"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human being as I remember seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,—stooping over some minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one lone blasted ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... in four prime elements of victory: first, in his ability to wear Lee down by sheer attrition if other means failed; next, in his own magnificent army; then in Sherman's; and lastly in Sheridan's cavalry. His supply and transport services were nearly perfect, even in his own most critical eyes. "There never ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... crept out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. This ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... certainly tinctured some part of the character of this mighty genius; and, without some tendency towards which, genius—I mean that kind which depends on the imaginative power—perhaps cannot exist to great extent. The wheels of a machine, to play rapidly, must not fit with the utmost exactness, else the attrition diminishes ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... held up to the light will show a series of little points, arranged spirally and symmetrically, which are the portions of silex the fire had not dissipated; and it is this serrated edge which seems to render the plant so efficient in attrition. Wheaten and oaten straw are also found by the experience of our good housewives to be good polishers of their brass milk vessels, without its being at all suspected by them that it is the flint deposited ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... try to grasp the colossal facts of the present war. Since the beginning of the conflict there has been a daily attrition of more than 25,000 in killed, wounded, or prisoners every twenty-four hours. At the opening of the fourth year of the war the number killed was over 5,000,000. This does not include those who have perished in the devastated ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... frequently reluctant and can be evaded by slight concessions. The world as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it was. Customs and customary attitudes change nowadays not so much by open, defiant and revolutionary breaches as by the attrition of partial negligences and new glosses. Innovating people do conform to current usage, albeit they conform unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a constant breaking down and building up of usage, and as a consequence a lessened need of wholesale ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of smaller type immediately became active and left German shores to do what damage they might to the British navy. It was hoped, perhaps, that the naval forces of the two powers could be equalized and a battle fought on even terms after the Germans had cut down British advantage by a policy of attrition. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... and happy students, who quit our hard, bright skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... than the boulder-covered lines of our middle latitudes. One boulder in particular had had its origin in a valley where rounded fragments of water-washed greenstone had been poured out by the torrents and frozen into the coast-ice of the belt. The attrition of subsequent matter had truncated the great egg-shaped rock, and worn its sides into a striated face, whose scratches still indicated ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... now assumed by this struggle—a war of attrition—the Germans are bound ultimately to lose, and it is the consciousness of this fact that inspires their present policy. This is to achieve as early as possible some success of sufficient magnitude to influence the neutrals, to discourage ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... it.' He speaks of the unquiet feverishness of democratic communities, not in times of great excitement, for such times may give an extraordinary impetus to ideas, but in times of peace. There is then, he says, 'a small and uncomfortable agitation, a sort of incessant attrition of man against man, which troubles and distracts the mind without imparting to it either loftiness or animation.' It rests with you to prove whether these things are necessarily so—whether scientific genius cannot find, in the midst ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... average, about a sofa per annum. The whiskers, if properly attended to, may be made to yield about an easy chair in the same space of time; whilst luxuriant moustachios will give a pair of anti-rheumatic attrition gloves every six months. Mr. M. recommends, as the best mode of cultivation for barren soils, to plough with a cat's-paw, and manure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... Twenty-five per cent. would be a liberal deduction for the sick, camp-guards, orderlies, etc. The navy was equally powerful in its way, though it did little service here. Large as it was, this army was virtually destroyed by continued attrition. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... against first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance; second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal sections of our common country to the Constitution ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... little better than a millstone around the necks of her children in this hour of their need. If there had been some innate strength and nobility in Mrs. Allen's character it might have developed now into something worthy of respect under this sharp attrition of trouble, however perverted before. But where a precious stone will take lustre a pumice stone will crumble. There is a multitude of natures so weak to begin with that they need tonic treatment all through life. What must such become under the influence of enervating ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... brave." Most of the great men in Georgia have been reared in the country. There seems to be something in the pure air, the broad fields, and even the solitude, conducive to vigor and self-reliance. Attrition and culture have finished the work laid up by the farmer boy, and that fertile section of middle Georgia, so rich in products of the earth, has ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... appears to be that the amount of the resistance denominated friction depends, in a great measure, upon the nature of the unguent employed, and in certain cases the viscidity of the unguent may occasion a greater retardation than the resistance caused by the attrition. In watchwork therefore, and other fine mechanism, it is necessary both to keep the bearing surfaces small, and to employ a thin and limpid oil for the purpose of lubrication, for the resistance caused by the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... they were always greatly outnumbered; they continued stubbornly to defy for the space of two years and seven months the most numerous and the most efficient Army which has ever left the shores of Great Britain, until at last they were worn down by mechanical friction and attrition, and not by the stroke of war. When the Boers were driven out of the Hlangwhane positions, they took up a new position facing S.E. on the left bank of the Tugela. Their right was near the head ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... friction, attrition; rubbing, abrasion, scraping &c v.; confrication^, detrition, contrition^, affriction^, abrasion, arrosion^, limature^, frication^, rub; elbow grease; rosin; massage; roughness &c 256. rolling friction, sliding friction, starting friction. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... when the psychological moment should come, months ahead. He was not, in 1915, looking to 1916; he was looking to 1917, having made up his mind from the outset that this was to be a prolonged war of attrition. He, no more than all others, could foresee that the Russian revolution was to occur and was to delay the final triumph of the Entente ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... upon which they stood was smooth as a marble pavement, apparently from attrition by the action of water through countless centuries, though the place was now perfectly dry. What chiefly excited their admiration, however, was the circumstance that the floor was not only smooth, it was as polished as glass, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... Dr. Barry's[97] System of Physick. 'He was a man (said he,) who had acquired a high reputation in Dublin, came over to England, and brought his reputation with him, but had not great success. His notion was, that pulsation occasions death by attrition; and that, therefore, the way to preserve life is to retard pulsation[98]. But we know that pulsation is strongest in infants, and that we increase in growth while it operates in its regular course; so it cannot be the cause of destruction.' Soon after this, he said something ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... that the brasses were sent from England. He is represented at full length in the episcopal dress, his head lying between two shields, the royal arms of England within the Garter, (as Chancellor of the order,) and his own bearings. But the tomb being placed exactly in front of the high altar, the attrition to which it has been exposed in this part of the church has nearly effaced the engravings." His funeral, we are told, was attended by the assembled princes and prelates and nobles of the council, who followed him to the grave with every ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... contain pebbles rounded by attrition, and of a figure more or less elliptical. In the places where the stratification is horizontal, the longer axes of these pebbles are all horizontal, for the same reason that an egg cannot stand upon its point. But where the strata are inclined at an angle of 45 deg., the greater ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... houses in the larger blocks, none larger, and many not more than five feet square. The stones exposed are each about seven by twelve inches square, and four inches thick, those in their original position retaining correct angles, but, when thrown down, worn away by attrition to shapeless bowlders." ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... each—the most wonderful proofs of what Nature can produce, (the survival of the fittest, no doubt—all the frailer samples dropt, sorted out by death)—as if to show how the earth and woods, the attrition of storms and elements, and the exigencies of life at first hand, can train and fashion men, indeed chiefs, in heroic massiveness, imperturbability, muscle, and that last and highest beauty consisting of strength—the full exploitation and fruitage of a human identity, not from ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... thin voice suffered the quavery attrition of surprise. "Funny place to be lookin' for that commodity. What's ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts |
