"Fibre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terrible of all risks. There is a small chance that he may find his exact subject and his exact medium, and that the subject may be one which is of a widespread interest. But there are innumerable chances against him. Either the fibre of his mind is commonplace; or he is born out of his due time, when men are not interested in what are his chief preoccupations; or he may miss his subject; or he may be stiff, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and vegetable; the mineral is the most permanent, and when caused by chemical decomposition within the pores it acts as a preservative agent in a greater or less degree. The vegetable colouring matters do not penetrate so easily, probably on account of the affinity of the woody fibre for the colouring matter, whereby the whole of the latter is taken up by the parts of the wood with which it first comes into contact. Different intermediate shades, in great variety, may be obtained by combinations of colouring matters, according to the tint ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... an orange, and having cut a hole in the peel about the size of a shilling, take out the juice and pulp. Fill the skin thus emptied with some cocoa-nut fibre, fine moss, and charcoal, just stiffened with a little loam, and then put an acorn or a date stone, or the seed or kernel of any tree that it is proposed to obtain in a dwarfed form in this mixture, just about the centre of the hollow orange peel. Place the orange peel ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... he could sleep as he did, having in front of him the terrible to-morrow, when perhaps Mr. Cox would cast them adrift; and she trembled in every fibre when she stood on the stairs leading to the manager's room. There was a great crowd: the chorus-girls wedged themselves into a solid mass, and murmured good-mornings to each other; Mortimer told a long story from the top step; Dubois ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... into the great revolving wooden drums that you see overhead and are worked about in borax and water until they become soft. They are washed, too. Then after all the skins have been washed and softened they are thrown into lime and are left there until the fibre swells and the hair is loosened. The men you see with rubber gloves on are the limers. If they did not wear gloves they would get their hands burned and raw, for the lime and the chemicals used in the tan often make the hands ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this secluded nook till his ship had sailed ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... of explanation to MacArthur, 'is a lad of coarse fibre. He doesn't understand the finer feelings. He can't see that I am doing this simply for the Old Man's good. Spare the rod, spile the choild. Let's go and have a look at Tony when we're changed. He'll be in the ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... purpose and malice, with a refinement of outrage: such an accident to THEM, of all people on earth, the very last, the least thinkable, those who, he verily believed, would feel it more than any family in the world. When Waterlow asked what made them of so exceptionally fine a fibre he could only answer that they just happened to be—not enviably, if one would; it was his father's influence and example, his very genius, the worship of privacy and good manners, a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations. The artist sought ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... darkened chamber, one or two priceless sentences of a Kempis, or a spirit-stirring Hebrew psalm, would fall upon my ear: and then there was silence again; and I was left to brood over the words in vacancy, till they became a fibre of my own soul's core. Again and again the stories of Lazarus and the Magdalene alternated with Milton's Penseroso, or with Wordsworth's tenderest and most solemn strains. Exquisite prints from the history of our Lord's life and death were ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... hull. Through that wood the dry hot wind had streamed for many weeks, till every stave and every board had become dry to its utmost possibility. Now at the first breath of the flame the wood yielded; at the first touch it flared up, and prepared to receive the embrace of the fire in every fibre of its being. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... heart makes only one three-thousandth of a volt of electricity at each beat. It would take over two hundred thousand men to light one of these incandescent lamps, two million or more to run a trolley- car. Yet just that slight little current is enough to sway the gossamer strand of quartz fibre up there at what we call the 'heart station.' So fine is this machine that the pulse-tracings produced by the sphygmograph, which I have used in other cases up to this time, are ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... sensibility, which needs to be just touched on here, is known by the name of the specific energy of the nerves. One and the same nerve-fibre always reacts in a precisely similar way, whatever the nature of the stimulus. Thus, when the optic nerve is stimulated in any manner, whether by light, mechanical pressure, or an electric current, the same effect, a sensation of light, follows.[27] In a usual way, a given class of nerve-fibre is ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the merchants of Boston, known by his name and his work to the entire English speaking world: Daniel Lothrop, of the famous firm of D. Lothrop & Co., publishers—the people's publishing house. Mr. Lothrop is a good representative of this early New England fusion of race, temperament, fibre, conscience and brain. He is a direct descendant of John Lowthroppe, who, in the thirty-seventh year of Henry VIII. (1545), was a gentleman of quite extensive landed estates, both in Cherry Burton (four ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... tiers one above another. Those who do not work are quickly cut out from all participation in race-progress and in race-delights; those who work earnestly, but blindly, have their small reward. But those who work with spiritual energy and enthusiasm are weaving their handiwork into the very fibre of the universal frame. It is for these spiritual workers that the great eagerness of life is undying; for them there is no shadow of fatigue; for them there is the joy of mastery and accomplishment; for them the peace of soul that comes from the triumphant ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... not a truly devoted sister. A truly devoted sister would give her brother a chance of developing some moral fibre on his own account. Ever since you two lived together you've been making noble sacrifices. Now two can't play at that game, and the boy hasn't had a chance. The consequence is, he won't work; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... week of the long search the outlook became more hopeless. Here was this army crowding into the great city, packed away in noisome tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre, and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air, free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... do," replied Aubrey, "Most assuredly I am! I love and honour Christ with every fibre of my being. I long to see that Divine Splendour of the ages stand out white and shining and free from the mud and slime with which His priests have bespattered Him. I believe in Him absolutely! But I can find nowhere in His Gospel that He wished us to turn Religion into ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... it came about that when the Captain's room was cosiest, and he and his friends were kindest, I used to steal away from luxuries which are dear to every fibre of my constitution, and pat hastily down to the dirty hole, where Terence accumulated old rubbish and misused and mislaid valuables—in the wild hope that I might hear, smell, or see the ragged-eared ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the window, and then sharply enough at Amyas; but Amyas was busy settling his stirrup; and Cary rode on, unconscious that every fibre in his companion's huge frame was ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... extracted, the outer part forms a rough covering for the rougher floor, on which the farmer sleeps. The leaf of the sago is preferable for the roofing of houses to the nibong. The gomati, or gno, gives the black fibre which enables the owner to manufacture rope or cord for his own use; and over and above, the toddy of this palm is a luxury daily enjoyed. When we entered, this toddy was produced in large bamboos, both for our use and that of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... freedom from a terrible bond must have been recent, since his manner towards herself had changed only that summer, within the month in fact. The reserve of years had been prompted by hard conditions. In honor he could not woo. Ah, in him ran the fibre of the hero, no matter what might have been his mistakes! He had resisted every natural temptation to show his love. Once more they were brother and sister, children of the dear father whose last moments they had consoled. Who would regret the sorrow which led to such a revealing ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... certain parts, necessary, indeed, to the nutrition of the future plant, but unfit, in its present state, for the use or nourishment of man. For instance, barley contains starch, mucilaginous sugar, gum, adhesive matter, vegetable albumen, phosphate of lime, oil, fibre and water. All these are necessary to the formation of roots, stalks, leaves, flowers and the new grain; but for the manufacture of beer, the brewer needs only the first three substances. The same ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... the calm, easy-going companion now, but the earnest student of the human frame, straining every mental fibre to the encounter ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... been more instructively analysed either by Aristotle himself or in modern works; at the same time, there is probably no work which is a better and more stimulating introduction to logical study. Its terse, epigrammatic phrases sink into the fibre of the mind, and are a healthy warning against crude, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a battle in which more personal courage was displayed, or in which more skill and endurance was called into requisition. Not unfrequently a trapper would occupy one side of a large boulder and an Indian warrior the other, each watching for the life of his adversary, while every fibre of mental and muscular power were roused to activity. Neither could leave his covert without certain death, and one or the ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... after which he bound it to his forearm, rejoicing in coming weal, and walked about till nightfall awaiting the gardener's return; and when he came not, he lay down and slept in his wonted place. At daybreak he rose to his work and, girding his middle with a cord of palm- fibre, took hatchet and basket and walked down the length of the garden, till he came to a carob-tree and struck the axe into its roots. The blow rang and resounded; so he cleared away the soil from the place and discovered a trap-door and raised it.—And Shahrazad perceived ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... which held the cigarettes, and made a desperate effort to dismiss the image of the girl before he again reached Leila. She was still sitting there, with her arms crossed, in the stillness of one whose every nerve and fibre was stretched taut. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... may have unconsciously exaggerated such failings in the revelation of his earlier self, or what the influence of such an experience as he relates may have done to strengthen the moral fibre, are points on which I can express no opinion, any more than I can pledge myself to the credibility of the supernatural element of ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... The constant and universal action of variation, the struggle for existence, and the "survival of the fittest," few who are competent to grasp will have the temerity to doubt. And to many, that lies within it as a doctrine, and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the existence of a continuity, an unbroken stream of unity running from the base to the apex of the entire organic series. The plant and the animal, the lowliest organized and the most complex, the minutest and the largest, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... thorny way of man, he gathers them up with thanks: a cheerful thrill quivers through his heart, like the melody of an Aeolian harp; but the earnest duties of life soon claim his attention and his cares. The melodious thrill dies away, and on he must go; on he goes, joyless, cheerless, and cold, every fibre of his heart bent to the earnest duties of the day. But when the hard work of the day is done, and the stress of mind for a moment subsides, then the heart again claims its right, and the tender fingers of our memory gather up again the violets of joy which the guardian angel threw in our way, and ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... if he did not understand the language; and I awaited the approach of the terror of France, the horror of Europe, during half an hour, which seemed to me interminable. The door at last opened, a valet came in, and the name of "Robespierre" thrilled through every fibre; but, instead of the frowning giant to which my fancy had involuntarily attached the name, I saw a slight figure, highly dressed, and even with the air of a fop on the stage. Holding a perfumed handkerchief in one hand, which he waved towards his face like one indulging in the fragrance, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... to the postmistress, but apparently she did not hear—Judith was watching the nearing stage as if it might bring some message of life and death. She stood still, and the drooping lines of her figure straightened, every fibre of her beauty kindled. She was like ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Russell was prepared to maintain at all times, in all places, and amid surroundings which have been known to test the moral fibre of more boisterous politicians. Though profoundly attached to the Throne and to the Hanoverian succession, he was no courtier. The year 1688 was his sacred date, and he had a habit of applying the principles of our English Revolution ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Indians on Lake Huron's eastern shores about three centuries ago, they saw them cultivating this plant, which must have been brought by them from its native prairies beyond the Mississippi—a plant whose stalks furnished them with a textile fibre, its leaves fodder, its flowers a yellow dye, and its seeds, most valuable of all, food and hair-oil! Early settlers in Canada were not slow in sending home to Europe so decorative and useful an acquisition. Swine, poultry, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... and instructiveness for us, though it was,—as, having regard to the human race in general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own,—a premature attempt, an attempt which for success needed the moral and religious fibre in humanity to be more braced and developed than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so present and paramount; it is impossible to have this idea too present and paramount; only the moral fibre must be ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... held sacred by his ancestors is ingrained in every fibre of a Hindu's character, and is, so to speak, bred in the very bone of his physical and moral constitution." So writes Sir Monier Williams. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience—a faculty of self-government and self-control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilisation, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... one thought which rises supreme at this particular moment of these tremendous times: The period of surprise is over; the forces known; the issue fully joined. It is now a case of "Pull devil, pull baker," and a question of the fibre of the combatants. For this reason it may not be amiss to try to present to any whom it may concern as detached a picture as one can of the real nature of that combatant who is called the Englishman, especially since ignorance in Central Europe ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to it; nay, of a predisposition in itself to fall into the ordained form, without any direct expression of the command to do so; an anticipation of the authority, and an instant and willing submission to it, in every fibre and spray: not merely willing, but happy submission, as being pleased rather than vexed to have so beautiful a law suggested to it, and one which to follow is so justly in accordance with its own nature. You must not cut out a branch of hawthorn as it grows, and rule a triangle ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... artificial torpedo, had well remarked these differences, depending on the greater or less energy of the charge. Philosophical Transactions 1776 page 212.) It will perhaps be found that, in most animals, every contraction of the muscular fibre is preceded by a discharge from the nerve into the muscle; and that the mere simple contact of heterogeneous substances is a source of movement and of life in all organized beings. Did an ingenious and lively people, the Arabians, guess from remote antiquity, that the same force which inflames ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break in the strata at the arch of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... stars above made their appearance, the same to which the Dryad had looked up in her home. She thought she felt a clear pure stream of air which went forth from them. She felt herself lifted up and strengthened, and felt an increased power of seeing through every leaf and through every fibre of the root. Amid all the noise and the turmoil, the colors and the lights, she knew herself watched ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... to describe, as it varies according to the soil and climate it comes from. Its fibre, however, has always a shiny outer surface, and is transparent, cylindrical, and pipe-like; apparently with breaks or joints ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Do but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the heart in you that will ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... butter-fat. Standard whole-milk cheese is cheese containing in the water-free substance not less than 50% of butter-fat. Standard sugar contains at least 99.5% of sucrose. Standard chocolate is chocolate containing not more than 3% of ash insoluble in water, 3.5% of crude fibre, and 9% of starch, nor less than 45% of cocoa-fat.'' Numerous other standards with details too technical for reproduction here have ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... respects it was opposite and antagonistic to His nature—because it defiled, degraded, and destroyed. He traced all human wretchedness to this poisonous root, and Gregory trembled and his face grew dark with despair as he realized how it was inwoven with every fibre of his heart. Then in simple but strong language the silver-haired old man, who seemed a type of the ancient prophets, portrayed the great white throne of God's justice, snowy, too dazzling for human eyes, and the conscience-stricken man shrunk ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... gallery with two stairways, I can reach the windows and enjoy the beauty of the landscape, which is lovely. My bed is a simple hammock of aloes-fibre, slung in a corner; very low divans, and huge tapestry arm-chairs, for the rest of the furniture. Hung up on the wainscoting are pistols, guns, masks, foils, gloves, plastrons, dumb-bells and other gymnastic ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... and already anticipating a real coon hunt, when the dog should be properly trained. The episode so contrasted with the sordid life he had left an hour before that he was spellbound. The very animal smell of the coon seemed to make his fibre tingle. His eyes were glowing with a wild light. He was so absorbed that he did not notice a third party attracted by the unusual noise of the chase, but the dog did. A sudden, loud challenge called all attention to a stranger on the ridge behind the camp. There was no mistaking the bloated ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and such sickening and poisonous vapors, as took away, for the instant, breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve and fibre of the frame. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... eyes indicated to me, who knew them so well, that every nerve, every fibre in her system, was trembling under the stress of some intense emotion. I stood and watched her, wondering as to her condition, and speculating as to what ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... always known, and in which Esther had trusted for the final outcome of Helen's choices. So that what seemed to her at that time to be a sudden act due to an accidental revelation of character, was, as a matter of fact, due to a life long training in a home which had established in the fibre of its whole system, underlying principles of right thinking ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... them the last "Bannact Dea Leat"—"God's blessing be on your way"; but when they come to Cove, the sorrow is smothered; they are buoyed up by that trusting faith in the future which is the first fibre in the Irish nature. They may look melancholy to us, but they themselves make merry, and before the "big ship" is but on the "Old Sea," as the Atlantic is called, the girls and young men are slipping through rollicking ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... daren't deny our hot reply as to "who are our mounted men." He shall honour them east and westward, he shall honour them south and north, He shall bare his head to that coat of red wherever that red rides forth. 'Tis well that he knows the fibre that the great North-West contains, The North-West pride in her men that ride on the Territorial plains,— For of such as these are the muscles and the teeth in the Lion's jaw, And they keep the peace of our people and the honour of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... mainspring of every action. We must not let slip one single occasion of sacrifice, everything has such value in the religious life . . . Pick up a pin from a motive of love, and you may thereby convert a soul. Jesus alone can make our deeds of such worth, so let us love Him with every fibre of ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... comparison with the attempts, the struggles, to accomplish what has now been achieved, the list of failures would far outnumber that of successes. Many of those who have rendered priceless blessings to their own and after generations by the production of wonderful machines or methods from the fine fibre of their brains, were plundered and buffeted, even in the midst of their grand successes, to such a degree that it requires a lofty comprehension to determine whether their lives were triumphs or defeats. Sometimes the failure of one generation ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... green cocoa-nuts, the juice of which he drank, for in all the isle there was no water. The days were long to him, and the nights terrifying. He made a lamp of cocoa-shell, and drew the oil of the ripe nuts, and made a wick of fibre; and when evening came he closed up his hut, and lit his lamp, and lay and trembled till morning. Many a time he thought in his heart he would have been better in the bottom of the sea, his bones rolling there with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Brereton, who had gone close to the table to examine the cord, and had seen that, though slender, it was exceedingly strong, and of closely wrought fibre. "Is ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... are feeding and storing places, so the stem is a sort of passage way for the passing back and forth of liquids. Take a stem of a big plant, like an oak tree, and you see in the wood where storage of fibre has gone on. But the great ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... man of weak fibre, who allowed himself to sponge upon his friends, such as Talfourd, Haydon, and Shelley. Though Dickens denied ('All the Year Round', Dec. 24, 1859) that "Harold Skimpole" was intended for Hunt, the picture was recognized as a portrait. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... and looked out into the distance. "If only we could ensure it for him everywhere! Native commissioners and their clerks and the magistrates, all men of fine fibre, who honestly care about the natives under them and the welfare of the country. So much could be done if ... if ..." He smiled a little grimly. "We are so apt to expect the impossible," he finished. "How should ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... dependent on the tending hand of a slighted wife; in quiet talks with an aged mother, of the days when we stood at her knee with our first picture-book, or wrote her loving letters from school. In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues, and Mr. Dempster, whom you have hitherto seen only as the orator of the Red Lion, and the drunken tyrant of a dreary midnight home, was the first-born darling son of a fair little mother. That mother was living still, and ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... it be forgotten, that every fibre passes through no less than ten sets of machinery, hence, the united spindles and threads travel through 1,000 miles a minute. The noise of their united frictions and collisions, and the united hum of thousands of little spindles, each revolving 4,000 times a minute, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... sounded convincing and logical; and yet, even while Stephen responded to the Governor's personal touch, some obstinate fibre of race or inflexible bent of judgment, refused to surrender. Vetch was probably sincere—it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt—but on the surface at least he was parading a spectacular pose. The role of the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... coarse and perverted natures,—worse than all, against the power that should have been ranged upon his side. And added to these discouragements, were the obstacles of physical delicacy, and an almost morbid conscientiousness. A man of coarser fibre might have borne the burden better—or at least ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Neither witty nor humorous, he was slow to appreciate a joke, but he had a hearty laugh when he did comprehend it. He was liberal in his habits, genial in his temperament, and kindly in his disposition. He was very modest, though firm and reliable; honest in every fibre, without guile and cunning; thoroughly simple, and yet clear-headed, cool, and sensible. He was slow in his mental processes, but no one doubted that he believed all that he thought and said and did. His apples were not ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... are four stories of power and dash in this volume: "The Last Straw," "The Surrender of Lapwing," "The Penance of Hedwig," and "Garret Owen's Little Countess." Each one of these tells a tale full of verve and thrill, each one has a heroine of fibre and spirit. ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... a collection now and then, a spasmodic effort here and there, a subscription to a Catholic paper or missionary magazine, the work for Home and Foreign missions will remain exterior to the corporate life of the Church, will not be woven into its very fibre to permeate its activities. As shadows on the wall, they will suggest rather than reveal the possibilities of our missionary effort. The great and pressing call of the White Shepherd of the Vatican will go unheard. If there is a response that comes from Canada, it will not be from ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... and straightening out under his weight, but, as it seemed to him, with inconceivable slowness. Then—to such a preternatural state of acuteness had his senses been wrought by the imminence and certainty of ghastly disaster—he saw the last strand slowly parting, not yarn by yarn but fibre by fibre, until, after what seemed to be a veritable eternity of suspense, the last fibre snapped, he heard a loud twang, and found himself floating—as it seemed to him— very gently downward, so gently, indeed, that, as he was swung round, facing the rocky wall, he was able to note clearly ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... its cup. A hundred feet across and a hundred and seventy feet deep was that gigantic bowl, its walls supported by the structural steel and concrete of the dock and lined with hard-packed bumper-layers of hemp and fibre. High into the air extended the upper half of the ship of space—a sullen gray expanse of fifty-inch hardened steel armor, curving smoothly upward to a needle prow. Countless hundred of fine vertical scratches ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... restoration of Queen Caroline's name to the Liturgy, as well as subscribing to compensate an officer, friendly to the Queen, whom the King's animosity had driven from the army, adds: 'It may well be that some tradition of this early independence, or some playful desire to test the fibre of Whiggery by putting an extreme case, led in much later years to an embarrassing question by an illustrious personage, and gave the opportunity for an apt reply. "Is it true, Lord John, that you hold that a subject is ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... sour-tongued woman; but, as the days shortened with the approach of the long winter months, she seemed to him to grow more fretful than ever; at times it was almost as if she bore him some smouldering, sullen resentment. He was of stubborn fibre, however, toughened by long habit of a bleak, unruly climate; he revolved the matter in his mind deliberately, and when, at last, after much plodding thought, it dawned upon him that she resented his acquaintance with Rosa Blencarn, ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... traced out the mechanics of the trap, and exposed the hidden fibre in the tangled undergrowth that at contact with Koogoo's foot had released the ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... examination further proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... soon drove away this temporary chagrin, bringing to him the best comfort life gave in those days—the gentle influence of Nature. For, just in proportion as Dan shunned humanity he courted her, and though he felt her relentlessness through every fibre of his suffering being, he felt her charm as well, and ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... than this, exactly as we reduce to greater simplicity and surety any one group of these practical laws, we shall find them passing the mere condition of connection or analogy, and becoming the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws which govern the moral world.—RUSKIN, Seven Lamps, 4. The sum total of all intellectual excellence is good sense and method. When these have passed into the instinctive readiness of habit, when the wheel revolves so rapidly that we cannot ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... dark, Richard's sole dependence was in his own will,—as flimsy a trust for an upward scramble, one would have premised, as a tuft of grass on the face of a perpendicular cliff. Flimsy as it looked, however, it served him. It started and crumbled, but it held, if only by a single fibre. When Richard had cantered fifty yards away from Gertrude's gate in a fit of stupid rage, he suddenly pulled up his horse and gulped down his passion, and swore an oath, that, suffer what torments of feeling he might, he would not at least break ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... as panic-stricken as a frightened horse. I, as I, had ceased to exist. Through me were vibrating the fibre-instincts of ten thousand generations of superstitious forebears who had been afraid of the dark and the things of the dark. I was not I. I was, in truth, those ten thousand forebears. I was the race, the whole human race, in its superstitious infancy. Not until part way ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... respond to this suggestion, but changed into an impersonation of a rollicking girl of rather common fibre. "Hello, Sally!" she cried out, and Mrs. Cameron stared at her in blank dismay as she asked, "Are ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... it was. The gloom of centuries darkened it. Their dusk had penetrated the very fibre of the wood. Its look suggested ancient times; far climes; and hands long mouldering in dust. It was an instrument to quicken curiosity and elicit mental interrogation. What was its story? Where was it made? By whom, and when? The Lad did ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... speak kindly to a poor peasant, smile upon him, and even show him a real affection, a happiness which he never experienced before would take possession of his heart. A thrill of joy would run through every fibre of his frame. He would be a new man, and live a new life, simply because a great one of this world had smiled upon him and condescended ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... his former vocation with airy contempt, as if he did not yearn for it with every fibre of his being,—its utility, its competence, its future. The recollection of the very feel of the fair smooth paper under his hand, the delicate hair-line chirography trailing off so fast from the swift pen, could ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... tell me that such a state of things is natural, and that such conduct on the part of the people of the north, springs from a consciousness of rectitude? No! every fibre of the human heart unites in detestation of tyranny, and it is only when the human mind has become familiarized with slavery, is accustomed to its injustice, and corrupted by its selfishness, that it fails to record its abhorrence of ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre. But no tiniest grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever escape from her hand, and the daily debris from all earth-made bodies is her constant toll. When the forms are set free from the life principle which has pervaded them in ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... there may be the truest unity.—There is variety in the human body—from eyelash to foot, from heart to blood-disc, from brain to quivering nerve-fibre; yet, in all this variety, each one is conscious of an indivisible unity. There is variety in the tree: the giant arms that wrestle with the storm, the far-spreading roots that moor it to the soil, the myriad leaves in which the wind ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do, there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him a disturbing and incalculable magic—an upheaving force, like leaven stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... of the dishes and the fumes of wine, she looked sublimely beautiful to his eyes, so fair had she grown with love. She was the loveliest, the most beautiful actress in Paris. The brotherhood, the heaven of noble thoughts, faded away before a temptation that appealed to every fibre of his nature. How could it have been otherwise? Lucien's author's vanity had just been gratified by the praises of those who know; by the appreciation of his future rivals; the success of his articles and his conquest of Coralie might have turned ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she never would or could love any man. Zuleika, on the other hand, was a woman of really passionate fibre. She may not have had that conscious, separate, and quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she could love. And, surely, no woman who knows that of herself can be rightly censured for not ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the body and the mind. If a man does not exercise his arm he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of moral fibre, no beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... reception of Lavengro by the critics, and also by the public,[173] may be said to have destroyed Borrow's moral fibre. Henceforth, it was a soured and disappointed man who went forth to meet the world. We hear much in the gossip of contemporaries of Borrow's eccentricities, it may be of his rudeness and gruffness, in the last years of his life. Only those who can realise ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... whether to talk in this manner be not allowing that we are weak, and yielding to our softness. Notwithstanding, let us be hardy enough, not only to lop off every arm of our miseries, but even to pluck up every fibre of their roots: yet still something perhaps may be left behind, so deep does folly strike its roots: but whatever may be left, it will be no more than is necessary. But let us be persuaded of this, that unless the mind be in a sound state, which philosophy alone can effect, there ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... an artificial body for a bird is by means of "peat." [Footnote: "Peat" is compressed vegetable fibre cut from old bogs, and is sold by the dealers, in dried cakes about 1 foot long by 6 inches by 2 inches.] Having provided yourself with one of these bricks of peat, you cut it with a sharp knife to as near the shape required as possible, having the natural body before you as a guide, finally inserting ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... had listened without permitting a single fibre of his face to betray what he felt, and his smile remained as it ever was—false and flattering; and when the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... among the first to witness his arrival. You ask me what was his appearance as he ran, or rather flew, up the steps of the hotel, and sprang into the hall. He seemed all on fire with curiosity, and alive as I never saw mortal before. From top to toe every fibre of his body was unrestrained and alert. What vigor, what keenness, what freshness of spirit, possessed him! He laughed all over, and did not care who heard him! He seemed like the Emperor of Cheerfulness on a cruise of pleasure, determined to conquer ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... newspapers are published in various languages, most of them with small circulations, 20,000 being the largest in India. The post and telegraph systems are well cared for; and 17,564 miles of railway are in operation, with others in process of construction. The manufactures, both in metal and fibre, have always been remarkably fine, and the quality is still kept up. Cotton factories have been established, with native labor, which promise great results to the industry ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... interior of the regulator body. Inside of the body is a metal or rubber diaphragm placed so that the pressure of the incoming gas causes it to bulge slightly. Attached to the diaphragm is a sleeve or an arm tipped with a small piece of fibre, the fibre being placed so that it is directly opposite the small hole through which the gas entered the diaphragm chamber. The slight movement of the diaphragm draws the fibre tightly over the small opening through ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... sea-fights, and of many smaller ones, before he was seventeen, young Olaf Haraldson was a remarkable boy, even in the days when all boys aimed to be battle-tried heroes. Toughened in frame and fibre by his five years of sea-roving, he had become strong and self-reliant, a man in action though ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... my great content that whatever change had passed over the spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he finds himself plunged into the urgent practical ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have filled the honorary and honorable offices of general-utility woman, story-teller, song-singer, and playmaker-in-ordinary to their royal highnesses, some thousands of babies, I have been struck with the greater hardness of the small boys; a certain coarseness of fibre and lack of sensitiveness which makes them less susceptible, at first, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the carbon atom may take part in the formation at one time of a diamond, again of a piece of coal, and yet again of a particle of sugar, of wood fibre, of animal tissue, or of a gas in the atmosphere; but from first to last—from glass-cutting gem to intangible gas—there is no demonstrable change whatever in any single property of the atom itself. So ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... manly strength; ambitious, it was true, but never likely to fulfil his ambitions. The sight pained her. And yet this was the one she had exalted so, and had believed a soaring genius. True, his mind had fine fibre in it, but he who would soar must have strength as well as wings. Beth saw clearly just what Clarence lacked, and what can pain a woman more deeply than to know the object ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt |
