"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... later, I heard that Epsilon-Terra had received its official name: Atri-Terra. Atri from attrition. I've wondered ever since whether GS based the choice upon the ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... explained. "When this war was started, I, with every fact and circumstance before me, with more information, perhaps, than any other man breathing, predicted peace within three months. I was wrong. Germany to-day is great and unconquered, but Germany has lost her opportunity. This may be a war of attrition, or even now the unexpected may come, but to all effects and ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The rock was 37 feet long, 22 high, and 21 broad, in the form of a parallelopipedon. It was cleft by a blast, the middle part taken away, and in the cavity was constructed a forge for the wants of the journey. Carburi did not use cylindrical rollers for his undertaking, these causing an attrition sufficient to break the strongest cables. Instead of rollers he used balls composed of brass, tin, and calamina, which rolled with their burden under a species of boat 180 feet long, and 66 wide. This extraordinary spectacle was witnessed by the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its ultimate stage of schism—that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the children of God as the past ages of church history ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... same force at different seasons 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
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... thirty years the original stock of evidence current and in circulation even underwent a process of attrition. As in the story of the Eastern sage who first wrote the collected learning of the universe for his sons in a thousand volumes, and by successive compression and burning reduced them to one, and from this by ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... me see. . . . He said: do not be discomposed by the opinions of inept persons. Do not swim with the crowd. They who are all things to their neighbours, cease to be anything to themselves. Even a diamond can have too many facets. Avoid the attrition of vulgar minds; keep your edges intact. He also said: A man can protect himself with fists or sword but his best weapon is his intellect. A weapon must be forged in the fire. The fire, in our case, is tribulation. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... what has become of the softer minerals of which the rocks whose disintegration has supplied the sand were in part, and often in large part, composed. The softer minerals have been ground to powder, and little by little the quartz sand also is worn by attrition to fine dust. Yet dust deposits are scant and few in great deserts such as the Sahara. The finer waste is blown beyond its limits and laid in adjacent oceans, where it adds to the muds and oozes of their ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... that is to water half a continent must rise high in the lonely hills, and be fed by many a mountain rill in the solitude, and the men who are to keep the freshness of their Christian zeal, and of the consecration which they will ever feel is being worn away by the attrition even of faithful service, can only renew and refresh it by resorting again to the Master, and imitating Him who prepared Himself for a day of teaching in the Temple by a night of communion on the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... land so much exposed to the violence of extensive oceans must have undergone some very material changes, by the incessant attrition of their vast waves. Two of the isles, either from this or a more sudden cause, have so far deviated from their centre, that their parallel strata form angles of between sixteens and eighteen degrees in one instance, and in another between twenty-five and thirty degrees, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... and to consider lexical elements only. But this statement must be clearly understood. It is postulated that in the growth of languages new words are formed by combination, and that these new words change by attrition to secure economy of utterance, and also by assimilation (analogy) for economy of thought. In the comparison of languages for the purposes of systematic philology it often becomes necessary to dismember compounded words for the purpose of comparing the more primitive forms ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not substance enough—few of Sterne's jests have—to stand the process of continual attrition to which he subjects it. But the mere historic gravity with which the various turns of this monomania are recorded—to say nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style—prevents the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome. On the whole, however, one begins to grow impatient ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... 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
... a person whose account on a computer has been removed, esp. for cause rather than through normal attrition. "He got disusered when they found out he'd been cracking through the school's Internet access." The verbal form 'disuser' is live but less common. Both usages probably derive from the DISUSER ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... in both cold and hot wars such as tanks, fixed wing aircraft, and large surface ships and submarines represent the most effective mix of numbers, technology, strategic mobility, and fighting capability. Our national preference for "attrition" and "force on forces" warfare continues to shape the way we design and rationalize our military capability. Therefore, it is no surprise that in dealing with the MRC, American doctrine, in some ways, remains an extension ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... world, and its pomps and vanities. He felt "that he was dying," to use Haines Bayley's beautiful and apposite words, and meditated an exchange, but that, from circumstances, was out of the question. At last, subdued by grief, and probably his spirit having chafed itself smooth by such constant attrition, he became, to all seeming, calmer; but it was only the calm of a broken and weary heart. Such was Major Jones at the time, when, "suadente diabolo," it seemed meet to Fathers Mooney and D'Array to make him the butt of their raillery. At first, he could not believe it; the thing ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of character of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible will be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances. Much of the result will be good; there will likewise be a few things not so good. Whether for better or worse, there will be a probable diminution of the moral influence of wealth, and the sway of an aristocratic class which ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wretched, lying, priest-inspired rag. If he were seen looking at any other it would be bad for him. But newspapers are practically unknown in the agricultural districts. And men do not meet in crowds as in England. They have not the attrition which wears away the angularities. They live solitary among the mountains, or away in the fields, and they never hear lectures, have no Institutes, get no chance of improvement. The priest is their Clan Chieftain, their spiritual adviser, their temporal adviser, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the people into strongly opposing parties, which, indeed, are necessary to all true national life, preserving the balance of political power, acting as a check upon injudicious and interested legislation, and, above all, evolving truths by the very attrition of conflicting ideas, yet the intimate association of the past, bringing about a thorough acquaintance with the virtues and patriotism of the great mass of those who profess radically different ideas and opinions, as well as the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... formations often 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 ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet in thickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under the clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was subjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings of the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... attrition with the world the mail-rider was more sophisticated than his enemy, and sooth ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... fresh neighborhoods the new-comers should try to cultivate society. There is something in its attrition which stimulates the mind. Society brightens up the wits, and causes the dullest mind to bring its treasures to ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Falls, where the attrition of a stream had worn pot-holes in the rocks, there were meetings of Haddam witches, to the number of a dozen. They brewed poisons in those holes, cast spells, and talked in harsh tongues with the arch fiend, who sat on the brink of the ravine ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... known to cultivated minds, but kindle lofty sentiments. They draw men from the whirlpools of folly, break up degrading habits, dissipate the charms of money-making, and raise the value of the soul. How charming, how delightful, how inspiring is the eloquence which is kindled by the attrition of gifted minds! What privilege is greater than to be with those who reveal the experiences of great careers, especially if there be the absence of vanity and ostentation, and encouragement by those whose ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... terse, often figurative or epigrammatic, the proverb was well calculated to arouse individual thought and make a deep impression on the mind. Transmitted from mouth to mouth for many generations, like the popular tradition or law, it lost by attrition all its unnecessary elements, so that, 'like an arrow,' it shot straight to the mark. Based on common human experience, it found a ready response in the heart of man. In this way crystallized experience was transmitted, gathering effectiveness ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... which could fairly be called discreditable. Still, Lee was losing men, few it is true, but most precious, since it was impossible to replace them, while the North poured unlimited numbers into the Federal camps. The policy of "attrition" upon which Grant had embarked, and which he was carrying through regardless of his losses, was having its effect. About this time Early, freed from the opposition of Hunter's forces, made a bold stroke upon Washington. Crossing the Potomac, he marched eastward, and, defeating a motley force (action ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their points and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity. The prevalence of fashion, the influence of example, the desire of applause, and the dread of censure, obstruct the natural tendencies of the mind, and check the fancy in its first efforts to break ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... its production. To quote his words: "This really involves the problem of the 'three bodies,' or disturbing forces so celebrated in dynamical mathematics, and it is further complicated by another quantity, the 'coefficient of attrition,' or work done by the grinding material, as well as the mischief done by capillary attraction and nodal points of superimposed curves in the path of the tool. These complications tend to cause rings or waves of unequal wear in the surface of the glass, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... that the capacity of the construction industry to expand cannot be fostered by service aviation alone; furthermore, in the event of another war of attrition, expansion will be more essential than any amount of machine reserve power immediately available, and in the event of a war of short duration that power will win which has the greatest preponderance of ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... 32,500 soldiers. 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
... by turning the wheel. An alternate twisting motion is communicated to the arm, which causes corresponding pressure and relaxation of all the soft tissues of the limb, combined with slight rubbing or attrition. The action is increased by contracting the muscles, and also by grasping at greater distance from the center. Both hands may grasp at the same time, or the two sides may receive the motion in turn. The effect is similar to that of the rubbing before described, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 'The style is the man' is a very excellent aphorism, though some eminent writers have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was le style c'est de l'homme. That only proves that, like many other good sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... may indeed be deferred till the approach of manhood. When solidity is obtained by pursuing the modes prescribed by our fore-fathers, then may the file be used. The firm substance will bear attrition, and the lustre then ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... preparations for another state of being,—unmistakable premonitions of that fact which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews so eloquently states, that "here have we no continuing city"? The gloss of objects in which we delighted is worn off by attrition,—is sicklied o'er by care; the vanity of earthly things startles us suddenly, like a new truth; the friends we love drop away from our side into silence; desire fails; the grasshopper becomes a burden; until, at length, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... 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 the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and beneath and around her ... a suffocating compression of the stagnant air ... a thrilling consciousness of the close approach of the two cruel orbs.... a superlative stillness ... and then a mighty attrition, in which the mortal part of the poor girl was about to be ground to atoms, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... brass, by long attrition tried, Placed by the purer metal's side, Displays at length a dingy hue, That proves its former claim untrue; So time's discerning hand hath art To set ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... limestone, the broken but extremely regular appearance of the layers being very much like wide steps. The scene at this place is wildly beautiful. The river, frequently only a few feet in width, sometimes foams furiously along between precipices covered with trees, and bearing the marks of years of attrition; then buries itself in dark gulfs, or rests quiescent for a moment in still black pools, before ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... necessarily thrust forward to bear the brunt in the first instance of all the opposition levied against the federal head," its revenue measures, its commercial restrictions, its efforts to enforce neutrality and to quell uprisings. In short, it was the point of attrition between the new system ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... seemed as unanswerable to the lay observer in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with England still in command ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... middle of the seventeenth century an agent which all experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most productive intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attrition of like minds, making suggestions to one another, criticising, comparing, and reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of the Royal Society of London and the Academy of ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... reflective and didactic poems, with more originality of treatment. It was his fortune to be born and reared in the western part of Massachusetts, and to become familiar with some of the most beautiful inland scenery of New England in youth and early manhood, when the mind takes impressions which the attrition of life never wears out. In his study of Nature he combines the faculty and the vision, the eye of the naturalist and the imagination of the poet. No man observes the outward shows of earth and sky more accurately; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... but possessed considerable elasticity and made a very fine driving park. They were experimenting when I came away on sanded glass for road beds. The difficulty was to overcome its susceptibility to attrition. After business hours every street was swept by a machine. The streets and sidewalks, in dry weather, were as free from soil as the floor of a private-house ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... and currents of the sea, be sufficient to carry the fragments to a distance, it can scarcely fail to wear off their angles, and the formation then becomes a CONGLOMERATE. If occasionally globular pieces of scoriae abound in an agglomerate, they may not owe their round form to attrition. When all the angular fragments are of volcanic rocks the mass is usually termed a ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... countered. "Small favors thankfully received. Brother thinks there is only one person writing, nowadays, and the name of that person is Kipling. I get a little of it by mere attrition." ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Brigadier-Generals John W. Phelps and Thomas Williams, and Colonel George F. Shepley of the 12th Maine. When finally assembled the whole force reported about 13,500 officers and men for duty, and from that moment its strength was destined to undergo a steady diminution by the natural attrition of service, augmented, in ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact with ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the capital cities, in those days, were very much the sources of the moral strength of the interior. Sparsely settled, with unfrequent opportunities of communion with one another, the minds of the forest population turned naturally for their tone and direction to the capital city. The active attrition of rival and conflicting minds, gives, in all countries, to the population of a dense community, an intellectual superiority over those who live remote, and feel none of the constant moral strifes to which the citizen is subject. In South Carolina, Charleston had been the seat of the original ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... one will examine a sea-beach he will see, not a vast mass of pebbles perpetually rolling and grinding each other, but an expanse of sand. And this is to be expected; for as soon as a part of the pebbles is, by the attrition of the waves, reduced to sand, the sand packs around the stones and arrests their further waste. To form such a mass of gravel as is found ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... pervades a republican atmosphere. There was little of justice perhaps, and less of security and comfort; but there was at any rate life, intellectual development, thought, pulsation, fierce collision of mind with mind, attrition of human passions and divine faculties, out of which an elemental fire was created which flamed over the civilized world, and has lighted the torches of civilization for centuries. He who would study the artes humaniores must turn of necessity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Complete contrition included love to God as its motive, and the truly contrite man was not always easy to find; but some of the scholastic Doctors had discovered a substitute for contrition in what they called "attrition." viz., incomplete contrition, which might have fear for a motive, and which the Sacrament of Penance could transform into contrition. When, therefore, a man was afraid of hell or of purgatory, he could make his confession to the indulgence-seller or his agent, receive ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... practical plan by which the downfall of the Confederacy could have been averted. However, the President and his cabinet decided to continue the old tactics of dodging from place to place, meeting the hard, stubborn blows of the enemy, only waiting the time, when the South, by mere attrition, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... their education, but she could not give them the culture which comes from the attrition of thought, and from contact with the ideas of others. Since her school-days she had read extensively and thought much, and in solitude her thoughts had ripened. But for her children there were no companions except the young slaves of ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... and peered into the grave. He was the father of Levi Baggs, the hackler, and people said he was never seen except on the occasion of a funeral. The ancient had been reduced to a mere wisp by the attrition of time. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Lincoln had to deal with it in a very similar way. When Grant took command the army expected him to have a similar fate, and his reputation was treated as of little worth because he had not yet "met Bobby Lee." His terrible method of "attrition" was a fearfully costly one, and the flower of that army was transferred from the active roster to the casualty lists before the prestige of its enemy was broken. But it was broken, and Appomattox ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... rubber; but in most carved work the surface is not accessible, and the brush must be used. Sometimes the carving is extremely coarse, and with an open porous grain, in which case it is best to oil it first and then to fine-paper it down; by this process a thin paste is formed by the attrition, which materially assists in filling up the pores. Before commencing to use the varnish have ready an earthenware dish or box,—one of the tins used for the preserved meats or fish will answer the ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... Nick. This party had joined us at Fort Benton, whither he had come on a steamboat, up the Missouri. This was his maiden venture upon the plains, and his habit of querulous faultfinding had, on the first day out, secured him the sobriquet of Old Pernicketty, which the attrition of time had worn down to Old Nick. He knew no more of wolves and other animals than a naturalist, and he was now a trifle frightened. He was crouching beside his saddle and kit, listening with all his soul, his hands suspended before him with divergent ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... 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 piling, driven as close together as possible and ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... an equal number of Class I and II candidates. Manpower officials had objected, arguing there was no point in enlisting more Negroes in Class I and II until the 10 percent ratio was again reached. Such a reduction, with current attrition, would take two years. At the same time, the Army manpower shortages made it impractical to discharge 92,000 soldiers, half of whom were white, in Class V. The organization and training representatives, on the other hand, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... pattered along a stone floor within, and in a moment a little woman stood in an arch raised by two steps from our own level. Carrying a candle, she descended and tripped toward him. She was not pretty, but sprightly and keen, as the perpetual attrition of life must needs make her, and wore the everlasting grisette costume, which displays the neatest of ankles, and whose cap is more becoming than wreaths of garden millinery. I am too minute, I see, but it is second nature. The two commenced a vigorous whispering ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... a pebble is an insignificant thing, suggestive possibly of some discomfort in walking, and fit only to shy at a bird, may be; but to the geologist it appears worthy a volume, and speaks to him of strata may be a million of years old, of glacial attrition, of volcanic action, of chemical constituents, of mineralogical principles, and crystallogenic attraction, of mathematical laws and geometric angles, and of future geognostic changes. That is to say, the pebble contracts and expands, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... artificial luxurious life, seemed capable of being 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 ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... celebrated for the saltness of its waters and the leathery qualities of its clams. This island is said to have been so named on account of its resemblance in shape to an inverted cone, but the attrition of the ocean has materially changed the conic base. Researches in the direction of the apex have not ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... take in the vital fact that after three years those German spiritual forces, those perverted German ideals, remain the most formidable obstacle in our path. We may continue to destroy the German armies by the slow process of attrition, and we may continue to sacrifice the flower of our youth until the process is completed. We may trust to our superiority in money-power and in man-power, but unless we also break the moral power of German ideals, unless we exorcise the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... region scarcely retains one characteristic of the stream far below. Here, it is confined to a bed of rock and sand, not more than two hundred yards wide, and its water is of unwonted clearness and transparency. Its banks are steep and the attrition caused at the time of spring freshets shows a deep vegetable mould reaching far back, making the soil highly fertile. Here, too, the river forces its way through a barrier of tablelands, forming one of those striking peculiarities incident to mountain streams, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... engine of destruction—quite as impersonal as heat or cold or lack of water. He is an unfortunate article of personal belonging requiring much looking after to keep in order. He is a credulous and convenient response to practical jokes, huge tales, misinformation. He is a laudable object of attrition for the development of your character. But somehow, in the woods, he is not as other men, and so you do not come to feel yourself in ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... on its weary way. Victories and occasional defeats marked the stages of attrition by which the bravery and obstinacy of a determined foe was gradually worn down. On August 16th, 1901, Lord Kitchener issued his proclamation banishing all Boer leaders taken in arms after September 15th: three days later the Duke of Cornwall landed ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift of dwelling ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... the curious custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at the age of puberty. This is done by both sexes; and though the under teeth, being relieved from the attrition of the upper, grow long and somewhat bent out, and thereby cause the under lip to protrude in a most unsightly way, no young woman thinks herself accomplished until she has got rid of the upper incisors. This custom gives ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... unconsumable matter will be left, and this 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 in the culms which makes it so useful.—Magazine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... been acknowledged with feelings and expressions becoming the character of a gentleman. They have been so; as the pages of the work abundantly testify. But English courtesy is too frequently located. It is a coin with a feeble impress, and seems subject to woful attrition in its circulation. The countenance, which beams with complacency on receiving a guest to enliven a dull residence, in a desolate neighbourhood, is oftentimes overcharged with sadness, or collapses ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... serve—demanding the best of conduct, brain and heart. The power of Odd-Fellowship lies in its fraternity. It goes forward with irresistible magnetism when its fraternal principles are truly interpreted. It furnishes to men a strong union, where general intelligence, by attrition, is increased; it provides a high moral standard; its objective action is such as touches the common heart of humanity; and by its grand co-operative system it gives the finest means of securing those advantages that tend to the securement of material comfort and mental and spiritual ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... were not submerged, was covered with glaciers, much as Greenland is now, and from these glaciers vast icebergs must from time to time have been detached by the sea and floated off, carrying with them fragments of rock, some freshly broken, some rounded by long attrition, which were deposited on the then submerged lands as the ice melted, and are now found as boulders, sometimes lying on the surface, at others dispersed through beds of clay and sand formed under water from the debris worn down by the glaciers. A subsequent movement of elevation ushered in the state ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... it rejected the idea of generalship in toto. Let us give General Grant his just dues, however. He was not a great commander, but he was a man of clear brain. He saw that brute force could alone shatter the army of Northern Virginia; that to wear it away by attrition, exhaust its blood drop by drop, was the only thing left—and he had the courage to ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... as had courage to venture across might lean, in case of accident or megrim. Indeed, anybody that had able nerves might have crossed the planks without this precaution, had they been dry; but, in consequence of the rain, and the frequent attrition of feet, they were quite slippery; and, besides, the flood rolled terrifically two or three yards below them, which might be apt to beget a megrim that would not be felt ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... evidently unaccurate and uncertain: and even of the mechanical labours which I now hear so loudly celebrated, when I consider the obstruction of movements by friction, the waste of their parts by attrition, the various pressure of the atmosphere, the effects of different effluvia upon metals, the power of heat and cold upon all matter, the changes of gravitation and the hazard of concussion, I cannot but fear that they will supply the world with another ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... do with pronouncing on Solomon's final condition, But he stands on the page of this history, a sad, enigmatical figure, a warning to all young people to take heed that the attrition of the world does not rub off the bloom of early religion, or make them cynically ashamed of the unselfishness of their early desires. There is no sadder sight than an old man whose youthful enthusiasm for goodness and belief in the super-excellency ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... York. Underneath all this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his gait, his demeanor, become as nearly ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... be blasted and destroyed by gunpowder discharged into their crevices and crannies. In families at such times they are like Pharaoh's plague of frogs—"in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading troughs." Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth-crickets, and, playing with them as they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials half filled with beer, or any liquid, and set in their haunts; for being always eager to drink, they ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... the earth is mainly composed of gravel, of calcareous, and argillaceous strata. Sand is separated by streams and currents, gravel is formed by the attrition of stones agitated in water, and argillaceous strata are deposited by water containing argillaceous material. Accordingly, the solid earth would seem to have been mainly produced by water, wind, and tides, and this theory is confirmed by ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... this time his terrible antagonist watched him as a tiger gloats on a helpless and certain prey—silent, merciless, inexorable. Then the end came suddenly. As soon as the process of attrition was sufficiently far advanced to demoralise the Dervish host, without completely dissolving them, the Sirdar and his army moved. The victim, as if petrified, was powerless to fly. The tiger crept forward two measured strides—from ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... were all comfortably encamped, with good grass beside us for the cattle. The bottom of this small river-channel was in no part gravelly, but consisted of soft earth, in which however the cattle did not sink very deep. Fragments of flint, basalt, and quartz, apparently not worn by attrition, abound in the adjacent soil. The general direction of the watercourse appeared to be about 36 degrees north ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... instance, the conflict of will with will, the passionate crises of human existence are but rarely concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's Le gendre de M. Poirier the material of life ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 nations. Not less than 6,000,000 men are now in the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... comfortable and honored one as Dr. Leslie's. What his friends were apt to call his notions were not of such aggressive nature that he was accused of outlawry, and he was apt to speak his mind uncontradicted and undisturbed. He cared little for the friction and attrition, indeed for the inspiration, which one is sure to have who lives among many people, and which are so dear and so helpful to most of us who fall into ruts if we are too much alone. He loved his friends and his books, though ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by the attrition ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... homeland, utilizing driven walls of captives to protect their own men in city assaults and attacks. He doubted if even that endless sea of men could have won the Arizona desert defended by Apaches under Cochise, Victorio, or Magnus Colorado. The white man had done it—by superior arms and attrition; but bow against bow, knife against sword, craft and cunning against craft and cunning—he did not ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... immediate than on his followers, so that it took several years before they decided on sending their commissioners to Benares to report on the Veda and its real character. Yet that mission was, Ibelieve, the result of a slow process of attrition produced by the contact between native and European minds, and as such I wished to present it in my address at the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... have frequently remarked, that if a man has made himself enemies either from neglect of that sophistry and humbug, so necessary to enable him to roll down the stream of time with his fellows without attrition, if they can find no point in his character to assail, their last resort is, to assert that he is an uncertain tempered man, and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... field. A genuine son of thunder would have rejoiced in his deportment, and though a sneering, jealous and disparaging temper, Alfred Stevens could not conceal from himself the conviction that there was stuff in the young man which it needed nothing but trial and rough attrition to bring out. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... 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
... of attrition has never shown such excellent results as in the case of Bulgaria. Her army of trained goats is now the only barrier to the vengeance of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... age and its limitations like so many helpless galley-slaves! Think of the dull sameness of a society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks, habits, tastes and feelings. Think how superior to it earth would be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into pleasant collision ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... and these triumphs are not all there is of college life, but they are a not unimportant part of it. The best education, the most useful training, come not from the classroom and from books, but from the attrition of mind on mind, from the wholesome emulation engendered by a common aim and purpose, from the whetting of wits by good-natured rivalry, the inspiration of youthful enthusiasms, the blending together of all of us in undying ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... of from five to twenty 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
... considerable direct and indirect opinion. She selected after dinner as the most propitious time for discussion. As a matter of fact, earlier in the day would have been better, before Keith's soul had been rubbed raw by downtown attrition. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... 10th Monro, with Bethune's Mounted Infantry, captured eighty fighting Boers near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were taken by a night attack at Boschberg. There is no striking victory to record in these operations, but they were an important part of that process of attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to bring the war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside, and to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of attrition. One by one we were losing the gallant young officers that came over with us to Flanders. Darling was wounded, Sinclair wounded, Warren killed. Sinclair had had a dixie of boiling water spilled on his leg while in the ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw. A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered the trail ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... these gay 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
... fatal to pursue it with this in view. It is the least lucrative of the professions, and yet, in the pressure of modern life, it may tempt men to join it merely as a profession. Even if it has been entered upon from higher motives, the attrition of domestic necessities may dry up the nobler motives and convert the minister into a hireling who thinks chiefly of his wages.[41] The commercial spirit is nearly omnipotent in our day; and men who can buy everything for money ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... is, in my opinion, the best policy; and the original idea would have meant, if a landing had been effected, a triangular advance which would have left before Armin only two alternatives—retreat or surrender. But attrition seems to be far more in Robertson's line than strategy! So the Third Battle of Ypres has begun. And, unless things change very quickly, I am bound to say that it is not a success. So much for the ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... situation through the watery barrier. The fall of the cataract is nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. The cavern is about one hundred and twenty feet in height, fifty in breadth, and three hundred in length. The entrance was completely invisible. By screaming in our ears, the guide contrived to explain to us that there was one more point which we might have reached had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... in order to reach flower. The increased facilities of communication between points once isolated, the interchange of customs and modes of thought, make this encouragement more and more difficult each decade. The naturally inclined eccentric finds his sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable attrition with a larger world than owns him. Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible cuffs and paper collars from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the scarabaeus in his scarf-pin from Mexico, and his ulster from everywhere. He ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to do with that first eventful year of married life—the year of attrition in mind and character, when two natures, differing in many points, and these sharpened as it were by education, are suddenly brought into immediate contact. There were some ideals overthrown, no doubt—it is often so; and some good qualities discovered, which were ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... 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 was a corps better organized than was the quartermaster's corps with the ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... morning with no tale to tell. Except when an enterprising member of a patrol entered the back door of a hut unknown to the officer who entered the front door. A little mutual stalking was indulged in with bombs ready, but fortunately recognition took place before attrition. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... food, and working parties to keep the trenches in good condition would be detailed. The men got no sleep at night, and in fact very little at all. Trench duty was exacting and exhausting from a physical point of view alone, but to this was added the continual attrition of numbers on account of shell ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... professed Protestantism probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... 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, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... made evident by the freedom with which his cavalry scoured the country about the Confederate capital, Richmond—in one raid even completely encircling that city. Steadily Lee's army lost strength by the attrition of the siege, by illness and, what was worse, by desertion since no forces could be spared from the fighting front to recover and punish the deserters. Grant waited for the approach of spring, when, with the advance northwards of the army at Savannah, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the effect of rivers transporting the rocks and stones, is not accurate or in perfect science. That stones are thus continually transported is certain; it is also indisputable, that in this operation they are broken and worn by attrition, more or less; but, that angular stones of the hardest substance are thus made into that round gravel, which we find so abundantly in many places forming the soil or loose materials of the surface, is a conclusion ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... contrition is said to be perfect. If we are sorry for the sins because by them we are in great danger of being punished by God, or because we have lost Heaven by them, and without any regard for God's own goodness, then our contrition is said to be imperfect. Imperfect contrition is called attrition. ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... religious woman," the Lady Deborah 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 ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... vast lakes, which once swept westward from the bases of the Rocky Mountains, were emptied into the Pacific. Next the draining currents transformed into rivers, cut their way through the soil which formerly covered the table-lands and commenced their attrition upon the underlying continent of sandstone. It was a grinding which never ceased; every pebble and every bowlder which lay in the way was pressed into the endless labor; mountains were used up ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... form 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, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... whereas Gray's, as has been said, is a narrow ridge, composed chiefly of comparatively small stones, with a sprinkling of good-sized boulders. The finer rocks give the impression of having been ground down by crushing and attrition to their present dimensions in the far-away, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... carbonate of lime (when the rock is said to be a "calcareous conglomerate"). The pebbles in all conglomerates are worn and rounded by the action of water in motion, and thus show that they have been subjected to much mechanical attrition, whilst they have been mechanically transported for a greater or less distance from the rock of which they originally formed part. The analogue of the old conglomerates at the present day is to be found in the great beds of shingle ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... 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 ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... dead, but Larrey, the surgeon-in-chief of the army, with his typical vigilance and humanity, remarked that the patient gave signs of life, and that, despite the magnitude of his wound, he did not despair of his recovery. Those portions in which attrition was very great were removed, and the splinters of bone taken out, showing an enormous wound. Three months were necessary for cicatrization, but it was not until the capitulation of Marabou, at which place he was ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... individuals. He finds, by experience, that nine square inches of chin will produce, on an 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... Sniping: (a) Snipers constitute one of the most dependable and productive agencies of attrition. (b) The best shots of the company are especially trained and assigned for this duty exclusively. (c) They operate in pairs and post themselves to cover any exposed portions of the enemy's trenches, especially his communicating trenches. (d) They should be well supplied with all necessary special ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... the geologist 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 ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... turns. They often come thundering down upon you unawares, and as the streets are generally very narrow, it is difficult to secure a retreat in good time. At the corners of the streets are large stone posts, to protect the houses from the otherwise constant attrition from the wheels. The streets are paved with large stones, and the noise of the wheels, arising from the rapidity of their motion,—re-echoed by the height of the houses, is no trifling ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Kedy to the captain's office. "So you see, Skipper, we got troubles," he said. "If we don't use those boosters against their skeletons it'll boil down to a stalemate lasting God only knows how long. It will be a war of attrition, outcome dependent on which side can build the most and biggest and strongest ships the fastest. On the other hand, if we do use 'em on defense here, they'll analyze 'em and have everything worked out in a day or so. The first thing they'll do is beef up their ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... see, won't you see, that, if you leave the one great sin all uncovered, open to the continual attrition of a life of goodness, God will let it wear away? It will lessen and lessen, until at the last, when the Ocean of Eternity beats against it, it shall go down, down into the deeps of love that no mortal line can fathom. Oh, Herbert, come out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... persecution is 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 substitutions. Human methods have become ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... in the daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must see and know him as ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... small hot spring called Igabo. In the middle of a plot of turf encircled by trees was a bare spot of oval form, nearly a hundred paces long and seventy wide. The whole space was covered with stones, rounded by attrition, as large as a man's head and larger. Here and there hot water bubbled out of the ground and discharged into a little brook; beside it some women were engaged in cooking their food, which they suspended in nets in the hottest parts of the water. On the lower surfaces of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... yellow outline bites into a parchment paper, blistering at the edges, suggest a rusty metal in the instrument. We must remember, however, that the inks of that period were frequently corrosive, as is proved by the state of many documents now made illegible through the gradual attrition of the paper by mineral acids. It is also not impossible that artists may have already invented what we call steel pens. Sarpi, in the seventeenth century, thanks a correspondent for the gift of one of these mechanical devices. Speaking broadly, the reed and the quill, red ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of the poor and the blood of the 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 given greatness to ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... as surprising to Madame as it was disconcerting. The consequences were such as her wily husband had foreseen. Encountering no externally resisting medium, its force was wasted by internal attrition, so that Madame was being reduced to a nervous wreck, all of which ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... licences members of their calling were classed before the law, and liable to be treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued to a company was regarded as a valuable corporate asset by its sharers. At times a company possessing a licence would diminish by attrition until the ownership of the licence became vested in the hands of a few of the original sharers, who, lacking either the means or ability to continue to maintain themselves as an effective independent organisation, would form a connection with a similarly depleted company and perform as one company, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... strait, and got jammed; or rather, that it went through, forced by the tremendous pressure above; though not without losing large masses, as it came in contact with the shores, and grinding much of its material into powder, by the attrition. Guert's presence of mind and decision did him excellent service here. Without delaying an instant, the moment it was in his power, he led Mary on that cake, and crossed the narrow branch of the river, which alone separated him from the main land, on it, dry-shod. The water was beginning to find ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... although it be hardly drawn into fusion, yet that metal soon submitteth unto rust and dissolu- tion. In the brazen pieces we admired not the duration, but the freedom from rust, and ill savour, upon the hardest attrition; but now exposed unto the piercing atoms of air, in the space of a few months, they begin to spot and betray their green entrails. We conceive not these urns to have descended thus naked as they appear, or to have entered their graves without the old habit of flowers. The urn of ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... know how great the contrition ought to be in order to be sufficient before God, they gave this consolation: He who could not have contrition, at least ought to have attrition, which I may call half a contrition or the beginning of contrition, for they have themselves understood neither of these terms nor do they understand them now, as little as I. Such attrition was reckoned as contrition when a ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... impalpable robe to sweep the surface as softly as a moon-beam. So much and no more of pollution he endures from contact with earthly objects. The lowest extremity of his dress, but with the delicacy of light, grazes the granite surface. And that is all the attrition which the sacred granite receives in the course of any one century, and this is all the progress which we, the poor children of earth, in any one century make towards the exhaustion of our earthly imprisonment. But, argues the subtle legend, even that attrition, when weighed ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... half past six P.M., all being right, we commenced again paying out the heavy shore-end, of which we had about eight miles to be left on the rocky bottom of the coast, to bear the attrition of the waves and to prevent injury to the delicate nerve which it incloses in its iron mail, and which is the living principle of the whole work. A critical time was approaching, it was when the end of the massive cable should ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... action. The foot tastes it and henceforth rests not. The joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition and progression, the thirst for space, for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and prospects, to cross mountains and thread rivers, and defy frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties, seizes it; and from that day forth ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... for not treated, as for neither formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled "mug" rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... and glued together by the particularities of little incidents. Thus in the production of heat in the physical world, the flint and the steel produce not the effect without collision; the rudest Barbarian will tell us the necessity of attrition, and the chemist of mixture. Now, an object, it is admitted, is brought into closer contact with its corresponding passion, by being seen and conversed with. This we grant is one way; but does it follow that there is no other? To assert this, would be ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... planks of the Elizabethan benches have been completely worn through in places by the perpetual fidgeting of hundreds of generations of schoolboys, which is as remarkable in its way as the knee grooves at Canterbury, though the attrition is due to a different portion of the human anatomy. As a boy I used to wonder how the trunk-hosed Elizabethan Harrovians addressed each other, and whether they found it very difficult to avoid palpable anachronisms in every sentence. Their conversations ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... sometimes reduced in size and represented on a single tile (Fig. 3). I give an example from Lucca Cathedral. It is on one of the porch piers, and is 191/2 inches in diameter. A writer in 1858 says that, "from the continual attrition it has received from thousands of tracing fingers, a central group of Theseus and the Minotaur has now been very nearly effaced." Other examples were, and perhaps still are, to be found in the Abbey of Toussarts, at Chalons-sur-Marne, in ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney |
