"Equipoise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... used therein as an equipoise to "the hindward charms" satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated thought and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more comical; but each of the companion sonnets ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... worst Pope who has ever occupied S. Peter's chair, Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old order of things had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies of which as yet remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chief Italian powers, hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzo de' Medici, were these—the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Florence, the Papacy, and the kingdom of Naples. Minor States, such as the Republics ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... in equipoise By opposite attractions and desires; The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, And the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... diligence was a rickety, slow-moulded antediluvian nondescript, toiling patiently along over impassable roads at a snail's pace. Judge of my astonishment at finding it a full-blooded, vigorous monster, of unscrupulous railway momentum and imperturbable equipoise of mind. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... For long years to come his name will be fragrant in the hearts of our people; and his lifelong consecration to the enterprise of the world's conversion will prove an example and a stimulus to this and the coming generation. The equipoise of his mind, the solidity of his character, the strength of his faith, the brightness of his hope, the simple, steadfast fidelity of his devotion to the Master, will speak trumpet-tongued to multitudes who never saw his face in the flesh. The unadorned story of his life, what he was ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... her vicinity, after fulfilling the purpose of my journey to Montpellier. However, after two pleasurable months in that city, when I found myself at the stage where the road divided—one road going to Mme. de Larnage, the other to Les Charmettes—I balanced love against pleasure, and finding an equipoise, I decided by reason. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... produce, in fact, a book for British citizens and British subjects, rather than a book for students of political history. That the inner working of the unwritten constitution of the country; that some of the unrealised checks and balances; that the delicate equipoise of the component parts of our executive machinery, should stand revealed, was inevitable. We have thought it best, throughout, to abstain from unnecessary comment and illustration. The period is so recent, and has ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... disturbed by her coming and departure, in that so slight vibration of air caused by her advance and her retreat, swayed as a reed in the wind, stood for a moment seeking equipoise. Vain endeavor! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... and of the ideal of character. He deprecates Kant's strenuous insistence upon the categorical imperative of duty. A man, he urges, must be free; and the slavery of duty is no better than any other slavery. Virtue is inclination to duty, and the ideal is to be found in the perfect equipoise of the sensuous and the rational nature; in other words, when 'thou shalt' and 'I would' pull steadily and harmoniously in the same direction. So he defines 'dignity' (Wuerde) as the expression of a lofty mind, just as winsomeness is the expression of a beautiful ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... had no difficulty in understanding him, and for the second time in this extraordinary interview, he gave evidences of agitation and of a mind shaken from its equipoise. But only for an instant. He did not shun the other's gaze or even maintain more than a momentary silence. Indeed, he found strength to smile, in a curious, sardonic way, as ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... ears how it would read in future story, that the ingenious Mr. Carew had no contrivance left to regain his lost liberty, but meanly to purchase it at his friends' expense. For some time did these passions remain in equipoise; as thou hast often seen the scales of some honest tradesman, before he weighs his commodity; but at length honour preponderated, and liberty and fear flew up and kicked the beam; he therefore told the captains he had the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... in its effected state the same constitutes its essential nature in the causal state also. Now the effect, in our case, is made up of the three elements Goodness, Passion and Darkness; hence the cause is the Pradhana which consists in an equipoise of those three elements. And as in this Pradhana all distinctions are merged, so that it is pure Being, the Chandogya text refers to it as 'Being, one only, without a second.' This establishes the non-difference ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... to France. Thus the number of the Germanies was suddenly reduced from more than three hundred to less than one hundred, and the German states which mainly benefited, along with Prussia, were the southern states of Bavaria, Wuerttemberg, and Baden, which Napoleon desired to use as an equipoise against both Austria and Prussia. In this ambition he was not disappointed, for in the War of the Third Coalition (1805) he received important assistance from these three states, all of which were in ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... degree of excellence at the expense of higher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks back over his uttered past—brown desert to him, in which there is no ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Second Assembly composed of the most illustrious men of the country, a power of equipoise the guardian of the fundamental compact, and ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... and the obloquy attaching to the one seemed out of proportion altogether to its importance, while the other by no means justified the eulogy wherewith it was connected. Was there any immediate or even distant, effect on life caused by evil which was not instantly swung into equipoise by goodness? But these slender reflections troubled him only for a little time. He had little desire for any introspective quarryings. To feel so well was sufficient in itself. Why should thought be so apparent to us, so insistent? We do not know we have ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... urged and pushed the youth, who had already lost his mental equipoise, into the midst of the gulf, ere he had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mind, even if a misdirected one, has mounted upon the battlements of its system, and proclaimed victory over all things. Of all tellers of marvels, Swedenborg alone is so absolutely free from a vulgar fanaticism, and so innocent of any appeal to passion, prejudice, or taste. With an equipoise of disposition which is almost provoking, Mr. Frothingham announces as dogmas speculations from whose sweep and immensity the human mind recoils. Having posited his principles, he confidently proceeds to deduce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... time, had he to weigh his case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise—one or the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too, otherwise, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can the mighty conception of duty alone hold us erect—I have no other care than to keep myself in equipoise. The body must, the spirit will, and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing—fill my letters with quotations, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... thousand trees in the maritime parts, yet so thick was the forest, that it was scarcely perceived an hundred miles from the shore. But as such violent storms are probably occasioned by the rarefaction of the air, with excessive heat, they are seldom of long duration, for having restored the equipoise in the atmosphere, the wind commonly ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... great thou art: first among men: By nature, or by early habit, grac'd With that blest quality which gives due force To every faculty, and keeps the mind In healthful equipoise, ready for action; Invaluable temperance—by all To be acquired, yet scarcely known to ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... common folk are free to follow our hearts; am I an old fool for saying that he is a fool who follows anything else? Our liberty is not for princes. We need wait for no future world to balance the luck of men; even here there is an equipoise. From the highly placed a price is exacted for their state, their wealth, and their honors, as heavy as these are great; to the poor, what is to us mean and of no sweetness may appear decked in the robes ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... was the story that Waring maintained from first to last. "Pills" ventured a query as to whether the amount of Krug and Clicquot consumed might not have overthrown his mental equipoise. No, Sam declared, he drank very little. "The only bacchanalian thing I did was to join in a jovial chorus from a new French opera which Lascelles's friend piped up and I had ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... Ireland's betrayal with such ferveur that Ned felt she was the support his character required, the support he had been looking for all his life; her self-restraint and her gravity were the supports his character required, and these being thrown into the scale, life stood at equipoise. The women who had preceded Ellen were strange, fantastic women, counterparts of himself, but he had always aspired to a grave and well-mannered ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the outside world. Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in place the balance-wheel of many a disordered mind. The mental equipoise is kept at the normal standard only by the powerful aid of the will, supported and assisted by extraneous adjuvants, such as fear of punishment, fear of personal harm, and, above all, by the fear of ridicule. Many a ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... to the stream; and still Count Henri leaned on the scull, not in a chosen attitude, but for positive support. He had thrown his force into the blow, to push off triumphantly, and leave his rival standing. It occurred that the boat's brief resistance and rocking away agitated his artificial equipoise, and, by the operation of inexorable laws, the longer he leaned across an extending surface the more was he dependent; so that when the measure of the water exceeded the length of his failing support on land, there was no help for it: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... British colonies in North America had been national instead of local from the beginning, the States would have disappeared under the Constitution, or have been kept only for selecting national representatives, and performing other national functions. An equipoise between the two could never have been reached. But fate had ordained otherwise. In a new land, the settlers naturally gathered into little groups for mutual protection. Collecting about some harbour or along some navigable waterway in the Northern colonies, or assembling ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... There were many vital things to be done in the exploitation of the system that Edison simply could not and would not do; but in Lowrey's savoir faire, ready wit and humor, chivalry of devotion, graceful eloquence, and admirable equipoise of judgment were all the qualities that the occasion demanded and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... motion, except in a running pace, appeared to exist in an extraordinary degree. It seemed to be necessary that the gentleman should be supported by his attendant, standing before him with a hand placed on each shoulder, until, by gently swaying backward and forward, he had placed himself in equipoise; when, giving the word, he would start in a running pace, the attendant sliding from before him and running forward, being ready to receive him and prevent his falling, after his having run about ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... know this not at all!" said Wilhelm. "But it will come in due time, and then you will be far more violent than others! Who knows? perhaps this is the sorrow of which you spoke, the misfortune which should bring your whole being into equipoise! That was also a kind of search after the sorrowful. I will sincerely wish that your heart may be filled with love as mine is; then will the influence of the sand-hills vanish, and you will speak with me as you ought to do, and as ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... clustered around it! It is woodsy, and savors of the trees; it is an encampment among the maples. Before the bud swells, before the grass springs, before the plow is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is the sequel of the bitter frost; a sap-run is the sweet good-by of winter. It denotes a certain equipoise of the season; the heat of the day fully balances the frost of the night. In New York and New England, the time of the sap hovers about the vernal equinox, beginning a week or ten days before, and continuing a week or ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... goes, I have had my share: it has indeed been leavened by other human contingencies, and this in a greater degree than has occurred to most literary men of a decent rank in life; but, on the whole, I take it that such equipoise is ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... the most speed, but their apparatus seems the most delicate and consummate. Apparently a fine play of muscle, a subtle shifting of the power along the outstretched wings, a perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equipoise, sustains them and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art; not merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that work becomes leisure and movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... happiness, I suffered not from the presence of ennui, nor ever feared to suffer: for my temperament was constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz., by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or, (if I should not be suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say,) in one eternal solstice of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... columns of the Greek temples were reduced to those proportions most consistent with strength and beauty, and the intercolumnations were relatively greater than in Egyptian examples. It may truly be said that Greek architecture exhibits the perfect equality and equipoise of vertical and horizontal elements and these only, no other factor entering in. Its graphic symbol would therefore be composed of a vertical and a horizontal line (Illustration 3). The Romans, while retaining ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... scenery on the other. In summer, a passage up or down its course in one of the day steamers is as near an idyl of travel as can be had, perhaps, anywhere in the world. Then its permanent and uniform volume, its fullness and equipoise at all seasons, and its gently-flowing currents give it further the character of a lake, or of the sea itself. Of the Hudson it may be said that it is a very large river for its size,—that is for the quantity of water it discharges into the sea. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... because there is a blindness in the spiritual eye which will not let us see the riper spirits who are not sated but satisfied with permanency. For there, too, is a reason that we are so glad to hide in the equipoise as an eternal fact that we are surfeited with constancy. Drowning in the malmsey-butt is no better than the Thames. Enjoyment to-day is secured by the certain prospect of sorrow to-morrow, which is not wilful, but a lesson of life, and as we suppose, at last, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... despotic, and is a despot; and you and I, so far as our Annual Conferences are concerned, do well to regard with a deep jealousy an infringement upon our organic rights. The only safety of the Church is the equipoise that is constituted by the relation the Annual Conferences sustain to the General Conference, and far safer is it for us to bring these women of the Church, elect, honorable women, into the General Conference of the Church by the same way that their ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... mention, the admirable mode, which they have here, and in most parts of France, of constructing their carts. They are placed upon very high wheels, the load is generally arranged so as to create an equipoise, and is raised by an axle, fastened near the shafts. I was informed by a merchant, that a single horse can draw with ease thirty-six hundred weight, in one of these carts. These animals have a formidable appearance, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... however, we must add to that fullness of material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be 'possessed with,' his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive, incisive, and, if I might coin a ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... great and pregnant principle of political necessity. All government supposes subjects; all authority implies obedience: to suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse, is absurd and contradictory; a state, so constituted, must rest for ever in motionless equipoise, with equal attractions of contrary tendency, with equal weights of power balancing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... intellect, and when sailing as it were with a prosperous wind, actions are performed looking to virtue; just as a pilot looks to the motions of the stars." All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it round the falls. The ripples curled away in our wake, like ringlets ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... his mentality was abnormally acute. He saw with eyes which were inspired by a brain capable of vast achievement, but which possessed none of that equipoise so necessary for a well-balanced manhood. And it told him all that, and forced conviction upon him. It told him so much of that which no man should believe until it be thrust upon him overwhelmingly by the bitter experiences of life. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the gods, but as regards the dead; and even είσεβης, though not used sneeringly, is a world short of our word 'religious.' This condition of language we need not wonder at: the language of life must naturally receive, as in a mirror, the realities of life. Difficult it is to maintain a just equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... arbitrary decrees; which M. Bayle and other modern philosophers have not sufficiently understood. Further I will show that there is an indifference in freedom, because there is no absolute necessity for one course or the other; but yet that there is never an indifference of perfect equipoise. And I will demonstrate that there is in free actions a perfect spontaneity beyond all that has been conceived hitherto. Finally I will make it plain that the hypothetical and the moral necessity which subsist in free actions are open ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... is to our touch. It is fairly presumable that there are transitional states between the human condition and the immaterial. Death comes after life, as man supersedes the animal. The inferior animals are men, with less soul. Man is an animal with more equipoise and self-direction. Death brings a condition of less materiality, but still with some matter left. I know therefore no reasonable argument against the reality of the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... untumultuous sentiment of an after-honey-moon constancy. We should say that his leading characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think, was more at home ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... eventually, to New Orleans and Louisiana, a portion of their political power; and to invest all the people those extensive regions might hereafter contain, with an authority over themselves and their descendants? When you throw the weight of Louisiana into the scale, you destroy the political equipoise contemplated at the time of forming the contract. Can any man venture to affirm that the people did intend such a comprehension as you now, by construction, give it? Or can it be concealed that, beyond its fair and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... not right with him, who ill sustains Retirement's silent hours.—Himself he flies, Perchance from that insipid equipoise, Which always with the hapless mind remains That feels no native bias; never gains One energy of will, that does not rise From some external cause, to which he hies From his own blank inanity.—When reigns, With a strong, cultur'd ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... newspaper, or the painter who declares for color only, or the man who tries hard to produce naivete by discarding composition. The test to which the sensitive eye subjects every picture from whatsoever creed or camp it comes is balance or equipoise, judgment being rendered without thought of the law. After the picture has been left as finished, why does an artist often feel impelled to create an accent on this side or weaken an obtrusive one on the other side of his canvas if not working under ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... vanished. No one will undertake such an affair unless he has personal confidence in my future (?) successes. Such a man, dearest Franz, you must find for me. Once more, I want from 3,000 to 4,000 thalers in order to find perfect rest and equipoise. That much my operas may well bring me in in three years IN CASE something real is done for "Lohengrin," so as to save it. I am willing to lease my rights to the lender; my rights in "Tannhauser" and "Lohengrin" shall be secured to him in any way he thinks desirable or necessary. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... as a Position which will seldom deceive, that when a Man cannot bear his own Company there is something wrong. He must fly from himself, either because he feels a Tediousness in Life from the Equipoise of an empty Mind, which, having no Tendency to one Motion more than another but as it is impelled by some external Power, must always have recourse to foreign Objects; or he must be afraid of the Intrusion of ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... society, when men were just emerging out of barbarism, chiefs and priests, touching the most powerful springs of savage conduct—hope and fear—must have had unbounded sway. An aristocracy, of course, is naturally the first form of government. But clashing interests soon losing their equipoise, a monarchy and hierarchy break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, and the foundation of both is secured by feudal tenures. This appears to be the origin of monarchial and priestly power, and the dawn of civilization. But such combustible materials cannot long be pent up; and getting ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a]**[Footnote: well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... to slip, and instantly the other gripped him for a throw. Fatal mistake—'twas but a ruse—and so clear a one as to end the first round. The Nottingham lad recovered adroitly, and now that the other had his arm low about the enemy's body, his equipoise was readily disturbed. The stroller felt himself swiftly thrust downward, and as they both fell together it ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... Nanki-Poo). Oh fool, that fleest My hallowed joys! Oh blind, that seest No equipoise! Oh rash, that judgest From half, the whole! Oh base, that grudgest Love's lightest dole! Thy heart unbind, Oh fool, oh blind! Give me my ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... jurisdiction over all the parties concerned. As a result of this just now in Europe, wisdom is not the arbiter; on the contrary, prejudices, passions, indiscretions, and follies on the part of all the antagonists preserve a certain dangerous equipoise. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... in ampler gyre Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned, Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire. How many trampled and deciduous joys Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still, Before the distance shall fulfil Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise! Happiness is the shadow of things past, Which fools still take for that which is to be! And not all foolishly: For all the past, read true, is prophecy, And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last, And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring. Then leaf, and flower, and ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... commodity in exchange for it, and is therefore a buyer by the mere fact of his being a seller. The sellers and the buyers, for all commodities taken together, must, by the metaphysical necessity of the case, be an exact equipoise to each other; and if there be more sellers than buyers of one thing, there must be more ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... to be indignant, and never to lose his temper. He was the most sensitive of men, but he also possessed an indomitable will. It was only his terrible determination that could make his life a success. Emerson, who had little sympathy with him otherwise, always admired the perfect equipoise of his nature. A man could not be more thoroughly himself; but, such a reticent, unsociable character as Hawthorne could never be used as the main-spring of a drama, for he would continually impede the progress of the plot. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... extortion their ill-gotten gold, and you avenge the feeble whom they have despoiled; you compensate the miseries of the poor by the anxieties of the rich; you console the wretched, by opening to him a last asylum from distress; and you give to the soul that just equipoise of strength and sensibility which constitutes wisdom—the true science of life. Aware that all must return to you, the wise man loadeth not himself with the burdens of grandeur and of useless wealth: he restrains his desires within the limits of justice; yet, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... tenderest rose,—her figure remained svelte, lithe and graceful in all its outlines. Finely strung, yet strong as steel in her temperament, all thoughts, feelings and events seemed to sweep over her without affecting or disturbing her mind's calm equipoise. She lived her life with extreme simplicity, regularity, and directness, thus driving to despair all would-be scandal-mongers; and though many gifted and famous men fell madly in love with their great princess, and often, in the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... each God's secret told: He touched them, and they lived. In each, the flesh Subdued to soul, the affections, vassals proud By conscience ruled, and conscience lit by Christ, The whole man stood, planet full-orbed of powers In equipoise, Image restored of God. A nation of such men his portion was; That nation's Patriarch he. No wrangler loud; No sophist; lesser victories knew he none: No triumph his of sect, or camp, or court; The Saint his ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... be lulled, at other times, into half-slumber; and the soft and even monotonies of Pope's pastorals and "Windsor Forest" effected this end. It loved to be suspended in a state of semi-doubt, swung to and fro in agreeable equipoise; and the "Essay on Man" was precisely such a swing. It was fond of a mixture of strong English sense with French graces and charms of manner; and Pope supplied it. It was fond of keen, yet artfully managed satire; and Pope furnished it in abundance. It loved nothing ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... by a fissure in the crag. It was not the width of this opening that disconcerted me, for it exceeded not ten feet; but I came upon it so unadvisedly, that, in attempting to check my forward motion, I had nearly lost my equipoise, and fallen into the abyss that now yawned before and on either side of me. To pause upon the danger, would, I felt, be to ensure it. Summoning all my dexterity into a single bound, I cleared the chasm; and with one buskined ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... 1758 also; for, thoughtless even of the admitted right of the plaintiff, they had scarcely left the bar, when they returned with a verdict of one penny damages. A motion was made for a new trial; but the court, too, had now lost the equipoise of their judgment, and overruled the motion by an unanimous vote. The verdict and judgment overruling the motion were followed by redoubled acclamations, from within and without the house. The people, who had with difficulty kept their hands off their champion from the moment of closing ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... thrice forbidden fruit, She'd lose her equipoise, And like a wayward Pleiad shoot ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... better portion of his time; and there Spontaneously had his affections thriven Amid the bounties of the year, the peace And liberty of nature; there he kept In solitude and solitary thought, His mind in a just equipoise ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... religious faith. But reason breaks the spell; and the world of poetry, and religion—a world which to them is always beautiful and good with God's presence—becomes a system of inexorable laws, dead, mechanical, explicable in strict truth, as an equipoise of constantly changing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... there was a marked stagnation in home politics, mainly due to an equipoise of parties and serious divisions in the ranks of the ministerialists as well as of the opposition. Not only was there a very strong conservative majority in the house of lords, with a sufficient though dwindling liberal majority in the house of commons, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... about the fortieth degree of north latitude, and to have been a highly-civilized people." It will be remembered that the fortieth degree of north latitude passed through Atlantis. Plato knew (" Dialogues, Phaedo," 108) that the earth "is a body in the centre of the heavens" held in equipoise. He speaks of it as a "round body," a "globe;" he even understood that it revolved on its axis, and that these revolutions produced day and night. He says—"Dialogues, Timaeus"—"The earth circling around the pole (which is extended through the universe) be made ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... fair hair gilded by the pale light of the gusty day, her lips parted a little, her eyelids drooping. It behoved her to move little, for her scarlet dress was very nice in its equipoise, and fain she was to seem fine in ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... my daughter, as I will presently explain, is scarcely so great as you think it. But, such as it is, it arose from a lack of calmness and of that mental equipoise which sails unruffled through a sea of contradiction. The irritability which results in displays of sudden temper is so foreign to your nature that it points to your having passed through a time of very special strain, both mental and physical; ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be "no next time." Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize against war, if war must go on, "then nations can protect themselves henceforth ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... were renounced, as it might be, if Palmerston joined Derby and the government were reconstructed, and if Disraeli ceased to be leader, then his own relations with the government would be changed. Gladstone was so uneasy in his present position, so nice in the equipoise of his opinions that he wished to be, as he said, 'on the liberal side of the conservative party, rather than on the conservative side of the liberal party.' A little earlier than this, Lord Aberdeen and Graham agreed in thinking (August) that 'Disraeli's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse—lonely toiler among his books. Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at home amid ancient ideals ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... received even of ordinary insanity, we can well believe that the temptation must have been great to recognise supernatural agency in a manifestation far more uncommon; and that the difficulty of retaining the judgment in a position of equipoise must have been very great not only to the spectators but still more to the subject of the phenomenon herself. To sustain ourselves continuously under the influence of reason, even when our faculties are preserved ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... fruitful seed. Then Memory strikes on no slack string, Nor sectional will varied Life appear: Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hear Earth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring. And ours the mellow note, while sharing joys No more subjecting mortals who have learnt To build for happiness on equipoise, The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt; Know in our seasons an integral wheel, That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed. This, the truistic rubbish under heel Of all the world, we peck at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are not simple. To have the right thing to say is a great commandment, and to know the right way to say it is, though second to it, hardly inferior. But the problem of the ministry is to have both in perfect equipoise—to utter a word which is at the same time both a message from God and ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... the length of which I ought to apologise) do not require the discussion of this point. The amicable reader will rejoice with me that, in spite of mutual shocks and encroachments, the three Orders of the State are preserved in salutary equipoise, although the mode of bringing this about has unavoidably changed with change of circumstances. The spirit of the Constitution remains unimpaired, nor have the essential parts of its frame undergone any alteration. May both endure as long ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to examine our two poets by the principles before stated, not forgetting to compare or contrast them, as there may be opportunity. In Mr. Taylor there is a just equipoise of the moral and intellectual natures, while the sensual nature, if not so strong as the former two, is at least calmed and subdued by their united power. With fine animal spirits, he has but little taste for gross animal enjoyments; and the mischief which his unlicensed spirits might ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... balustrade—are fugues, and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere. In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra. But the English novelist takes 'Any and 'Arriet, and without question allows them to achieve deeds; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the realms of the supernatural. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... subscriptions, of direct bribery, and those innumerable methods of clandestine corruption, which are abundantly in the hands of the court, and which will be applied as long as these means of corruption, and the disposition to be corrupted, have existence among us. Our constitution stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other. Every project of a material change in a government so complicated ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... poet," spake the woodlouse, very blandly, "I am likewise the created,—I the equipoise of thee; I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie The inane of measured ages that were ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... three travellers got into their car. The doctor lit the combustible in his cylinder and turned the flame so as to produce a rapid heat, and the balloon, which had rested on the ground in perfect equipoise, began to rise in a few minutes, so that the seamen had to slacken the ropes they held it by. The car then rose about twenty feet above ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... you unworthy," she said. "Others may hold me, too, unworthy because I have not reached that impartial equipoise whence, impassive, I can balance my native land against its sins and watch blind justice deal with it ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... while his systematic reading, the soothing influence of the music to which he devoted a considerable time each day, and, more than all, his growing intimacy with Mr. Britton, were doing much towards restoring a better mental equipoise. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... had originally composed the regency with a pretty equal distribution of power between the adherents of the two communions. But the suspicion, or disgust, which afterwards caused him to erase the name of Gardiner from the list, destroyed the equipoise, and rendered the scale of reformation decidedly preponderant. In vain did Wriothesley, a man of vigorous talents and aspiring mind, struggle with Hertford for the highest place in the administration; in vain did Tunstal bishop of Durham,—no bigot, but a firm papist,—check ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... marine steam-engine, the lever and counter-balance weight are fixed upon the wiper-shaft, to form an equipoise to the valves. There is one on each side of the cylinder. (See SPANNER.)—Also, an inflexible bar of iron or wood to raise weights, which takes rank as the first and most simple of the mechanical powers.—To lever. An old word for ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... that Tristan and Isolde become wholly distinct individuals, yet wholly submerged in the unity that is Wagner; and so reconcile life's duality by balancing its opposing laughters in a definite form—thereby sending out into life a profounder duality than existed before. A Platonic equipoise, Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence—the only real philosophic problem, therefore one of which these two philosophers ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... minister had lost his equipoise in the face of the Englishman's great riches, of which hitherto he had held some doubts. Suddenly a vivid thought entered his confused brain. The paper cutter in his hand trembled. In the breathing space allowed him he began to calculate rapidly. The ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... woman, not recking of the human heart that throbs wildly out of sight. They see the foam-crest on the wave, and picture an Atlantic Ocean of froth, and not the solemn sea that stands below in eternal equipoise. You turn to them the luminous crescent of your life, and they call it the whole round globe; and so they love you with a love that is agate, not pearl, because what they love in you is something infinitely below the highest. They ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... a pity that he should have been so mistaken! And then as she sat after dinner, eating five or six grapes, she felt that she was unable to recall her spirits and look and speak as she was wont to do: a thing had happened which had knocked the ground from under her—had thrown her from her equipoise, and now she lacked the strength to recover herself ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... bullets as they hiss by him, interspersed with the agonizing screams of the wounded, or the death shrieks of comrades falling in dying convulsions right in the face of the living,—these things are not conducive to that serene and judicial mental equipoise which the historian enjoys in ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... do artists, like mechanics, find the means to live? Because society has made the fine arts, like the rudest industries, objects of consumption and exchange, governed consequently by all the laws of commerce and political economy. Now, the first of these laws is the equipoise of functions; that is, the equality ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... should rather say a certain number of truth's innumerable aspects, none of them claiming to afford a full vision, and not a few of them apparently contradictory; for, as both Plato and Shakespeare tell us, truth cannot be directly stated: it lies, as it were, in equipoise between ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... disequilibration. In other words the ticquer feels and speaks and acts by the tic. He lives by, in and for his tic. He is attempting to meet certain situations of a disturbing nature and to obtain equilibrium and equipoise by compensating for his feelings of inefficiency and unrest by the tics. It is an organic, constitutional, psychophysical, biological means ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world—would not, if the question were that of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... that time forward, woman assumed a new place in the world. It is not to mere civilization, but to the spirit of life in Christ, that woman owes all she has and all she has yet to gain. In Christ, manly and womanly characteristics were united, and were in equipoise. He was not the Son of the Man, but the Son of Man. It was not manhood, but humanity, that was made divine in him. Humanity has its two sides: one side in the strength and intellect of manhood; the other in the tenderness and faith and submission of womanhood; man and ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... indeed gets more out of such resolutions than contemporaries, for posterity is able to accept them in a more literal sense. Hilbrough's ascendency in the bank, and his appreciation of Millard, in spite of the latter's symmetrical way of parting his hair, the stylish cut he gave his beard, and the equipoise with which he bore his slender cane, procured the latter's promotion to the vacant cashiership without visible opposition. Meadows would have liked to oppose, but he found powerful motives to the contrary; for Meadows ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... condition is an established fact. And history proves that most Zen masters enjoyed a long life in spite of their extremely simple mode of living. Its mental discipline, however, is by far more fruitful, and keeps one's mind in equipoise, making one neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... appearance entered the room. His entrance was followed by an exhibition as though a ghost had suddenly appeared at the conventional midnight hour and demanded a hand, as he reached forth his rattling joints of bone. The men stared, even our hero for just one instant lost his equipoise, but he recovered when like a wink he asked, as though no one had entered ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey
... lifting of his hand—instantaneously affects and may seriously disturb some part of nature. He is the point of support on which hangs the balance of the world, and the slightest irregularity on his part may overthrow the delicate equipoise. The greatest care must, therefore, be taken both by and of him; and his whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his, voluntary or involuntary, may disarrange or upset the established order of nature. Of this class of monarchs the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... a marvel that they could engage in so terrific a fight upon the ice-coated ledge and hold their balance there. But I saw that they were in equipoise, for they were bending all the tension of each muscle to the fight, so that they remained almost motionless, and, thigh to thigh, arm to arm, breast to breast, each sought to break the other's strength. And I saw that, when ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... is steady. Of course, with growing means their wants rise, and increasing wants in turn react happily upon their industry. The friend to whom I have several times referred, and who, being both a missionary and a proprietor, is placed in a pretty impartial equipoise of judgment, remarks that if some of those at home who imagine the Jamaica negro as lying lazily in the sun, eating bananas, could see the bill of fare of a good many black men, and compare it with what they were used to eat in time of slavery, they would probably be rather astonished. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... those are to be considered as in my opinion sufficiently supported; some I have rejected without mention, as evidently erroneous; some I have left in the notes without censure or approbation, as resting in equipoise between objection and defence; and some, which seemed specious but not right, I have inserted with ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... his equipoise; and even when Juan, returning from his next trip down to the river, brought the priest another sharp letter from Wenceslas, written in the Bishop's name, he read it without a tremor. The letter complained of Jose's silence, and especially of his failure to assist the Catholic ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up is seldom conspicuous by reason of a bull-neck, pugilistic limbs, and the nervous equipoise of a dray-horse. What he may lack in strength, however, he is apt to make up in hectic ambition. Thus it often happens that when the city does not consume quite all of his available energy, the poet, with his probably inadequate ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Habit is (a) passive, or (b) active. The passive habit is that which gives us the power to retain our equipoise of mind in the midst of a world of changes (pleasure and pain, grief and joy, etc). The active habit gives us skill, presence of mind, tact in ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... the Hindoo princes. France and England had made peace; the English and French Companies in India had not laid down arms. Their power, as well as the importance of their establishments was as yet in equipoise. At Surat both Companies had places of business; on the coast of Malabar the English had Bombay, and the French Mahe; on the coast of Coromandel the former held Madras and Fort St. George, the latter Pondicherry ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a twelvemonth and never think of, or care to please, or desire to be near, the object that he loved? And inasmuch as, deep down at the bottom of our moral being, there is no such thing possible as indifference and a perfect equipoise in reference to God, it is clear enough, I think, that—although the word must not be pressed as if it meant conscious and active antagonism,—where there is no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... celebrated German physiologist, born at Leipzig; a many-sided man; advocate of the theory that health of body and mind depends on the equipoise of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the dual system of government has been profoundly modified by the great elemental forces of our mechanical age, so that the scales, which try to hold in nice equipoise the Federal Government on the one hand and the States on the other, have been greatly disturbed. Originally, the States were the powerful political entities, and the central government a mere agent ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... it was on the brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of chiaroscuro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:" or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... reflection, said he would. The unmoved equipoise of the big man visibly reassured him. He sipped at his bubbling tumbler and smacked his thin lips. "Man, I've had an awful fright," he said at last, in the tone of one whose ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... after him. "I have been fearing this very thing. He has taken the matter more to heart than I, and there has been a look in his eye in the last few weeks which showed he was not right; but I thought, when he found he was going back to his home again, he would almost instantly regain his mental equipoise. ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... sought in both is forgetfulness of ourselves.' In The Rambler, No. 5, he wrote:—'It may be laid down as a position which will seldom deceive, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong. He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind ... or he must be afraid of the intrusion of some unpleasing ideas, and, perhaps, is struggling to escape from the remembrance of a loss, the fear of a calamity, or some other ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... love. Thus gradually the mist melted away, till I caught a glimpse of her real self. We were one evening talking of American literature,—she contrasting its boyish crudity, half boastful, half timid, with the tempered, manly equipoise of thorough-bred European writers, and I asserting that in its mingled practicality and aspiration might be read bright auguries; when, betrayed by sympathy, she laid bare her secret hope of what Woman might be and do, as an author, in our Republic. The sketch ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... dreamy peace, but a peace that was refreshing, strengthening, and was exactly what her mind needed. She sat in perfect bliss drinking in all she could, when Penloe came into the room. He seemed to her to be all peace. This delightful condition put her mind in a state of equipoise, such as she had never felt before; for it was a peace that was tinged with a Divine quality; and it was about to awaken her more than ever to the possibilities of the real world, the Divine world, the spiritual world, the world whose realization so far she had not a knowledge of. For her ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... of the body politic as to get beyond control, remedy should be applied. Let the future appointments of judges be for four or six years, and renewable by the President and Senate. This will bring their conduct, at regular periods, under revision and probation, and may keep them in equipoise between the general and special governments. We have erred in this point, by copying England, where certainly it is a good thing to have the judges independent of the King. But we have omitted to copy their caution also, which makes a judge removable on the address of both legislative Houses. That ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... had come in at this time on the German side, she might well have tilted swiftly and irremediably against us that awful equipoise of forces which, once established, lasted for more than four years. There would have been small hope that France, supported only by our small Expeditionary Force and faced with an Italian invasion in the South-East, in addition to a German invasion in the North-East, could have prevented ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... equipoise of Reason and Faith, in the individual or the Nation, and the alternating preponderance cease, the result is, according as one or the other is permanent victor, Atheism or Superstition, disbelief or blind credulity; and the Priests either of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike |
