rarely succeeded, and when they did they almost invariably landed him in disgrace. Still he persevered and hoped some ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... over the legends of heathendom. The age and period of these crosses, the greater influence of one or other of these schools have wrought differences; the beauty and delicacy of the carving is in most cases remarkable, and we stand amazed at the superabundance of the inventive faculty that could produce such wondrous work. A great characteristic of these early sculptures is the curious interlacing scroll-work, consisting of knotted and interlaced cords of divers patterns and designs. There is an immense variety in ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain. Dries me there, all-the foolish, dull, and crudy vapours which environ it: makes it apprehensive, quick, inventive; full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered over to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit—The second property of your excellent sherris, is, the warming of the blood; which, before, cold and settled, left the liver white and pale: which is the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... old customs are held, which causes them to regard the fact that their fathers had this fashion as reason enough for their having it, and above all to the total absence of all but oral tradition. But so great a faith have I in the lack of inventive power in the African, that I feel sure all their customs, had we the material that has slipped down into the great swamp of time, could be traced back either, as I have said, to some natural phenomenon, or to the thing being advisable, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... customs of the peoples of his day in the Far East. He was not satisfied with doing this, but added to his narrative a number of on-dit more or less marvellous in character, which he collected from credulous or inventive persons with whom he came into contact, principally from mariners ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... some distance lying on the ground. Such unpromising materials as dust and sage brush had not quenched their inventive power or hampered their imaginations. They played with as an absorbed an industry here as in their own garden at home. They had scraped the earth into mounded shapes marked with the print of baby fingers and furrowed with paths. One led to a central mound crowned with a wild sunflower blossom. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... the senses employed or implied as here described means much more than mere previous consideration or reflection, which may be very feeble. It is, in fact, "constructive," which, as inventive, implies active thought. "Forethought stimulates, aids the success of honest aims." Therefore, as the active principle in mental work, I regard it as a kind of self-impulse, or that minor part in the division of the force employed which sets the major into action. ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... between the hunter and the beast-mind the intellectual powers of perception, memory, reason and will were developed; experience and knowledge by experience were enlarged, language and the graphic arts were fostered, the inventive faculty was evoked and developed, and primitive science was fostered in the unfolding of numbers, metrics, clocks, astronomy, history and the philosophy of causation. Beliefs and practices with reference ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... everything appertaining to camp life attached to each soldier by a hook. Marcy, who saw the humorous side at once, said to Davis: "It's no use to court-martial this man. The matter will be made public and the laugh will be upon us. Besides, a man who has the inventive genius that he has displayed, as well as the faculty of design, ill-directed though they be, is too valuable to the service to be trifled with." Derby therefore was not brought to grief, and in time Davis's anger was sufficiently ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... I returned from a row, we would often see the children waiting for us, running like sand-spiders along the beach. They always liked to swim in company with a grown-up of buoyant temperament and inventive mind, and the float offered limitless opportunities for enjoyment while bathing. All dutiful parents know the game of "stage-coach"; each child is given a name, such as the whip, the nigh leader, the off wheeler, the old lady passenger, and, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... descent, who made for him a happy home during fifty-seven years.[1] He bought a house in Hempstead, expecting to remain there; and in the household, as in business, he gave rein to his ardent and versatile inventive faculty. One of his domestic contrivances rocked the cradle, fanned away the flies, and played a lullaby to the baby. He sold the patent in Connecticut to a Yankee peddler for a horse and wagon, and the peddler's stock, ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... literal. An author gets no credit whatever for inventive faculty—his characters and stories are supposedly real people and real things. I am asked how I came to know so much about such and such a thing. I once wrote a love story with an unhappy ending ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... quite beside himself, half mad, half senseless from sheer terror and amazement. Presently he began to gaze about him with desperate alertness, like a wild beast that has fallen into a trap and looks eagerly for a way out of it, rallying all its powers for a final struggle, becoming resourceful and inventive in proportion to its peril, and forgetting the very instinct of life in the longing for freedom, at last gets to fear nobody and nothing. After fruitless struggles it surrenders in despair, lies down, closes its eyes, and the next instant once more begins ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... form of inventive genius. Tom Swift is a bright, ingenious boy and his inventions and adventures make the ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... the humble home at Nazareth; and from these qualified informants Matthew and Luke probably derived the knowledge of which they wrote. The record made by those who knew is marked by impressive brevity. In this absence of detail we may see evidence of the genuineness of the scriptural account. Inventive writers would have supplied, as, later, such did supply, what we seek in vain within the chapters of the Gospels. With hallowed silence do the inspired scribes honor the boyhood of their Lord; he who seeks to invent circumstances and to invest the life of Christ with ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... paying more attention to science, by giving the students a free choice of studies, and by shortening the course when desired. But the mechanical idea in the new education seemed to be the attraction. The boys were seized with a passion for doing something with their hands, and their inventive faculties were quickened, increasing in a remarkable degree their interest in their work ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... no man but himself can say; but it is reasonable to suppose that, man of science though he was, he was still sufficiently human to regard with critical yet innocent pride and exultation the wonderful fabric which owed its existence to the inventive ingenuity of his fertile brain. It is probable, too, that when he had at length gratified himself with an exhaustive contemplation of its many points of interest, he went on board the ship, and with his own eyes and hands made a final ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... is much too well established for that, even with professed philosophers; I am only surprised at his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... weather, and too full of anxiety to mind either cold or wet. He had, indeed, almost always felt gloomy weather exciting rather than depressing. For one thing, it seemed, when he was indoors, to close him about with protection from uncongenial interruption, leaving the freer his inventive faculty; and now that he was abroad in it, and no inventive faculty left awake, it seemed to clothe him with congenial sympathy, for the weather was just the same inside him. And now, as he strode along with his eyes on the ground, he scarcely saw any of the objects about ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... drink, and eminently to no other vice; hard in bargaining, but just; surly and respectless, as in all democracies; thirsty, industrious, and cleanly; disheartened upon the least ill-success, and insolent upon good; inventive in manufactures, and cunning in traffick: and generally, for matter of action, that natural slowness of theirs, suits better (by reason of the advisedness and perseverance it brings with it) than the rashness and changeableness of the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... of improvement's hammer as it fell on the anvil of our possessions. Long lines of streets passed through the meadow-lands, and where, in less level places, rocks and stones were in the path, the power of inventive genius was applied and the victory gained. Some of our people felt it keenly. To father it was an advantage, but to ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... rank among exhibitors, does not suffice to meet the increasingly urgent demands of our manufacturers. The efforts of the Commissioner-General are ably directed toward a strictly representative display of all that most characteristically marks American achievement in the inventive arts, and most adequately shows the excellence of our ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... thought themselves released from all the ties of nature and humanity towards this brood of Satan, and justified in committing the most savage atrocities upon them. Woe to the Swedish soldier who fell into their hands! All the torments which inventive malice could devise were exercised upon these unhappy victims; and the sight of their mangled bodies exasperated the army to a fearful retaliation. Gustavus Adolphus, alone, sullied the lustre of his heroic character by no act of revenge; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with your mother to-morrow morning and get out ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... to himself, 'I could almost fancy Melpomene in love with me. But I have seldom seen her laugh, and when she has done so now and then, it has usually been at me. That is not much like love. Her last remark was anything but a compliment to my inventive genius.' ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... of agriculture and the earnings of commerce, were of the value of $494,075,498. But, in a few years after the completion of these works, this amount will be doubled. Such is the skilled and educated industry of New England, and such the inventive genius of her people, that there is no limit to her products, except markets and consumers. As New York increases, the swelling tide of the great city will flow over to a vast extent into the adjacent shores of Connecticut and New Jersey, and Hoboken, West Hoboken, Weehawken, Hudson City, Jersey ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... attention of all present was concentrated on the solemnity of the occasion, the thoughts of these ladies were wandering on their own poetical imaginations about 'sweet flags;' or if, again, on the Ninth-day festival,[45] when all the nobles present were exercising their inventive faculties on the subject of Chinese poems, they were to volunteer to pour forth their grand ideas on the dew-laid flowers of the chrysanthemum, thus endeavoring to rival their opponents of the stronger sex. There is a time ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... Prefect. There each individual explained ably, but especially, said Fourier, with much detail, the difficulties which he perceived. As regards the means of vanquishing them, the authorities seemed to be much less inventive. Confidence in administrative eloquence was not yet worn out at that epoch; it was resolved accordingly to have recourse to proclamations. The commanding officer and the Prefect presented each a project. The assembly was ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... force. In the economy of the Aryan household, of which the Slavic race is but a member, each member has hitherto had a special office in the discharge of which its originating force was to be spent. The German has thus done the thinking of the race, the American by his inventive faculty has done the physical comforting of the race, the Frenchman the refining of the race, the Englishman the trading of the race; but the Russian has no such force peculiar to him. The office of the Slavonic ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... advantage of printed books? The answer will be, on ninety-nine persons in a hundred—Because the mystery of printing was not then discovered. But this is altogether a mistake. The secret of printing must have been discovered many thousands of times before it was used, or could be used. The inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stupidity is divine—as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the slow development of the sofa through successive generations of immortal dulness. It took centuries of blockheads to raise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... they never availed themselves of these resources, which must have led to great improvements in their architecture, and almost entirely reserved the use of stone for ornamental purposes. This would tend to show, at all events, that the Assyrians were not distinguished for inventive genius. They had wandered northward from the lowlands, where they had dwelt for centuries as a portion of the Chaldean nation. When they separated from it and went off to found cities for themselves, they ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... Moliere's; and observe how they reveal these prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness and each satisfied when he had done this. In 'Love's Labor's Lost,' Shakspere is trying to amuse by inventive wit and youthful gaiety and ingenuity of device, just as Moliere in the 'Etourdi' is enjoying his own complicating of comic imbroglios, not yet having anything of importance to say on the stage, but practising against the time when he should want to ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically,—a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... community, Thomas," said the Judge, laying down his spectacles and newspaper at the same time. "Mr. Editor Peters and the gossips ought to be infinitely obliged to you for wounding yourself, and affording him an opportunity to display his inventive genius and the brilliancy of his imagination, and giving them something to talk about. Here, Anne, read the article ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... the air in primrose satin, with red-velvet trimming. This mild mixture re-appeared on her head in a primrose hat with a red feather. A gold chain, so big that it would have done for a felon instead of a fool, encircled her neck, and was weighted with innumerable lockets, which in size and inventive taste resembled a poached egg, and betrayed the insular goldsmith. A train three yards long completed this gorgeous figure. She had commenced life a shrimp-girl, and pushed a dredge before her, instead of pulling a silken ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... shortly afterward, seemed likely for a time to be more serious. The sophomore class, exuberant and inventive as ever, were evidently determined to "try it on'' their young professor—in fact, to treat me as they had treated their tutors. Any mistake made by a student at a quiz elicited from sundry benches expressions of regret much too plaintive, or ejaculations of contempt much ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... darkness. Oh Imogen, I may now behold thee for the last time. The moment we sally from this retreat, I may be discovered by that enemy from whom we have so much to fear. I may be confined to all the wantonness of inventive torture, and that beauteous form, and the smiles of that bewitching countenance may be torn from these longing eyes for ever. But here, my shepherdess, we are safe. We may here secure ourselves from sudden intrusion, and ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... should have said. As I am not an inventive liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which the gods forbid, my means would not ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... their profit; and this because, in spite of the violated conscience of the nation, we refuse to give him protection for his property. Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property there recognized as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive genius of our brethren of the North is a source of vast wealth to them and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the patents now before us in this Capital for renewal, was $40,000,000. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... French inventive genius continued to occupy itself with coffee making, and in the invention of Edward Loysel de Santais, of Paris, in 1843, produced the first of the ideas that were later incorporated in the hydrostatic percolator for making "two thousand cups ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... peculiar endowment of inventive genius as a divine gift, involving a special and defined responsibility, and considered himself called of God, as was Bezaleel, to that particular course of invention to which he devoted the chief part of his life. This he often expressed, though with his ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... subdivisions of time which we now enjoy. Unrest, progress, discontent with things that be, we must acknowledge, have, from the appearance of the first clock to the present hour, been the powers which have driven on the inventive genius of watch and clockmakers to designate some new and more acceptable system for regulating the course of the movement. In consequence of this restless search after the best, a very considerable ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... said to have been abolished in the Russian Army. Our own military authorities, on the other hand, declare that it would be unwise to abolish a practice in which the inventive genius of the young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... be lost in making my will." Monsieur Crapaud was too wise to express any astonishment; and his master began to hunt for a tidy-looking stone (paper and cambric were both at an end). They were all rough and dirty; but necessity had made the Viscount inventive, and he took a couple and rubbed them together till he had polished both. Then he pulled out the little pencil, and for the next half hour wrote busily. When it was done he lay down, and read it to his friend. This was Monsieur the Viscount's ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... first country in the world to use the threads of a moth or worm for fabrics. The patience and care and inventive skill required in first making silk were very great. But it gives us an index to invention when we hear that Confucius regarded the making of linen, using the fiber of a plant, as a greater feat than utilizing the strands made by the silkworm. Confucius had a sort of tender sentiment toward the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... many curious and interesting things that happen daily, and in spite of the inventive faculty of the mind, it is impossible to find a new plot. "History repeats itself" in small affairs as well as in great, and the human mind has not changed materially since the first days of story telling. ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... selected by the natural leaders of each community. Moreover, they had not merely the adhesion of all the more able, ambitious, and intellectual who seceded from a republic in which neither talent nor industry could give comfort or advantage, but also the full benefit of inventive genius, stimulated by the hope of wealth in addition to whatever public spirit the habits of Communism had not extinguished. They systematically encouraged the cultivation of science, which the Communists had very early put down as a withdrawal of energy from the labour due to the community ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart—this remains a spectacle for the gods—for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... collector discovered some, he generously brought them to a descendant of the great painter, who coldly observed, that "he had a great deal more in the garret, which had lain there for many years, if the rats had not destroyed them!" Nothing which this great artist wrote but showed an inventive genius. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... arrangements are largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a story ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... it is admission as an employee. In each case we present the qualifications of the following at college age: Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Nicholai Tesla, James Watt, Heinrich Hertz, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Henry Ford. The admissibility of this group of the world's scientific and the inventive leaders is shown here." Baker pointed to a minute dab of red ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... the most interesting one can read of in the history of the Polar regions. Badly equipped as they were, they had to have recourse, like Robinson Crusoe, to their inventive faculties. The most extraordinary contrivances were devised in the course of the winter, and when spring came the three men stepped out of their hole, well and hearty, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... mental activity, and in this he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of young ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... at first as a paid soldier of Prussia, later as an adherent of the Czar. At the bombardment of Bender he had become a Cossack hetman. His extraordinary physical strength, his natural common sense and inventive power, had distinguished him even at this time, but the peace which was concluded barred before him the gate of progress. He was sent with many discharged officers back to the Don. Let them go again and look after their field labors! Pugasceff's head, however, was full of other ideas than that of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... the comparison, and only remarking, with reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... pieuvre, and all other evils are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even romance—in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if you like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever order you please—the deaths of Cleopatra and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... perhaps other occasions, Bonaparte displayed some of the frolic temper of youth, mixed with the inventive genius and the talent for commanding others by which he was distinguished in after time, his life at school was in general that of a recluse and severe student, acquiring by his judgment, and treasuring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an 'advisory Council ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... cheese. Our sole riches consisted in our ammunition, packets of cartridges which we had stowed away inside some of the huge cheeses. We had about a thousand of them, just two hundred each; but then we wanted rifles, and they must be chassepots; luckily, however, the captain was a bold man of an inventive mind, and this was the plan that ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... may long for leisure for purposes of study or meditation," I remarked, "he cannot get out of the harness, if I understand you rightly, except in these two ways you have mentioned. He must either by literary, artistic, or inventive productiveness indemnify the nation for the loss of his services, or must get a sufficient number of other people to contribute to such ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... broken English spoken by individuals among the Germans, French, Portuguese, Arabs, and Negroes, with whom he had at various times associated, modified by his own ignorance, and seasoned with a dash of his own inventive fancy. ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... years since I planned the story related in these volumes, the outcome of a series of lectures which I had occasion to deliver on the period of the Roman dominion in Egypt. But the pleasures of inventive composition were forced to give way to scientific labors, and when I was once more at leisure to try my wings with increase of power I felt more strongly urged to other flights. Thus it came to pass that I did I not take the time of Hadrian for the background ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... analysis of chemical compounds, in the explanation of the phenomena of the heavens, in the wonders of steam and electricity, in mechanical appliance to abridge human labor or destroy human life, in astronomical researches, in the miracles which inventive genius has wrought,—seen in our ships, our manufactories, our wondrous instruments, our printing-presses, of our observatories, our fortifications, our laboratories, our mills, our machines to cultivate the earth, to make our clothes, to build our houses, to multiply ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the development of the balloon lagged, until Count Zeppelin and M. Santos-Dumont consecrated their fortunes, their inventive minds, and their amazing courage to the task of perfecting a dirigible. In a book, necessarily packed with information concerning the rapid development of aircraft which began in the last decade of the nineteenth century ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Athena, Apollo stands close to the sitting Jupiter, singing, with a deep, quiet joyfulness, to his lyre. The sun is always thought of as the master of time and rhythm, and as the origin of the composing and inventive discovery of melody; but the air, as the actual element and substance of the voice, the prolonging and sustaining power of it, and the symbol of its moral passion. Whatever in music is measured and designed belongs therefore to Apollo and the Muses; whatever is impulsive and ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... ABEL. I'm usually inventive. Let me see. Look here, why couldn't you have his refused picture brought home just as all your ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... Menzies will say—'Pelargoniums for the hall, Miss Percival, and some nice maidenhair.' He's not inventive, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... remarkable man, and he had hitherto shown much inventive ability; but in that month in the cave he had developed into an intellectual giant. After mature deliberation, he proposed a prodigious scheme to his followers. He explained that, while they might, by using the utmost discretion, hold the financial world in their power by means ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... York state. His mother was dead, and a Mrs. Baggert kept house. Eradicate was an eccentric, colored helper, but of late had become too old to do much. Mr. Swift was also quite aged, and had been obliged to give up most of his inventive work. ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... at the same time declaring, that if he had committed a fault in drawing out the plan of the expedition, he was ready to answer for it. He made this declaration in such a cold, self-satisfied tone, that it drew down upon his head the most bitter inventive from members of the opposition. Barre, Luttrell, Burke, Townshend, and Fox, all, in their turns, assailed the haughty secretary, and revelled in descriptions of the loss and disgrace which we had sustained—necessarily, from chagrin, heightening the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... who are not capable and who yet occupy positions of great responsibility. The young engineer, fresh from college and a bit puzzled as to the game as a whole, if he accept a connection under an engineer, for instance, whose inventive ideas are impractical, will unwittingly absorb such a man's viewpoint on construction, and so spoil himself as an engineer for all time to come. Cases like this are not rare. The writer personally knows ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... pottery, and tile-work[31]—a somewhat important branch of human skill. Next to the potter's work, you have all the arts in porcelain, glass, enamel, and metal,—everything, that is to say, playful and familiar in design, much of what is most felicitously inventive, and, in bronze or gold, most precious ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... him was,'"My son, learn how to say No." She warned me further of an error into which, from the vivacity of my temper, I was most likely to fall. "Your inventive faculty," said she, "will lead you eagerly into new plans; and you may be dazzled by some new scheme before you have finished, or fairly tried what you had begun. Resolve to ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... have, then, three orders of ornament, classed according to the degrees of correspondence of the executive and conceptive minds. We have the servile ornament, in which the executive is absolutely subjected to the inventive,—the ornament of the great Eastern nations, more especially Hamite, and all pre-Christian, yet thoroughly noble in its submissiveness. Then we have the mediaeval system, in which the mind of the inferior workman is recognised, and has full room for action, but is guided and ennobled by ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... infirmary for poor Stevie—if only during inquiries—wrung her heart. For she was a proud woman. Winnie's stare had grown hard, intent, inventive. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... far on:... "There are continual foragings, on both sides; with parties mutually dashing out to hinder the same. The Prussians have a detached post at Smirzitz; which is much harassed by Hungarians lurking about, shooting our sentry and the like. An inventive head contrives this expedient. Stuff a Prussian uniform with straw; fix it up, by aid of ropes and check-strings, to stand with musket shouldered, and even to glide about to right and left, on judicious pulling. So it is done: straw man is made; set upon his ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... glimmerings of social science are beginning to see—is precisely a newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has been unfortunately necessary—or perhaps fortunately necessary—for the great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is appallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for national organization socializes the nation capable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sympathetic eye. "Oh, Daff, I'm so sorry for you; just at the time, too, when——" He dared not proceed, awed by Dill's protesting pathos. "Come, now," he ventured presently, "why shouldn't we let Ignace in on this? He's so inventive; ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... everything—everything, I tell you, and, as you yourself admitted, proceeded to play her part with the utmost sagacity. But that is not to be at all compared with what took place on the occasion of Musso's visit to the old gentleman. The most practised address, the most impenetrable cunning,—in short, all the inventive arts of the most experienced woman of the world could not have done more than little Marianna did, in order to deceive the old gentleman with perfect success. She could not have acted in any better way to prepare the road for us for any kind of enterprise. Our feud ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... adust, where rivers never flow, Where constant suns repel approaching snow, How Nature's various and inventive hand Can pour unheard-of moisture o'er the land! immortal plants she bids on rocks arise, And from the dropping branches streams supplies, The thirsty native sucks the falling shower, Nor asks for juicy fruit or blooming ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... now explained with honor to Robert. The conduct which his parents had ascribed to indifference really sprang from affection; he had neither obeyed the voice of ambition nor of avarice, nor even the nobler inspiration of inventive genius; his whole motive and single aim had been the happiness of Genevieve and Michael. The day for proving his gratitude had come, and he had returned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of Ireland, being out a-hunting, had, in the act of leaping a fence, the misfortune to have one of the skirts of his coat torn off; upon which his lordship tore off the other, observing, that to have but one left was like a pig with one ear! Some inventive genius took the hint, and having made some of these half-coats, out of compliment to his lordship, gave them the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... be a matter of cultivation and perseverance. A man of ordinary intelligence may, by determined resolution, push his way to power in many directions, and the one talent may become ten talents. But genius is not mere cleverness, however well directed and carefully developed. Genius is creative and inventive; it has insight, it has imagination, it "bodies forth the forms of things unknown," and "gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name." Isaiah speaks of the inspiration of the inventor of the agricultural instrument: "His God doth instruct ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... thoroughfares, on great bridges, and frequented cross-roads, detective vigilance kept sleepless watch, and fancied in every approaching form, the doomed victims, who were at once to satisfy the angry gallows and its own excited avarice. Equally well assured were we that the most inventive and hazardous scrutiny would never track our footsteps to the dizzy height of Carn-Tuathail. One motive with us was to baffle all calculation on the part of our pursuers. When we found we were tracked and discovered, our first care was to consider how ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... brother urged him to waylay her and press his own suit. He exerted all his inventive power to procure him an opportunity of speaking to her alone. Our hero refused to be urged or to accept his offers. After all, it was useless. All that he might accomplish would be to make ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... the ways and means through which the want may be satisfied. Ages may elapse before an ideal may be realized. Numberless attempts must be made, the lessons of the successive failures must be learned. It is in the ability to draw the right inference from failure that inventive genius is seen. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... ever busy with new inventions. To his nephew, Talus, or Perdrix, he taught all that he himself knew of all the mechanical arts. Soon it seemed that the nephew, though he might not excel his uncle, equalled Daedalus in his inventive power. As he walked by the seashore, the lad picked up the spine of a fish, and, having pondered its possibilities, he took it home, imitated it in iron, and so invented the saw. A still greater invention followed this. While those who had always thought that there could be none greater ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... proposition is stated, we have to imagine the demonstration; that is, we have to find upon what proposition already known the new one depends, and from all the consequences of this known principle select just the one required. According to this method the most exact reasoner, if not naturally inventive, must be at fault. And the result is that the teacher, instead of making us discover demonstrations, dictates them to us; instead of teaching us to reason, he reasons for us, and ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Meighen for the cordiality with which he greeted me, as the inventive Canadian press had added impromptu reflections of their own to what I had said of him. I sat next to Mr. MacKenzie King, but as we had no opportunity of private conversation, he invited me to go to his house for supper ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... a mechanical routine, because in the exercise of their ostensible calling their imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits more alluring. Therefore, in their proper vocation they are seldom bold or inventive,—out of it they are sometimes both to excess. And when they do take up a novelty in their own profession they cherish it with an obstinate tenacity, and an extravagant passion, unknown to those quiet philosophers who take up novelties every day, examine them with the sobriety of practised ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all about our national waste of inventive talent, our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong men ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... justness of my cause, the unbounded confidence I had in my own resolution, and the labours of an inventive head and iron body—these only could have preserved my life. These bodily labours, these continued inventions, and projected plans to obtain my freedom, preserved my health. Who would suppose that a man fettered as I was could find means of exercising himself? By swinging ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... southern continent, &c!", A zeal so red-hot as this, could scarcely be cooled down to any thing like common sense, on one of the fields of ice encountered by Cook in his second voyage; but what a pity it is, that it should not be accompanied by as much of the inventive faculty, as might serve to point out how impossibilities can be performed, and insuperable obstructions removed! It is but justice to this gentleman to say, that his willingness to undertake such a task, was as enthusiastic as his idea of its magnitude and importance. His industry, besides, in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... necessary, then, to keep our habitual acts under some surveillance of attention, to pass them in review for inspection every now and then, that we may discover possible modifications which will make them more serviceable. We need to be inventive, constantly to find out better ways of doing things. Habit takes care of our standing, walking, sitting; but how many of us could not improve his poise and carriage if he would? Our speech has become largely automatic, but no doubt all of us might remove faults of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
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