"Mainspring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to do, in order to place life before you in a more favourable light, would seem purposeless, if your confidence feels the lack of this talisman to which you attach so great a value. We must not laugh at these little superstitions. They are often the mainspring of our ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by the Timrod Memorial Association of South Carolina to the memory of the most vivid poet the South has given to the world. On the west panel is an inscription which expresses to us the mainspring of his character: ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... if possible, during my stay in the factory, what it is that clogs this mainspring of "spirit" ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... insignificant, so had this pride increased and strengthened, until, together with her passionate propriety and horror of everything in the least doubtful in the way of reputations, it had come to be the very mainspring of her being. "Then——" she began again, with a great effort; for she remembered how there had actually been no food sometimes when she was hungry, and no fire when she was cold, and no doctor when she was sick, and how severe weather ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... April, 1876, this great magnate died. His business was carried on, for a time, by others, but the mainspring was gone, and in 1882 the great clock stopped. Here is an instance that should convince us of the result of courage, energy, and self-reliance. A. T. Stewart began without a dollar, and succeeded, while they who had the benefit ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... near. Cavalcades of horsemen thronged in from many a distant place, wearing proudly the Fenian sash of orange and green over their shoulder, and it struck my youthful imagination what a dashing body of cavalry these would have made in the fight for Ireland. Michael Davitt was the founder and mainspring of the Land League and it is within my memory that in the hearts and the talks of the people around their fireside hearths he was at this time only second to Parnell in their hope and love. I am told ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... would not give it to Freddy, for he is a man, and I should be breaking the mainspring of his life. But I will give half my money to Ethel, provided that you will consent to let ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on its source with variable energy.—But there ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... interesting to the reader: and the author had to regret, that though he made liberal use of the power of departing from the reality of history, he felt by no means confident of having brought his story into a pleasing, compact, and sufficiently intelligible form. The mainspring of the plot is that which all who know the least of the feudal system can easily understand, though the facts are absolutely fictitious. The right of a feudal superior was in nothing more universally ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... events at home changed the whole face of affairs. After eight years of childlessness the king became in October the father of a son. With the birth of this boy the rivalry of York and the Beauforts for the right of succession ceased to be the mainspring of English politics; and the crown seemed again to rise out of the turmoil of warring factions. But with the birth of the son came the madness of the father. Henry the Sixth sank into a state of ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs. Quickly's account of his desiring 'to eat some of housewife Keach's prawns', and telling her 'to be no more so familiarity with such people', is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR put together. Ford's jealousy, which is the mainspring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the different degrees of fidelity in their wives. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... amazing substance was this, which could not be bent or broken, or even bitten into? The more Black Bruin pushed at the iron bars of his cage, the fainter grew that spark of hope which is the mainspring of all life, until at last he ceased to hope altogether, and bowing to the inevitable, no longer sought to be free. Sullenly he glared at the gaping crowds that passed his cage daily, and the only thing to which he looked forward ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... of his life he was faithful to it. He made no vaunt of his religion, founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs; and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,—the thirst for moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but the result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. Franklin's character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Brownie, wouldn't she love it all!" said Norah, her eyes tender at the thought of the old woman who had been nurse and mother, and mainspring of the Billabong house, since Norah's own mother had laid her baby in her kind arms and closed tired eyes so many years ago. "Wouldn't she love fixing the house! And how she'd hate cooking with coal instead of wood! Only nothing would make ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... meaning of the words, "Do this in remembrance of Me," is "Break your bodies in union with My Body broken: give your lives in sacrifice for others, as I have given Mine." The Eucharist, rightly regarded, is the mainspring and motive-power of service, the principle of a life that is crucified. And all those who in their day and generation have spent their lives unselfishly and used themselves up in promoting causes not their own are partakers in that ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... The mainspring of all progress, individual and social, is the desire to fulfill in character all one has planned in thought. Man's life is one long pursuit of the visions of possible excellence which disquiet, rebuke and tempt him upward. "As to other points," said ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in an unconcerned, wooden way, as if they were moved by some ingenious piece of Swiss clock-work. The stiff old curee, too, had an air of having been wound up and set a-going. I could almost hear the creak of his mainspring. I was smiling at that, perhaps, and thinking how strongly the scenery of some portions of our own country resembles this part ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... almost clairvoyant vision, this artist-artisan sees how every process of mainspring making can be carried further; and how, at every stage of manufacture, more perfection can be reached; how the texture of the metal can be so much refined that even a fiber, a slender thread of it, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... lock apart: 1st. Cock the piece and apply the spring-piece to the mainspring; give the thumb-screw a turn sufficient to liberate the spring from the swivel and mainspring notch; remove the spring. 2d. The sear-spring screw. 3d. The sear-screw and sear. 4th. The bridle-screw and bridle. 5th. ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... possessed himself of a set of examination-papers, enabled him to take his degree with an ease and brilliance which very considerably astonished his instructors. By adroitly using his good fortune, SAUNDERS accumulated a pile of most egregious testimonials, and these he regarded as the mainspring of success in life. He had early discovered in himself a singular capacity for drawing salaries, and as he had unbounded conceit and unqualified ignorance, he conceived himself to be fit for any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that he first found himself in direct antagonism to the France of the Revolution. The fact that Leopold's sister, Marie Antoinette, was the wife of Louis XVI. had done little to cement the Franco-Austrian alliance, which since 1763 had been practically non-existent; nor was it now the mainspring of his attitude towards revolutionary France. But by the decree of the 4th of August, which in the general abolition of feudal rights involved the possessions of many German princes enclaves in Alsace and Lorraine, the Constituent Assembly had ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the children interested? While, as we have seen, the atmosphere or spirit of the classroom supplies the condition necessary to successful work, interest supplies the motive force. For interest is the mainspring of action. A child may politely listen, or from a sense of courtesy or good will sit quietly passive and not disturb others, but this does not meet the requirement. His thought, interest, and enthusiasm must be centered on the matter in hand. He must withdraw his ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... mainspring of everything. Money is indispensable, even for going without money. But though that dross is necessary to any one who wishes to think in peace, I have not courage enough to make it the sole motive power of my thoughts. To make ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... have been contemptuously called the shop- keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement. And one sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can never come, and retiring on pensions or ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... took the party to Crystal Brook, Shanty Brook, Mainspring Brook, Tenement Brook, and more little mountain gutters of the kind than you could count on your fingers and toes. As an aristocratic residence, this region is certainly superior to New York, for the Murray Hills are as plenty as blackberries. The next day ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... German sword was pointed everywhere, its hilt was in Berlin. Prussia supplied the mind which conceived the policy and controlled its execution; and in the circumstances of the Prussian Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of the war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with Russia, France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and extension; but national rivalries always exist ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... You are a stranger no longer: all men know you, all men are your friends; this it is to possess the friendship of the venerable Solon. Conversing with him, you will forget Scythia and all that is in it. Your toils are rewarded, your desire is fulfilled. In him you have the mainspring of Greek civilization, in him the ideals of Athenian philosophers are realized. Happy man—if you know your happiness—to be the ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... the STRANGER with his foot). The worm! You can make him believe whatever you like. That comes from his unbelievable pride. Does he think he's the mainspring of the universe, the originator of all evil? This foolish man believes he taught youth to go in search of Venus; as if youth hadn't done that long before he was born! His pride's insupportable, and he's been rash enough to try to botch my work for me. Give him another ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... quivering back to the same point—namely, righteous anger against Damaris. For was not that high-spirited maiden's imperviousness to influence and defiance of authority—her, Theresa's, influence and authority—the mainspring of all this disastrous complication? Theresa found it convenient to believe so, and whip herself up to almost frantic determination in that belief. It was so perfectly clear. All the more clear because her informant, Mary, evidently did not share her belief. Mary's account of to-day's most vexatious ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a world of beauty, Where there is no gloomy night, Where love is the mainspring of duty, And God is the fountain of light. I have read of the flowing river That bursts from beneath the throne, And beautiful flowers that ever Are found on its banks alone. I long—I long—I long to ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... astonished when he sees the thick masses of leaves on the trees. "What is it, then," he says, "which is laid waste if it was not the garden? Not even a blade of grass is missing. It is I who must live in winter and cold hereafter, not the garden. It is as if the mainspring of life were gone. Ah, you old fool, this will pass like everything else. It is too much ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... usefulness, even the government of Oriental races; the list of the known qualified would be exhausted, perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must; it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client's situation, the view which came to him ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... our history, John de Bermingham, created for his former victory Baron of Athenry, had now the Earldom of Louth conferred on him with a royal pension. He promptly followed up his blow at Faughard by expelling Donald O'Neil, the mainspring of the invasion, from Tyrone; but Donald, after a short sojourn among the mountains of Fermanagh, returned during the winter and resumed his lordship, though he never wholly recovered from the losses ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... selfishness and pride. The relation of man to nature and her physical forces commands the highest functions of the mind, but the relation of man to his fellows not only enlists the highest intellectual effort, but requires that it be tempered by impulses of human kindness. Those who have as the mainspring of their actions the elevation of their fellows live and move upon a higher plane and are better members of society than those who subordinate sentiment and sympathy ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... in worshipping his ancestors, whose minister he should consider himself to be. The custom of adoption arose from the natural desire of having some one to perform sacrifices; and this desire ought not to be rendered of no avail by neglect. Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to them will ever be disrespectful to the gods or to his living parents. Such a man also will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle to his wife and children. For the essence of this devotion ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... interests and happiness do not seem to have been consulted in the arrangements made for her protection. She has been bought and sold, caressed and crucified at the will and pleasure of her master. But if a chivalrous desire to protect woman has always been the mainspring of man's dominion over her, it should have prompted him to place in her hands the same weapons of defense he has found to be most effective against wrong ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... as possible to the provinces. Then, as always, he was true to those principles of fidelity to the crown and empire which had forced his father to seek refuge in Nova Scotia, and which had been ever the mainspring of his action, even in the trying days when he and others were struggling for responsible government. He believed always in constitutional agitation, not in rebellion. He now agreed to enter the ministry as president of the council on ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... duration, and though I will not exactly say that poor Ross was already forgotten, the success of yesterday had reconciled at least the privates to the guidance of their new leader; nor was any other issue anticipated than what would have attended the excursion had he still been its mainspring ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... devolves the conduct of affairs. His words on the susceptibility of the people to be acted on by those above them ought not to prove as water spilt on the ground. But to return to Confucius.— As he thus lays it down that the mainspring of the well-being of society is the personal character of the ruler, we look anxiously for what directions he has given for the cultivation of that. But here he is very defective. 'Self-adjustment and purification,' ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... meaning of your own tenet—'Perfect Love and Fulfilment'? If you have any doubts upon these points, Mr. Mario, hold your hand. It can profit the world nothing to restir the witches' cauldron. Love must always be the mainspring of life and honour its loftiest ideal. Teach men how to live and leave it to Death to reveal the hereafter. Not for the good of mankind do I tremble—God has the world in his charge—but for yourself. We all are granted ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... territorial princes of old; but among them all there was not one who, finding his state reduced to such a miserable condition, so successfully raised it to independence and power. He instilled into his subjects a spirit of enterprise,—the mainspring of a state. He took measures which secured to his country an increase of power and prosperity. What the world most admired, and indeed what he himself most valued, was the condition of his army. It contained at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... on the various problems of "The Wind Bloweth"—problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity, and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander the wide world over, a race that loves battle, and yet always ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Felicia Herbert, she became for a time the very mainspring of Elisabeth's life. She was a beautiful girl, with fair hair and clear-cut features; and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration that is freely given, as a rule, to the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not. She was, moreover, gifted with a sweet and calm placidity, which was very restful ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... she had planned to make it, in her first indignation at his "even you." She did not pat him on the back for making concessions about the play. She merely said she was glad he was acting so sensibly about it, and that if she was the mainspring of that action she was proud. As for letting him off, he was the only living person who could keep him on, or let him off. If he was the sort of softling who could not stand up under life's discipline because it ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... climate, surrounded by the circumstances mentioned. Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring: man's is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... mainspring of his entire life, the real source of all his success. Without it, he might have been honored of men; with it, he was honored of God. Encircling all the separate parts of his character, like a golden chain, it bound them in one grand, beautiful, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... the stage must accept. Now, if we examine a collection of typical plays of every kind, tragedies and melodramas, comedies and farces, we shall find that the starting point of everyone of them is the same. Some one central character wants something; and this exercise of volition is the mainspring of the action. . . . In every successful play, modern or ancient, we shall find this clash of contending desires, this assertion of the human will against strenuous opposition of one ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... this writer, "Fidelio is governed throughout by one purpose, to which everything is rendered subservient. Determination to discover and liberate her husband is the mainspring not only of all her actions, and the theme of all her soliloquies, but, even when others likely to annunce her design in any way are acting or speaking, we read in the anxious gaze, the breathless anxiety, the head bent to ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... the community cannot undertake, and there is a danger in curbing individuality by a stereotyped method of instruction. 'All social enactments,' says Harnack, 'have a tendency to circumscribe the activities of the individual. If we unduly fetter the free play of individual effort we break the mainspring of progress and enterprise, and create a state of social immobility which is the antecedent of national decay.'[18] Youth ought to be taught self-reliance and strenuousness of will; and this is a work which can only be done in the home by the firm yet kindly influence of the parents. But ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... and demands close observation. The will, you see, is the mainspring of the mind, and if it is affected the whole mind goes ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... eminently qualified for a number of employments, which the instincts of the white man regard as degrading. If the white man be forced by necessity into employments abhorrent to his instincts, it tends to weaken or destroy that sentiment or principle of honor or duty, which is the mainspring of heroic actions, from the beginning of historical times to the present, and is the basis of every thing great and noble in all grades ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... is soft; or that T is sharp and D is flat; or, on the contrary, as some writers have actually maintained, that the sound of D requires a stronger impulse of the tongue than the sound of T: but we shall never get an answer that goes to the root of the matter, and lays hold of the mainspring and prime cause of all these secondary distinctions between T andD. If we consult Professor Helmholtz on the same subject, he tells us that 'the series of so-called medi, b, d, g, differs from that of the tenues, p, t, k, by this, that ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... and burgess followed burgess, but the old guild hall lived on, the central mainspring of the borough's life. Therein were stored the archives of the town, the charters won, bargained for, and granted by kings and queens, which gave them privileges of trade, authority to hold fairs and markets, liberty ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... violence of temper on the occasion of his son's revolt. It was intolerable for a man all of whose other surroundings moved like clockwork, obedient to his whims, to be disobeyed flatly by one whose obedience should be his first duty—to find disorder and rebellion in the very mainspring of the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... with a system of firm dogmatic beliefs, was the mainspring of his whole career, a guiding light in perplexities, a source of strength in adverse fortune, a consolation in sorrow, a beacon of hope beyond the disappointments and shortcomings of life. He did not make what is commonly called a profession of religion, and talked little about it in general ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... did unique service in demoralizing and scattering Big Bear's murderous and pillaging band, to whose outrages we have already referred. These two Police detachments became the tentacles of our column and the mainspring ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... them. Hence, to accomplish this journey, it was not only necessary to know the direction to shape their course, but also to be familiar with the haunts and habits of these various tribes, in order to avoid them. All of this knowledge, Kit Carson, the mainspring of this little party, was well possessed of, and, as a matter of business, guided himself and men in a direct ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... chapter which the nature of the case allowed. But there are incidents which cannot be altered; as they would draw after them other alterations; and compel the artist, who had simply undertaken to "clean the works" of the watch, absolutely to put in a new "mainspring."—English Translator.] ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... with devoutness in the plot which he had detected for the spoliation of Lord Wetherby's summer-house, that plot of which he held Lord Dawlish to be the mainspring. And it must be admitted that circumstances had combined to help his belief. If the atmosphere in which he was moving was not sinister then there was no meaning ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... produces, but without which the religion—or so-called religion—would soon cease to exist, struck us as we entered, and increased with every step. It was as if to say, "Look at these lovely things, feast your eyes on them, and let their beauty be the mainspring to inspire you with faith." There was no appeal to the true religion of the soul, that springs from the heart in a clear stream, and which no tinsel banners, no elaborate statues, and no flaming candles, can quicken ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... consideration induced the author to lay his purpose aside. It appeared, on mature consideration, that Astrology, though its influence was once received and admitted by Bacon himself, does not now retain influence over the general mind sufficient even to constitute the mainspring of a romance. Besides, it occurred, that to do justice to such a subject would have required not only more talent than the author could be conscious of possessing, but also involved doctrines and discussions of a nature too serious for ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... there in this world who is not eager to learn a secret? To him Jess was a riddle of which he did not know the key. That she was clever and well-informed he soon discovered from her rare remarks; that she could sing like an angel he also knew; but what was the mainspring of her mind—round what axis did it revolve—this was the puzzle. Clearly enough it was not like most women's, least of all like that of happy, healthy, plain-sailing Bessie. So curious did he become to fathom these mysteries that he took every opportunity to associate with her, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... one thing," said Griggs at last. "You make a spiritual engine of mankind, and you forget the mainspring of the world. You leave love ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him—the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... administration of the Library during the early years are few, but it appears that the Committee was undoubtedly the mainspring of the organisation. It contained men such as Carleton, Fitzherbert, Travers, and Domett, to mention only the best known, who were interested not only in the Library for its own sake but also in the part it could play in parliamentary affairs and ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... wants and to aspire to a higher standard of comfort, to a fuller and a larger existence. A discontent with existing circumstances is the chief source of a desire to improve them, and this desire is the mainspring of progress. In this theory of life, happiness is sought, not in content, but in improved circumstances, in the development of new capacities of enjoyment, in the pleasure which active existence naturally gives. To maintain in their due proportion in our nature the spirit of content and ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. "That I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. "Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... the French capital. In Berlin, Rome, London, it aroused the indignation of those whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Protestants, the latter stood alone in the intensity of their conviction that "Home Rule meant Rome Rule." It has already been mentioned that it is the "disloyalty" attributed rightly or wrongly to the Roman Catholics as a body that has been, in recent times at all events, the mainspring of Protestant distrust. But sectarian feeling, everywhere common between rival creeds, is, of course, by no means absent. Englishmen find it hard to understand what seems to them the bigoted and senseless animosity of the rival faiths ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... invaders was looked upon as a temporary evil, trifling when compared with the advantages that would result from it. Amongst the most enthusiastic liberals was young Pepe, who had already conceived that ardent love of liberty, which, throughout life, has been his mainspring of action. He hailed with delight the publication of the edict by which Naples was erected into the Parthenopean Republic. He was eager to enter the new army, whose organisation had been decreed, but his tender age made his brothers oppose his wish, and he was fain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to have the mainspring of the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to have a rifle that couldn't be trusted, least of all ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... that has acted as a bond between us since we first knew and loved each other. When I came to S—— he was just settled here, a young man full of zeal and courage. Whatever the experience of his college days had been—and he has often told me that at that time ambition was the mainspring of his existence,—the respect and appreciation which he found here, and the field which daily opened before him for work, had wakened a spirit of earnest trust that erelong developed that latent sweetness in his disposition which more than his mental qualities, perhaps, ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... vows of faith and secrecy, they took me into the secret. This was, however, only to the extent of teaching me the code and method; they still withheld from me rigidly the fact or political secret, or whatever it was that was the mainspring of their ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... frightened, and to think that perhaps, after all, she had better have left it alone. Her mother came into the room and said, "What are you doing, Bessie? You must have broken the mainspring of the clock." ...
— The Nursery, March 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... or caprice. That Sir Edward Stanley made any such vow we cannot imagine, much less would he put it into execution. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was the governing principle of his life, and the mainspring of his actions. It would be a strange anomaly in the records of human opinions to find an edifice reared to perpetuate a belief which the founder thought a delusion, a mere system of priestcraft and superstition. To this prominent feature in his history our attention has been directed, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and destined to be bravely fulfilled, as the life and death of the writer and the records of his country proved, from generation unto generation. If we seek for the mainspring of the energy which thus sustained the Prince in the unequal conflict to which he had devoted his life, we shall find it in the one pervading principle of his nature—confidence in God. He was the champion of the political rights of his country, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... vice are the result not of innate tendencies, but of external circumstances. When these are perfected, evil will necessarily disappear from the world. He had so successfully subordinated his own emotions, that in his philosophical system he calmly ignores passion as a mainspring of human activity. This is exemplified by the rule he lays down for the regulation of a man's conduct to his fellow-beings. He must always measure their respective worth, and not the strength of his affection for them, even if the individuals concerned ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... half by my watch, but five or six by my nerves, I paced the lonely, sequestered halls in the lower regions of the castle. Two or three times I was sure that my watch had stopped, the hands seemed so stationary. The third time I tried to wind it, I broke the mainspring, but as it was nearly one o'clock not much harm ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... mouth wider, perhaps, but not without injuring the mainspring of his neck and turning his epiglottis out ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... of Middleton are not so properly divisible into tragic and comic as into realistic and romantic—into plays of which the mainspring is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical. Two only of the former class remain to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" and "A ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... step of it, as if he were there himself, the Arch-Enemy of honest neighbors in a time of stress!")—but it does appear they had got it into their sagacious heads that the bad neighbor at Berlin was, in effect, the Arch-Enemy, probably mainspring of the whole matter; and that it would be in the highest degree interesting to see clearly what Lee and he had on hand. Order thereupon to Elliot: "Do it, at any price;" and finally, as mere price will not answer, "Do it by any method,—STEAL Lee's ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... learnt to transform imprecation into prayer, and the desire for justice into supplication for the guilty. But if, in the presence of crime, we were forced to believe that there will never be either vengeance or pardon, the mainspring of the moral life would be broken, and humanity would at length exclaim, like Brutus in the plains of Philippi:—"Virtue! thou art ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... enlarged them) are such as perhaps no other person of equal knowledge and capacity would agree in. Were those views as true as they are questionable, they could not take effect until the unanimity among positive thinkers, to which he looked forward, shall have been attained; since the mainspring of his system is a Spiritual Power composed of positive philosophers, which only the previous attainment of the unanimity in question could call into existence. A few words will sufficiently express the outline of his scheme. A corporation of ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... power of it all. To see those great looms, and wheels, and cylinders, and spindles, we had been looking at, and hear nothing but their deafening roar all about us, and to think that even I, standing there with my hand upon the rope, might hush it all, and stop the mainspring of it ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... account of this trait in Hawthorne's character, but he has failed to discover the mainspring of it. Who indeed can explain it? It was part of the man, and without it we could not have had Hawthorne. Perhaps the easiest solution is that of Thoreau's wild apple-tree. When the sprout from an apple-seed comes up in the grass a cow pretty soon bites it ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... there were weaknesses in the telepathic communication linkage that was the mainspring of Operation Mapcase, but he had thought that they could be overcome by the strengths of the system. Lenny had no blockage whatever against receiving visual patterns and designs. He could reproduce an electronic ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... afflicted with energy that their days are twenty-five and a half hours long. Mine are twenty-six just now. If it were not for the fact that several hours each day I am under the influence of Roxanne's repose, I suspect I would run down like a clock that has exhausted its mainspring. Mamie Sue says that Belle says Roxanne is shiftless, but Belle is unable to distinguish shiftlessness from noble composure under difficulties. I told Mamie Sue that it would be best for her to forget all that Belle has ever said to her; ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... foregoing notes, was also one of the qualities on which he most strenuously insisted in the playing of his pupils. The reader will remember Gutmann's statement to me, mentioned in a previous chapter, that all his master's fingering was calculated for the attainment of this object. Fingering is the mainspring, the determining principle, one might almost say the life and soul, of the pianoforte technique. We shall, therefore, do well to give a moment's consideration to Chopin's fingering, especially as he was one of the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... opportunity to attack. He was endowed, like Massena, "with that rare fortitude which seems to increase as perils thicken. When conquered he was as ready to fight again as if he had been conqueror." "L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace" was the mainspring of all his actions, and the very sights and sounds of a stricken field were dear to his soul. Nothing had such power to stir his pulses as the rebel yell. "I remember," says a staff-officer, "one night, at tattoo, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... sticklers to egg them on. Is there a quarrel, and suppose that I, thinking on your counsels, am something loth to engage in it, believe you I am left to decide between peace or war at my own choosing? Not so, by St. Mary! there are a hundred round me to stir me on. 'Why, how now, Smith, is thy mainspring rusted?' says one. 'Jolly Henry is deaf on the quarrelling ear this morning!' says another. 'Stand to it, for the honour of Perth,' says my lord the Provost. 'Harry against them for a gold noble,' cries your father, perhaps. Now, what can ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... establishing the system of absolute power, did not suffer himself, by any show of affection from his people, to be diverted from his design of rendering his government independent of them. To this design we must look as the mainspring of all his actions at this period; for with regard to the Roman Catholic religion, it is by no means certain that he yet thought of obtaining for it anything more than a complete toleration. With this view, therefore, he could not take a more judicious ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... turned faint with jealousy, and when a second glance showed me that the interloper was no other than the identical gold repeater whom I had known and dreaded in my infancy, I was ready to break my mainspring with vexation. To me the surprise had brought nothing but foreboding and despair, and already I felt myself discarded for my rival; but to Charlie it brought a rapture of delight which expressed itself in a whoop which could be heard half ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts," appear to us as happy anticipations of our deductions to the effect that primitive modes of work suppressed during the day participate in the formation of the dream; and with us, as with Delage, the suppressed material becomes the mainspring of ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... MAY, 1732. "You will see by this that I am exact to follow your instruction; and that the SCHULZ of Tremmen [Village in the Brandenburg quarter, with a SCHULZ or Mayor to be depended on], becomes for the present the mainspring of our correspondence. I return you all the things (PIECES) you had the goodness to communicate to me,—except Charles Douze, [Voltaire's new Book; lately come out, "Bale, 1731."] which attaches me infinitely. The particulars ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... reduces us to silence or to wild conjectures. Something—let us call it matter—must always have existed, and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... fortunes, slavery flourishing to a state unprecedented in the world's history, women the victims and the toys of men, lax sentiments of public morality, a whole people given over to demoralizing sports and spectacles, pleasure the master passion of the people, money the mainspring of society, all the vices which lead to violence and prepare the way for the total eclipse of the glory of man. What was a cultivated face of nature, or palaces, or pomps, or a splendid material civilization, or great armies, or a numerous population, or the triumph of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... absolute monarchy, the royal authority is the mainspring which controls all movements and all actions in every part of the State. Let this source of energy grow weak, and decline at once shows itself throughout the entire body politic. It is as when a fatal malady seizes on the seat of life in an ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... challenged. It found that the long series of crimes of which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... and the reports of them are both a part of and a stimulus to the "back to the land movement." This movement has its mainspring in two plain economic facts, namely: first, clerical and other indoor vocations have become overcrowded; second, while crops grow bigger year by year, the number of mouths to feed multiplies even faster, and unless more land is tilled and all land cultivated more intensively, we shall eat ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born poet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he clothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the aroma of sentiment rises like a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... stop at Boma, the capital of the Congo, which is five hours steaming down river from Matadi. We remained here for a day and a half because the Minister of the Colonies was to go back on "The Anversville." I was glad of the opportunity for it enabled me to see this town, which is the mainspring of the colonial administration. The palace of the Governor-General stands on a commanding hill and is a pretentious establishment. The original capital of the Congo was Vivi, established by Stanley at a point not far from Matadi. It was abandoned some year ago on account of its undesirable ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... Arabs enter, they contrive to render their name and race abominated. But the mainspring of it all is not the Arab's nature, colour, or name, but simply the slave-trade. So long as the slave-trade is permitted to be kept up at Zanzibar, so long will these otherwise enterprising people, the Arabs, kindle gainst them the hatred ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... same malevolent or selfish desires working in every breast, directed against one object, and rendered irresistible from that very multiplication, and we have the envy of the coterie transformed into the fury of revolution. Whoever will closely observe the working of that mainspring of human actions—selfishness—on the society, whether in a village, a city, a country, or a metropolis in which he resides, will have no difficulty in discerning the real but secret, and therefore unobserved spring of the greatest changes that ever occur in the political ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... listened attentively to Gabriel, understanding for the first time that in great nations there is something more than the warlike sympathies of the monarch and the bravery of the army. He saw suddenly that wealth was the basis and mainspring of ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... hope, however faint it might prove, served to reanimate Graham; and with that hope his heart, as if a load had been lifted from its mainspring, returned instinctively to the thought of Isaura. Whatever seemed to promise an early discharge of the commission connected with the discovery of Louise Duval seemed to bring Isaura nearer to him, or at least to excuse ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... placed Scotland in entirely new relations with England. Scotland could now no longer be "governed by the pen" from London; Parliament could no longer be bridled and led, at English will, by the Lords of the Articles. As the religious mainspring of Scottish political life, the domination of the preachers had been weakened by the new settlement of the Kirk; as the country was now set on commercial enterprises, which England everywhere thwarted, it was plain that the two kingdoms could not live together on the existing terms. Union ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... infinitesimal pause between the contractions that these arteries can carry blood to the heart tissue; hence during sleep the heart- beats differ from those of our waking hours, being fewer in number, and with a more decided pause between. Now, the heart being to the body what the mainspring is to a watch, the necessity of affording it ample time for ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... deep-rooted faith which influenced every thought, and regulated every action of her life. Great love and reverence towards God was the foundation of this pure faith, which accompanied her from youth to extreme old age, indeed to her last moments, which gave her strength to endure many sorrows, and was the mainspring of that extreme humility which was so remarkable ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... that what thus affords a gratification to my own curiosity, may not be wholly unattractive to others, I shall thus continue from time to time to play the Showman to my own machinery, and explain the principle of the mainspring and the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Governor Nathan L. Miller maintained a neutral position. The mainspring of the opposition from beginning to end was U. S. Senator Oscar W. Underwood. Senator John H. Bankhead was equally opposed. Both Senators had voted against the submission of the Federal Amendment and of the ten members in the Lower House only one, William ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... admitted the recruit generously, "let us be frugal. Frugality is the mainspring of efficiency. One way of turning about is ample for me. But why right rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform; there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the kepi of the National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill, as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all—the determination to conquer. The contagious influence of illusion, scattered ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Second scrum collapsed on top of Reade. When we dug him out his ankle was crocked. Mainspring gone, probably. Then they gathered up the pieces and took them gently away. I don't know ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... in the theory, the Supreme Being is reduced to the function of a motive power, a mainspring, a corner-stone, or, if a still more trivial comparison may be allowed me, a constitutional sovereign, reigning but not governing, swearing to obey the law and appointing ministers to execute it. But, under the influence ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... indiscriminate alms':—I believe that is the phrase. Perhaps he won't rob, like my friend Sandford; but his 'disinterested labors' are an economical substitute for substantial charity, and his desire for a place in the public eye is the mainspring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the land it is three hundred times less known. History is full of sea-power, but histories are not; for most historians know little of sea-power, though British history without British sea-power is like a watch without a mainspring or a wheel without a hub. No wonder we cannot understand the living story of our wars, when, as a rule, we are only told parts of what happened, and neither how they happened nor why they happened. The ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... little capital go home content when he has invested their money in mortgage of real property. Still the work goes on increasing; additional clerks have to be employed; a fresh wing has to be built to the old house. He has, too, his social duties; he is, perhaps, the head or mainspring of a church movement—this is not for profit, but from conviction. His lady is carried to and fro in the brougham, making social visits. He promotes athletic clubs, reading-rooms, shows, exhibitions. He is eagerly seized upon ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... devoted Platonic affection in either sex, but they also see enough of the opposite side of the question to convince them that in the majority of cases the sexual relations are the bond of union, as well as the mainspring of love. As observed by Montesquieu, the bride of a first-class Turkish eunuch has but a sorry time, and a woman of the same calibre of mind as that possessed by the ordinary Circassian or Armenian bride cannot be in a much happier condition with ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... fact, runs through them. They are so many different expressions, answering to so many different observations taken at different angles, of one and the same persisting estimate of human nature. 'Self-love is the mainspring and motive of every thing we do, or say, or feel, or think:' that is the total result of the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... gallant spirit of the French people has furnished the mainspring which has made this ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... experience, not only in reaching out for powers that the previous generation would not have dared to grant, but in being able to make plastic to its own purposes the electorate that believed itself to be the mainspring of political power. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... trouble; but, of course, he took instinctively the crooked and suspicious method, expected to find the case the worst possible,—as a man was bound to do who had been trained to take the lowest possible view of human nature, and to consider the basest motives as the mainspring of all human action,—and began his moral torture accordingly by a series of delicate questions, which poor Eustace dodged in every possible way, though he knew that the good father was too cunning for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... "the same impetuous youth that is at this very moment hacking out for Germany a world empire amidst the nations in arms. A wonderful race, a race of giants, our German youth, Herr Doktor ... the mainspring of our great German machine—as they find who resist it. A ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... the Aeneid are derived from Homer. As the wrath of Achilles is the mainspring of the Iliad, so the unity of the Aeneid results from the anger of Juno. The arrival of Aeneas in Italy after the destruction of Troy, the obstacles that opposed him through the intervention of Juno, and the adventures and the victories of the hero form the subject ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... whatever harm may have ensued from her errors in detail, those young people will yet bless her for the principle she worked on. You can none of you bless me, for having guided the hands of the watch, and having left the mainspring untouched.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nature to open her heart to any one; her large organ of "secretiveness" was her bane; she knew it and deplored it; it was the origin of that misconception which embittered her whole life, the mainspring of that calumny which made fame a mockery and glory a deceit. But I may say, that, when slander was busiest with her reputation, we had the best means to confute it,—and did. For some years there was not a single week during which, on some day or other, morning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes, who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at every turn; and in England, Lloyd, Regius Professor ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... relegate some of them to the sphere of mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing. Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them. Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in ...
— Sophist • Plato
... show, by an allusion to certain prominent facts occurring during the summer of '64, that the so-called Democratic party was the mainspring to the great conspiracy that has been attempted in the North with so much audacity that many men of the best judgment can scarcely believe it to be a reality. In this we do not wish to be understood that all men who have heretofore ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an intense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger, its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched thirst for Him underlies ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... flavour of ether filled eyes, mouth, and nostrils, till it permeated to his very lungs. Then with every pulsation of the blood Big Ben seemed to be striking inside his brain till something gave way with a great whizz! like the mainspring of a watch, and Tom Ryfe was perfectly quiet and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... deeply in support of his projects of aggrandizement, that they became his zealous and enthusiastic followers. His ambition was caught by the nation, and men of the humblest station became proud of his brilliant victories. To form and keep up this state of public temper was the mainspring of his domestic administration, and satisfactorily explains the internal tranquillity of England during the forty years of his effective reign. It was the natural consequence of so long and watchful a pursuit ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... on the one hand, and timidity on the other, were the parents of these great follies. The presidential succession was the mainspring of the first movement and of the opposition thereto, while that and party majority in Congress were the motives of the later "reconstruction." Both ingloriously failed, as they deserved to do. How much stronger the Republican party would have been if it had relied ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... indicated, though vaguely, in the portions preserved. In the opening lines of the epic there is a reference to the time 'when fates were not yet decided.' The decision of fates is in the Babylonian theology one of the chief functions of the gods. It constitutes the mainspring of their power. To decide fates is practically to control the arrangement of the universe—to establish order. It is this function which arouses the natural opposition of Tiamat and her brood, for Tiamat feels that once ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... he had ever dreamt of possessed so many tones in it as hers—even one of pathos, as she lingered over the word "shadow," All his annoyance melted. He only felt he would change the very mainspring of his life if necessary to give ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... through some sort of pecuniary fraud; and the crafty servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary distresses, is the real mainspring of the piece. There is no want of the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love, of tearful parting scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous intrigue ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... singularly well qualified in all respects to do justice to his rich and comprehensive theme. Professor Botta is a native of Northern Italy, in the first place, and thus by inheritance and natural transmission is heir to a great deal of knowledge as to the important movements of which Cavour was the mainspring, which a foreigner could acquire only by diligent study and inquiry. In the next place, he has not been exclusively a secluded student, but he has taken part in the great political drama which he commemorates, and has been brought into personal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... unknown. He knows that he could have been successful in the old place. He does not know that he may not be a failure in the new place. Art, literature, science, commerce—in all—it is the men and women who have dared to risk being failures that have proved the mainspring of progress. Cook was sure enough of himself to exchange shopkeeper's linen for the coal-heaver's blue jeans, to risk following the star of ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... O'Hara began: "In order to paint you my life, Hogarth, I must give you at once to understand what has been its mainspring and secret: ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our mainspring. Odd, isn't it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it's the truth. We're full of hate towards everything that doesn't square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves. Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... his profession may be styled remonstrance, for he is perpetually checking our levity, as he calls it; always keeping us in order and snubbing us, nevertheless we couldn't do without him. In fact, we may be likened to a social clock, of which Jim is the mainspring, Bob the weight, I the striking part of the works, and Dobson the pendulum. But we are not particular, we are ready ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... Liberty issued warrants for the arrest of suspected persons; arranged in secret caucus the preliminaries of elections, and the programme for public celebrations; and in fact were the mainspring, under the guidance of the popular leaders, of every public demonstration against the government. In Boston they probably numbered about three hundred. The 14th of August,—the anniversary of the repeal of the stamp act,—was celebrated by them for several years, ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... inner weakness and to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent from the family influence if that influence is ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... mainspring of Maggie's character—the motive for most of her actions? Does Tom seem to you worthy of the intense affection she bestows upon him? Do you think a person with Maggie's nature would be likely to live a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... faith in which I have lived, by the Divine help and mercy, from my youth upward. I ask you earnestly, I ask you confidently, to make it your faith, too. It is the mainspring of all the good I have ever done, of all the happiness I have ever known; it lightens my darkness, it sustains my hope; it comforts and quiets me, lying here, to live or die, I know not which. Let it sustain, comfort, and enlighten you. It will help you in your sorest need, as it has ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... subsequent renouncing on her part could fairly and honestly deprive him. That others should oppose the match was intelligible to him; but it was hardly intelligible that she should betray him. And, as yet, he did not believe that she herself was the mainspring of this renouncing. Others, the countess and the Castle Richmond people, had frightened her into falseness; and, therefore, it became him to maintain his right by any means—almost by any means, within ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... The ground or mainspring of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element in conscience, becomes ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... itself does not exist, because you cannot see its primaeval causes or beginnings. The Soul is the centre of your being,—the compass of your life-journey,—the pivot round which, whether you will or not, you shape your actions in this world for the next. If you lose that mainspring of motive, you lose all. Your conduct, your speech, your expression in every movement and feature all show the ungoverned and ungovernable condition in which you are. God is not mocked,—and in many cases,—taking the grand majority of the human ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... general reflections at the beginning of our study, in order to make it clear to the reader that, whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Bright retained Cobden in the public career to which Cobden had invited him four years before. Bright was in Scotland when a letter came from Cobden announcing his determination, forced on him by business difficulties, to retire from public work. Bright replied that if Cobden retired the mainspring of the League was gone. "I can in no degree take your place," he wrote. "As a second I can fight, but there are incapacities about me, of which I am fully conscious, which prevent my being more than second in such a work as we have laboured in." A few days later he set off for Manchester, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... and anxiety was tearing to shreds the delicate health of the two young artists, and on September 23, 1870, Valeriano breathed his last in the arms of Gustavo. His death was a blow from which Gustavo never recovered. It was as though the mainspring was broken in a watch; and, though the wheels still turned of their own momentum, the revolutions were few in number and soon ceased. "A strange illness," says Correa, "and a strange manner of death was that! Without any precise symptom, that which was ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... animates the breast of the combatant on either side; it may even be said that frequently some pity for the vanquished is felt, when all is over, by the side which has conquered. At Malta the element of actual personal individual hatred was the mainspring by which the combatants on both sides were moved; each regarded the other as an infidel, the slaying of whom was the sacrifice most acceptable to the God they worshipped. "Infidel" was the term which each ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... Madness, I entered the office—or, as our lively neighbour the Gaul would term it, the Bureau—of the Firm, nominally conducted under the appellation of Wickfield and—HEEP, but in reality, wielded by—HEEP alone. HEEP, and only HEEP, is the mainspring of that machine. HEEP, and only HEEP, is the Forger and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... reached. The thousands of social and local reasons which influence the choice of a vocation to-day would to a certain degree remain in force also in a period of better psychological analysis. Moreover, the personal inclinations and interests naturally would and ought to remain the mainspring of economic action. This inclination, which gives so much of the joy in labor, is by no means necessarily coincident with those psychophysical dispositions which insure the most successful work. Political economists have found this out repeatedly ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... a man goes a long way in life, if founded on a just estimate of himself and a steady obedience to the rule he knows and feels to be right. It holds a man straight, gives him strength and sustenance, and forms a mainspring of vigorous action. "No man," once said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, "is bound to be rich or great,—no, nor to be wise; but every man is bound to be ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besides The Ring and the Book, and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... 1729) had shown not only to be the safest to the bank, but by far the most advantageous to the public. Indeed it is not too much to say, that were those credits prohibited, and no other alteration made in the existing system, the mainspring of the machinery of Scottish banking would be broken, and its general utility impaired. With that point we shall deal more fully when we come to the consideration of the system in detail; at present it is only necessary to remark, that these credits had been maintained unimpaired during the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... thwart and embarrass. But the main motive of the whole proceeding is to be found in his devoted deference to what he knew to be the wishes and feelings of that Personage, who had become now, more than ever, the mainspring of all his movements,—whose spell over him, in this instance, was too strong for even his sense of character; and to whom he might well have applied the words of one of his ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... The true mainspring of all well-regulated lives was still lacking, and sin soon broke out in unholy indulgence. George Muller was an adept at the ingenuity of vice. What he had left he pawned to get money, and with Beta and two others went on a four days' pleasure-drive, and then ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... that among the oppressed, of both the rival creeds, are saints whose saintliness has gained force from the systems to which they have given their allegiance. To Frederica the practice of her cult both inwardly in her heart, and outwardly in the work of St. Matthew's Parish, was the mainspring of her existence. It was also her pastime. She would analyse a sermon, as Dick Lowry would discuss a run, and with the same eager enjoyment. She assented with enthusiasm to the Doctrine of Eternal Damnation, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... crowd which he had shipped into a state of comparative efficiency and of entire subjection to his iron will. Years of quasi-respectability, of financial position, of autocratic power as Vice-Governor had modified the ideas of the old buccaneer, and the co-operative principle which had been the mainspring of action as well as tie which produced unity among the brethren-of-the-coast had ceased to be regarded, so far as he was concerned. He took care, however, to be upon fairly amicable terms with the officers in command ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its human and ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... The appearance of Henry the Huguenot as the champion of the Council of Trent was of itself too biting an epigram not to be extensively destructive. Whether for good or ill, religion was fast ceasing to be the mainspring of political combinations, the motive of great wars and national convulsions. The age of religion was to be succeeded by the age ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... constraint." This was his favourite motto, and the mainspring of his direction of others. He has often said to me that those who try to force the human will are exercising a tyranny which is hateful to God and man. This was why he had such a horror of those masterful and dominant spirits which insist ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... the same Thought by examining the Inorganic, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein |
