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Plastic   /plˈæstɪk/   Listen
Plastic

adjective
1.
Capable of being molded or modeled (especially of earth or clay or other soft material).  Synonyms: fictile, moldable.
2.
Capable of being influenced or formed.  Synonym: pliant.  "A pliant nature"
3.
Forming or capable of forming or molding or fashioning.  Synonyms: formative, shaping.  "A formative experience"



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"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... society should be in close touch with the denomination or body of Christians which has organized and maintains it. It should be plastic to the touch and will of its constituency and should seek in every way to be at the same time a faithful exponent of the thought and ambition of the churches, and a leader and a source of new inspiration and light to them ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... Father Hudson resumes the plastic, immobile, and almost invisible attitude which he occupied at the opening of the play. The Choruses file silently out, one on ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman

... copies of the works of other artists, among them those of Jacopo de Barbari, a painter of the Italian school, who was residing in Nuremberg, and who among other things gave the great artist instruction in plastic anatomy. The influence of his instructor is plain, when we compare engravings executed about 1504 with those published at a previous date, and especially when we examine his design of the Passion of our Lord painted in white upon a green ground, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... be thanked, that ye have obeyed from the heart that pattern of doctrine to which ye were delivered," writes the apostle (Rom. 6: 17). The pattern, as the context shows, is Christ dead and risen. If the church truly lives in the Spirit, he will keep her so plastic that she will obey this divine mold as the metal conforms to the die in which it is struck. If she yields to the sway of "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," she will be stereotyped according to the fashion of ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... of life and experience. Such is the return of the Hero to Circe, the fair, the terrestrial, who makes existence beautiful if she be properly held in restraint; beautiful as sunlit Hellas with its plastic forms she can become, in striking contrast to the dark shapes of the sunless Underworld which leads to the Gorgon, the realm of spooks, shades, fiends, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, 45 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... the most distinguished disciples—men who honor Roscher as their teacher and master, the leader whose beacon light they follow. Roscher combines the richest positive learning with rare clearness and plastic beauty in the presentation of his thought. These are conceded to him on every hand; and it does not detract from him, or alter the fact that he possesses them, that, here and there, an ill-humored or maliciously snappish critic calls them ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... into shape to represent the form of the body. In a later (probably Fifth Dynasty) mummy, found in 1892 by Professor Flinders Petrie at Medum, the superficial bandages had been impregnated with a resinous paste, which while still plastic was moulded into the form of the body, special care being bestowed upon the modelling of the face[26] and the organs of reproduction, so as to leave no room for doubt as to the identity and the sex. Professor Junker has described[27] an interesting series of variations ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... no doubt an active agent in the holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... modelling are plasticity, which enables it to be worked without falling to pieces, and fineness—a perfect freedom from grit, small stones, and other impurities. It should be quite soft to the touch, and when pressed and kneaded should feel smooth and silky. Old clay is more plastic as well as being tougher than new, and in potteries clay is often kept a considerable time before it is used. The clay should not be allowed to dry when it is not in use, and to prevent this it must be wrapped in wet flannel. Should it dry quite hard, there is nothing ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various

... Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those natures—sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge life—which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a strict ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... retarding the earth, must also push the moon out from the parent planet on a spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of from two ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... gazed into the bearded face, calm, masklike in its repose of unconsciousness, as if to penetrate behind the mask and read the real nature of him. She realized with a feeling almost of fear, that here was no weakling—no plastic irresolute—whose will could be dominated by the will of a stronger; but a man, virile, indomitable; a man of iron will who, though he scorned to stoop to defend his position, was unashamed to vindicate it. A man whose words carried conviction, and ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... every particularity of detail, as part of the divine law, in the Koran; and so defying, as sacrilege, all human touch, it stands unalterable forever. From the stiff and rigid shroud in which it is thus swathed the religion of Mohammed cannot emerge. It has no plastic power beyond that exercised in its earliest days. Hardened now and inelastic, it can neither adapt itself nor yet shape its votaries, nor even suffer them to shape themselves to the varying circumstances, the wants ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was a great ill-looking thing, and my second little better, but as ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... a much smaller number of dicotyledonous plants. (a) Clay and tertiary sandstone with lignites; plastic clay; mollasse and nagelfluhe, sometimes alternating where chalk is wanting, with the last beds of Jura limestone; amber. (b) Limestone of Paris or coarse limestone, limestone with circles, limestone of Bolca, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... words of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton

... revelation; now and again he would toss his books aside—he kept them in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them—and launched into his sea dreams, Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in the busiest ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... reached little higher than a proper soldier's heart, but what she lacked in stature she supplied in plastic perfection of body and vivacity of face. There was a bounding joyousness of life in her; her eager eyes reflecting only the anticipated pleasures of today. There was no shadow of yesterday's regret in them, no ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... Environment. And not only are the highest organisms the most mobile, but the highest part of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower. Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the body of a child: but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be turned to music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other, he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce loftier spirits, related to the gods,—such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads,—in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... either of forwarding or hindering its work. The ancient Greeks were well acquainted with this fact when they assisted Nature to create beautiful forms by placing in the mother's room statues of rare plastic perfection, and removing from her sight every suggestion of ugliness. More than this; certain intense emotions of the pregnant woman are capable of momentarily effacing the image of the model which the builder has to reproduce, and replacing ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax—put ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... the most painful experience in their lives. Barbara had come to it softened and ready to meet him half way. The right kind of humility in Monty would have found her plastic. But she had very definite and rigid ideas of his duty in the premises. And Monty was too simple minded to seem to suffer, and much too flippant to understand. It was plain to each that the other did not expect to ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon

... form at this age. They have cultivated the temperamental qualities which they will retain, with few modifications, throughout life. On the other hand, their dispositions are responsive to reason, and are capable of readjustment. Their temperamental characteristics are plastic, and under favorable conditions it is possible for both to evidence a degree of sympathy and toleration that bespeaks future harmony and success. No marriage can result in mutual happiness and success if one of the participants is temperamentally incapable of changing his or her convictions. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... introduction), and, calling each other "cousin" and "gossip," these two shared rooms together in perfect simplicity of soul and held several conversations which reflect, I suppose, Mr. BERNARD CAPES' views on the plastic arts and life in general. And why, in passing, he should continue to heap ridicule on staid Victorian respectability I cannot for the life of me imagine. The plucky and unorthodox thing nowadays surely is to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various

... or splint has served as the warp and a small twisted cord as the woof. One interesting feature of this vessel is that from certain impressions on the raised ridges we discover that the vessel has been taken from the net mold while still in a plastic state. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes

... and mortar of Paris. All about her were evidences of an artistic sensibility pervading every form of life like the nervous structure of the huge frame—a sensibility so delicate, alert and universal that it seemed to leave no room for obtuseness or error. In such a medium the faculty of plastic expression must develop as unconsciously as any organ in its normal surroundings; to be "artistic" must cease to be an attitude and become a natural function. To Claudia the significance of the whole vast revelation was centred in the light it shed on ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... a better way. The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin

... providing some stability in the old, creating that contrast between the new and the old, so stimulating to the new itself. For the impulse to originate operates best alongside of and in opposition to the desire to conserve. France has been the great originator in the plastic arts during recent times; but it has also been the only country where a genuine traditional standard has existed. When tradition is based on experiments, as in art, it cannot be in essence hostile to them. And all valid aesthetic principles are sufficiently ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers

... a badly-scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing serious seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear. By the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... not at once to dance; instead, she executed a series of postures; almost without apparent transition she melted from one pose to another of plastic grace, her body the mere, boneless, obedient servant ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... brought together the work of so many really great sculptors. America has a very large number of talented men expressing themselves on the plastic side - ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... nothing else courted the sunbeam. In her childhood and girlhood, Leslie had gone out to school, and although always somewhat marked and individual in character, she had companions, friends, sufficient sympathy and intercourse for an independent, buoyant nature at the most plastic period of its existence. This stage of life was but lately left behind; Leslie had not long learnt that now she was removed from classes and masters, and must in a great measure confine her acquaintances to those ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... it was corrugated, not so much, however from necessity, as from habit. In consequence of the difficulty experienced in removing these bowl-forms from the bottoms of the baskets—which had to be done while they were still plastic, to keep them from cracking—they were made very shallow. Hence the specimens found among the older ruins and graves are not only corrugated outside, but are also very wide in proportion to their height. (See Fig. 525.) As time went on it was ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... and carefully stepped through the cumbrous minuet of court-life without impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon. Mirabeau himself would have elbowed his way through furbelows and court-rapiers more forbearingly than Richter. It was not possible to make this genius plastic, in the aesthetic sense which legislated at Weimar. Besides, Goethe could not look at Nature as Richter did. To such a grand observer Richter must have appeared like a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... maintaining the Balance. Each had its niche in the ecological architecture, as Dodeth liked to think of it. The trouble was that the Balance was a shifting, swinging, ever-changing thing. Living tissues carried the genes of heredity in them, and living tissues are notoriously plastic under the influence of the proper radiation or particle bombardment. And animals ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett

... sighed Zimmern; "it was always so; when a people has once fallen into evil ways the old generation can never be wholly redeemed, but youth can always be saved—youth is plastic." ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... of the East, I had fallen into a holy lethargy and calm contemplation of the everlasting substances, more especially of yours and mine. Greatness in repose, most people say, is the highest aim of plastic art. And so, without any distinct purpose and without any unseemly effort, I thought out and bodied forth our everlasting substances in this dignified style. I looked back and saw how gentle sleep overcame us in the midst ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... chloroformist, feeling him there, had naturally claped the towel across his mouth and nose. The others had secured him, and the more he roared and kicked the more they drenched him with chloroform. Walker was very nice about it, and made the most handsome apologies. He offered to do a plastic on the spot, and make as good an ear as he could, but M'Namara had had enough of it. As to the patient, we found him sleeping placidly under the table, with the ends of the blanket screening him on both sides. Walker sent M'Namara ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of expression, to other thinkers. His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never realised ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... and groove suture proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being transfixed ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... which delight a child, these expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Goethe, but also less of the freezing pride of art, he is infinitely more humane, sympathetic, holy. His creations are statuesquely moulded like Goethe's, but they have the same quick music of heart-throbs that Shakespere's have. Hawthorne is at the same moment ancient and modern, plastic and picturesque. Another generation will see more of him than we do; different interpreters will reveal other sides. As a powerful blow suddenly descending may leave the surface it touches unmarked, and stamp its impress on the substance ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... she flirts outrageously with me. I'm sure I don't know how many heads the little witch is going to turn when she grows up. And her sister, Margaret—I couldn't tell you which of the two I like the better—has quite an extraordinary talent for plastic art. I mean to give her a commission before I return to my place. I'd like for one thing to have a bust of her mother in my study—that would be so inspiring. And long ago I took a fancy to have a nice sphinx. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... love of truth, a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. A genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic and finished. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... work is not the less plastic for that. The impressions that succeed one another, as the pages of the book are turned, are to be built into a structure, and the critic is missing his opportunity unless he can proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to be supposed that an artist who carves ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... incidentally to our sense of the beautiful, and requiring always nice literary skill in its management. It should be borne in mind always that literary description must not usurp the office of representations of the material in the plastic arts. It should not be employed as an end in itself, but only as subsidiary ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... To the class of these mystical superior men Lumley Ferrers might have belonged; for though an ordinary journalist would have beaten him in the arts of composition, few men of genius, however eminent, could have felt themselves above Ferrers in the ready grasp and plastic vigour of natural intellect. It only remains to be said of this singular young man, whose character as yet was but half developed, that he had seen a great deal of the world, and could live at ease and in content with all tempers and ranks; fox-hunters ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the gates of our National Capital; how rebellion had baptized itself in blood and victory at Bull Run—when we think how the effect of all these adverse teachings and adverse fortunes had rendered the public mind plastic to whoever had the genius to seize and direct it, and reflect that a man of King's abilities, but without his patriotism, might have grasped the opportunity to drift us upon shoals and rocks and quicksands of treason, we cannot feel too ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds

... information which held their attention while it lasted, but which was never mastered in any real sense of the term, and which could have but the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. But, worst of all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most critical and plastic period of life. His pupils had followed the lines of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. The result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not superficially attractive ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating of ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde

... and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person simply submitted ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... marital excess. The mother suffers doubly, because laden with the burden of supporting two lives instead of one. But the results upon the child are especially disastrous. During the time when it is receiving its stock of vitality, while its plastic form is being molded, and its various organs acquiring that integrity of structure which makes up what is called constitutional vigor,—during this most critical of all periods in the life of the new being, its resources are exhausted and its structure ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... fact that the Atellanae, with their patrician surroundings, were only half popular; and lastly, the familiarity with the different offshoots of Greek comedy, thrown out in rank profusion at Alexandria, and capable of assimilation with the plastic materials of the Mimus. These worthless products, issued under the names of Rhinthon, Sopater, Sciras, and Timon, were conspicuous for the entire absence of restraint with which they treated ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... upon it, causing it to burst into a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the intensity of the thought or ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded with a deep and intimate understanding of the human heart. His characters ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... this clay, thoroughly mixed and plastic, is placed on a board on the earth before the kneeling or crouched potter. She pokes a hole in the top of this mass with thumbs and fingers, and quickly enlarges it. As soon as the opening is large enough to admit one hand it is dug out and enlarged by ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... inspired and taught, The lofty and the excellent in mind adores. Then, Saviour! what a paragon art Thou Of all that Wisdom in her hope creates— A model for the universe—Though God Be round us, by the shadow of His might For aye reflected, and with plastic hand Prints on the earth the character of things— Yet He Himself,—how awfully retired Depth within depth, unutterably deep! His glory brighter than the brightest thought Can picture, holier than our ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting passages ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... artist's eye. A vigorous bust of his godfather was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the cause he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... that the weakness which had made her so plastic a creature in her father's hands had been an injustice to her husband; that it was not herself only she had been bound to consider in this matter. It was one thing to fling away her own chances of happiness; but it was another thing ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy's innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, who had made such a pretty little speech—"Oh, then I shall have ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger climbed out, saluting ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell

... as well perhaps as a thin layer of the planet's original surface; so that when in due course the whole of the meteor-swarm had been captured, Mars had acquired its present mass, but would consist of an intensely heated, and either liquid or plastic thin outer shell resting upon a cold and ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace

... appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... of a young person is plastic, easy to take impressions, strong to retain them. And the "old man" or the "governor," whether he is father, friend, or employer, or all three, has infinitely more influence than either he or the young man realizes. At the same time it ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... understanding and harmony with Townshend and Walpole. His principal idea was that the time had passed when it was proper or expedient to exclude the Tories or the High-churchmen from the political service of the Crown. He desired to enlarge the basis of administration by admitting some of the more plastic and progressive of the Tories to a share in it. There was, however, something more than a conflict of political views between Carteret and Walpole. Walpole's ambition was to be the constitution dictator of England. We do not say that this was a mere personal ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... burst of laughter, he set very adroitly to the mimicry of beasts and birds upon his frets. Never have I seen a face so consummately the action's. His every fibre answered to the call; his eyebrows twitched like an orator's; his very nose was plastic. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... The writer(14) while experimenting with aerial layering in 1945 found one instance of root production on a hickory where the branch was girdled at the base of the one-year wood. This method offers possibilities, especially now that polythene plastic is available for retaining moisture in the moss about the girdle or wound ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... worked out was, that the young mind is plastic, impressionable and accepts without question all that it is told. The young receive their ideas from their elders, and ideas once impressed upon this plastic plate of the mind can not ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which surrounds us. But we may stop at once: what does it mean to say that the surroundings appear to the mind plastic and the moving pictures flat? The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood. Of course, when we are sitting in the picture palace we ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... sung in Carmelo before; an infernal clash of sound which mingled incongruously with the solemn mass of the surf. Chonita's eyes flashed. Even Estenega's face darkened: the traditions planted in plastic youth arose and rebelled ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... carry at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion:—Or, was there even a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture, were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky, so much above the less animated clay ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... child gain from his ceaseless attempts at making? Froebel's answer was that intellectually, through making he gains ideas, which, received in words, remain mere words. "To learn through life and action is more developing than to learn through words: expression in plastic material, united with thought and speech, is far more developing than mere repetition of words." Morally, it is through impressing himself on his surroundings, that the child reaches the human attributes of self-consciousness and self-control. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... beauty, is not the finest of the master's; but it serves again as well as another to transport—there is no other word—those of his lovers for whom, in far-away days when Venice was an early rapture, this strange and mystifying painter was almost the supreme revelation. The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... jerkily, "had electronic base-measuring instruments. Some of their elements had to be buried in plastic because otherwise they ionized the air and leaked current like a short. If I had that instrument now—No. I'd have to take the plastic away and it couldn't be done ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... due to the plasticity of the material. A perfectly plastic substance would have no elasticity and the smallest forces would cause a set. Lead and moist clay are nearly plastic and wood possesses this property to a greater or less extent. The plasticity of wood is increased by wetting, ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... simply vanish from in front of the operator's eyes. The metal tends to run from the flame and separate at the same time. To keep the metal in shape and free from oxide, it is worked or puddled while in a plastic condition by an iron rod which has been flattened at one end. Several of these rods should be at hand and may be kept in a jar of salt water while not being used. These rods must not become coated with aluminum and they must not get red hot while in ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly

... brisk and attentive, and did the work as if he liked it; but Archie was not satisfied. Something seemed to tell him that the man was fitted for higher things. Archie was a grateful soul. That sausage, coming at the end of a five-hour hike, had made a deep impression on his plastic nature. Reason told him that only an exceptional man could have parted with half a sausage at such a moment; and he could not feel that a job as waiter at a New York hotel was an adequate job for an exceptional man. Of course, the ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... little finger-nail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... that you have expanded the first draft of your plastic scenario into a nearly perfect manuscript. But as you read it over, you are not content. You feel that it lacks "punch." What is "punch," and how are you going to add it when it ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... upward. There is a growing tendency, moreover, to recognize the importance of gravitation in producing eruptions. The weight of several miles of rock is almost inconceivable, and it certainly ought to compel "potentially plastic" matter to rise through any crevice that might be newly formed. Russell, Gilbert and some other authorities regard this as the chief mechanical agent in an eruption, at least when there is a considerable outpouring ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... day that God would be so good to him,—then everything would be well. Then he would marry and have children, and Bragton would descend in the right line. But were it to be ordained otherwise, should it be God's will that he must die, then, as he grew weaker, he would become more plastic in her hands, and she might still prevail. At present he was stubborn with the old stubbornness, and would not see with her eyes. She would bide her time and be careful to have a lawyer ready. She turned it all over in her mind, as she sat there watching him in his sleep. She knew ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... "Confessions":[106] "Formerly I felt little affection for Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was dominant within me, and I could not pardon the Jewish lawgiver for his intolerance of images, and every sort of plastic representation. I failed to see that despite his hostile attitude to art, Moses was himself a great artist, gifted with the true artist's spirit. Only in him, as in his Egyptian neighbors, the artistic instinct was exercised solely ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... from square to square of the big rope hairnet that served as guidelines on the outer surface of the big wheel, Mike Blackhawk completed his inspection of the gold-plated plastic hull, with its ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... smooth lord whom nature's plastic pains Would seem to've fashioned for those Eastern reigns When eunuchs flourisht, and such nerveless things As men rejected were the chosen of kings;—[12] Even he, forsooth, (oh fraud, of all the worst!) Dared to assume the patriot's name at first— Thus ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... weighs nothing. A statue is framed by all outdoors. The vertical of a single figure pierces the unlimited sky, and the only consideration to the artist is that the mass looks well from any point of view. The group by Carpeaux is a sample of plastic art unusually picturesque, and would easily fit a frame, because in it the vertical figure is supported by horizontals, both of lines and in the idea of lateral movement. It is, therefore, solid and complete and sets ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... dropped away to the main deck, flowing lines and curves, broad sheets of clear plastic, animated signs, the grass and flowerbeds of a small park, people walking swiftly or idly. The huge gyro-stabilized bulk did not move noticeably to the long Pacific swell. Pelican Station was the colony's "downtown," its shops and theaters ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But Japanese poetry is original in every sense of the term. Imitative as the Japanese are, and borrowers from other nations in every department of plastic, fictile, and pictorial art, as well as in religion, politics, and manufactures, the poetry of Japan is a true-born flower of the soil, unique in its mechanical structure, spontaneous and unaffected in its ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... BRAIN.—The plastic brain of the foetus is prompt to receive all impressions. It retains them, and they become the characteristics of the child and the man. Low spirits, violent passions, irritability, frivolity, in the pregnant woman, leave indelible marks on ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... around the edges a form of boards was placed, making a sort of bottomless box. The cement, mixed with sand and water from the creek, was made into a concrete which was poured into the form upon the baked clay and boulders. The plastic mass when it filled the boxlike structure to the top was smoothed off and allowed to dry. Forty-eight hours after it had hardened into stone ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor

... and his "young Italian friends" makes mention of the visit of the king, in company with the Duchesse d'Etampes, to the studio of Serlio who was working desperately on the portico of the Cour Ovale. He found the artist producing a "melody of plastic beauty, garbed as a simple workman, his hair matted with pasty clay." He was standing on a scaffolding high above the ground when the monarch mounted the ladder. Up aloft Francois held a conference with his beloved workman and, descending, shouted back the words: "You understand, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... Industries: small-scale consumer goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products processing; oil ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.



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