"Invention" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is that there is no mystery. That was an invention of Jack to arouse my curiosity and interest. James is not a Thug. He solemnly assures me that in all his wanderings he has never ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... night of which we write Mrs Twitter happened to have a "few friends" to tea. And let no one suppose that Mrs Twitter's few friends were to be put off with afternoon tea—that miserable invention of modern times—nor with a sham meal of sweet warm water and thin bread and butter. By no means. We have said that Samuel Twitter was rich, and Mrs Twitter, conscious of her husband's riches, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... first taught by the stork, which may be observed to inject water into its bowels by means of its long beak." The British Medical Journal, reviewing the newly published Storia della Farmacia, says that Frederigo Kernot describes in it the invention of the enema apparatus, which he looks upon as an epoch in pharmacy as important as the discovery of America in the history of human civilization. The glory of the invention of this instrument, so beneficial to suffering ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... spring, had been pushed aside, and discovered, built in the wall, a large and deep iron chest, the lid of which, being open, displayed the wondrous mechanism of one of those Florentine locks of the sixteenth century, which, better than any modern invention, set all picklocks at defiance; and, moreover, according to the notions of that age, are supplied with a thick lining of asbestos cloth, suspended by gold wire at a distance from the sides of the chest, for the purpose of rendering incombustible the articles contained in it. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... report against thy life, [Half-Chorus II. Whispered words with falsehood rife, Wise Odysseus bringing near Shrewdly gaineth many an ear: Since invention against thee Findeth hearing speedily, Tallying with the moment's birth; And with loudly waxing mirth Heaping insult on thy grief, Each who hears it glories more Than the tongue that told before. Every slander ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Corn, &c. they have good Mills upon the Runs and Creeks: besides Hand-Mills, Wind-Mills, and the Indian Invention of pounding Hommony in Mortars burnt in the Stump of a Tree, with a Log for a Pestle hanging at the End of a Pole, fix'd like the ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... weight in the community. There is no home-encouragement of varied agriculture,—for the wants of a slave population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade, for that is developed only by communities where education induces refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of the people. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... underhand way he contrived to favor and foment the disturbance. He took care that the orders of the Government should not be too quickly carried out, and he gave more than a tacit encouragement to the common rumor that the King in his heart was hostile to the new tax, that the tax was wholly an invention of Walpole's, and that resistance to such a measure would not be unwelcome to the Sovereign, and would lead to the dismissal of the minister. Walpole was not long in finding out the treachery of the Duke of Roxburgh. To adopt a homely phrase, he "took the bull by the horns" ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... fearlessness, which has ruined wiser plans than ever were moulded in his brain. Rumor hints broadly at a sudden fit of depression, not unnatural in one notoriously addicted to the use of stimulants; but this is, probably, the ill-natured invention of an enemy. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... had the good fortune to discover a second attack on a coach, far less picturesque, as a matter of fact, than the one to which he owed his fame, but which he undertook to work up like a master, and did it so well, by dint of disguises, forged letters, surprised confidences, the invention of imaginary persons, and other melodramatic tricks, that he succeeded in producing at the Criminal Court at Evreux seven prisoners against whom the evidence was so well concocted that five at least were in danger of losing their heads. ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... things the Bishop passed lightly, while exaggerating others. Some things, again, were entirely of his own invention; and if from the depths of her tomb the Duchess could have heard all that M. de Meaux said about her, she never would have borne me such malice, nor would her grief at leaving life and fortune have troubled ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... boys would spend in idleness or purposeless pastime in learning the telegrapher's code. Later on this knowledge gave him work which enabled him to gain experience as a telegraph operator, which in turn led to his invention of the quadruplex telegraph. But the invention was temporarily a failure, although later on a great success. Sorely reduced in circumstances, he was one day tramping the streets of New York without ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... guttered wheels in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently located in adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried a readily manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached down through a slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable. This invention solved the problem of hauling heavily laden street-cars up and down steep grades. About the same time he also heard, in a roundabout way, that the Chicago City Railway, of which Schryhart and Merrill were the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... are given up to practise, my afternoons to teaching. Of these practise hours, at least one hour is given to technic, scales, arpeggios, octaves, chords—and Bach! I believe in taking one selection of Bach, say a Two-voiced Invention, and perfecting it, playing it in various ways—transposing it into all keys and polishing it to the highest degree possible. The B flat Invention is a useful one for this treatment. So with etudes; instead of playing at so many, is it not better to perfect a few and bring them up to the highest ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... assumed its usual expression of diabolical malignity, whilst, at the same time, he gave a look so piercing at Darby, as if suspecting that the curse, from its peculiar character, was at least partially his own invention,—that the latter, who stood like a criminal, looking towards the floor, felt precisely what was going forward in the other's mind, and knew that he had nothing else for it but to look him steadily ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... reasonably imagined, that others may have the same design; but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same materials, it must be expected they will supply from invention the want of intelligence; and that under the title of "The Life of Savage," they will publish only a novel, filled with romantick adventures, and imaginary amours. You may therefore, perhaps, gratify the lovers of truth ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... king, if not the father, of bibliomaniacs; his immortal work reveals to us that long before the invention of printing men were tormented and enraptured by those very same desires, envies, jealousies, greeds, enthusiasms, and passions which possess and control bibliomaniacs at the present time. That vanity was sometimes the controlling passion ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... power Rhoda grew in ingenuity, and failure in any one particular only stimulated her genius of invention the more. Did she spill paste, mucilage, water on her gingham aprons, and wipe anything and everything on them that came in her way, Rhoda dressed her in daintier ones of white cambric, with a ruffle at the neck ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of the Christian Endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics (the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the Mormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations, the spread of zooephilia, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... first they struck me as wonderful," said the girl. "They were such a novel invention that I went to see them from pure curiosity. But, afterward, the subjects presented in the pictures bored me. The drama pictures were cheap and common, the comedy scenes worse; so I kept ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... immense, but the result was failure. "Sunt lacrimae rerum," and tears were never shed over a greater waste of ingenuity and heroic toil, if indeed a fine example of fruitless devotion is to be called waste. With apologies to the Esperantists, it must be said that the invention of a universal language, of any but the narrowest compass, seems impossible, for language, in any real sense, is not made but grows. It is dangerous, however, to dogmatise on possibilities. Misled, ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... that an iron of unprecedentedly good qualities was attainable from common pig; and second, that the cost of its manufacture would not exceed that of Bessemer steel. Nevertheless, owing to lack of funds properly to push the invention against the jealous opposition which it encountered, the enterprise came to a halt until quite recently, when its merits found a champion in Gustav Lindenthal, C.E., member of this club, who is now the general manager of the Chapin Pneumatic Iron Co., and under whose direction this new quality ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... Schwartzmann's plans," she said quietly. "He would ruin you; seize your ship; steal for himself the glory of your invention. Would you go back and deliver yourself ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... Simp Wolley and Bud Briskett, who had tried to get his invention, as told in the preceding volume, "The Moving Picture Girls," but they were in jail, as far as he knew. Clearly there was some mystery here, but it was not to be ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... burthen: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... dispose of you? The invention of a statuary is exhausted, and Sir William is yet unprovided with a monument. America is anxious to bestow her funeral favors upon you, and wishes to do it in a manner that shall distinguish you from all the deceased heroes of the last war. The ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... But it harmonized finely with the Greek ideal—the notion that patriotism is even a woman's first duty, and her life not worth living except in subservience to her husband. There is good reason to believe[327] that this story was a pure invention of Xenophon and deliberately intended to be an object lesson to women regarding the ideal they ought to live up to. The whole of the book in which it appears—[Greek: Kyrou paideia]—is what the Germans call a Tendenzroman—a historic ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... my daughter, it would have countenanced no such invention; for the town held its charter from the Viscounts of Beziers and Albi, and might consume only such corn and wine as ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... coffee, the smell alone is enough to—to—whoever invented hot coffee was a genius! The chord of the ninth and the diminished seventh were ordinary discoveries; any musician was bound to stumble across them sooner or later. But this," and he poured the ground coffee into the pot, "is a positive invention of genius!" ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... but admire the hardihood of invention which devised such slight means to realize the mathematical conception that if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of sound which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuously as nearly as may be in simple proportion ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... at the very least, to carry them out of the everyday six-and-eightpenny world, or the whizz of an Excalibur to startle their drowsy imaginations into life. The beauties and the wonders of the universe died for them some centuries ago; they went out with Friar Bacon and the invention of gunpowder. Praised be Apollo! this is not our case. There is a snatch of poetry, to our apprehension, in almost everything. We have detected it pushing its petals forth from the curls of a barrister's wig, and scented its fragrance ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... attempted various other pieces, which were indeed on too grand a scale for so narrow a stage. Although this presumption spoiled and finally quite destroyed what we performed, such childish pleasures and employments nevertheless exercised and advanced in many ways my power of invention and representation, my fancy, and a certain technical skill, to a degree which in any other way could not perhaps have been secured in so short a time, in so confined a space, and at so ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... a race practically without musical instruments,—for the drum and rattle were used only to accentuate rhythm,—they are representative of the period when the human voice was the sole means of musical expression,—a period which antedated the invention of instruments by an immeasurable time. They prove, therefore, that musical form was not developed, as has sometimes been stated, by the use of instruments, but that it took its rise in a mental necessity similar to that which ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... care of to-morrow; Short and dark as our life may appear We may make it still darker by sorrow, Still shorter by folly and fear! Half our troubles are half our invention, And often from blessings conferred Have we shrunk, in the wild apprehension ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the report was a mistaken one, and that Montgomery barely received the assurance that he would be placed in the hands of the king alone. "There have been only too many acts of perfidy in France, without the invention of others," says this historian. "If there were any infractions of the capitulation, they were in the case of some other gentlemen and soldiers, who were maltreated ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... heed this piece of news, any more than the slight flush on his sister's face as she delivered it; he was wondering whether what Bully Tom said was mere invention to frighten him, or whether there was ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... to be a good spirit, her discourse was so heavenly. Her two great errands were to comfort Mrs. Bargrave in her affliction, and to ask her forgiveness for the breach of friendship, and with a pious discourse to encourage her. So that, after all, to suppose that Mrs. Bargrave could hatch such an invention as this from Friday noon till Saturday noon, supposing that she knew of Mrs. Veal's death the very first moment, without jumbling circumstances, and without any interest too; she must be more witty, fortunate, and wicked too, than any indifferent person, I dare say, will allow. I asked Mrs. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig of real—perhaps personally real—hair, and dressed from head to foot in the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own laundress; and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Esq., of Plymouth. The latter as chairman of the Plymouth committee, sent up for inspection an engraving of a plan and section of a slave-ship, in which the bodies of the slaves were seen stowed in the proportion of rather less than one to a ton. This happy invention gave all those who saw it a much better idea, than they could otherwise have had, of the horrors of their transportation, and contributed greatly, as will appear, afterwards, to impress the public in favour ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Stereotype printing had been first suggested by William Ged, of Edinburgh, in 1735, and was perfected and brought into general use by Tillock, in 1779. The printing machine had been originated by Nicholson, in 1790, and an improved form of it, made of iron, the invention of Earl Stanhope, was in general use in 1806. Thomas Martyn, a compositor of The Times, invented some further modifications, and was aided by the younger Walter. Owing, however, to the violent opposition ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the development of the Northwest was the invention and manufacture of grain-planting and harvesting machinery by Cyrus McCormick and others about 1845. This enabled the farmers to increase their operations very much as the Whitney gin had done for the cotton farmers of 1800. Still ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however—quite steadily—doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask justice, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... "Useful Transactions in Philosophy," etc., January and February, 1708/9, which commenced with an article entitled "An Essay on the Invention of Samplers," by Mrs. Arabella Manly (sic). She had a friend, Mrs. Betty ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the ancient temple has fallen into ruins, but the relics are not excelled in beauty of architecture and sculpture by any remains of Hindu art. Forty columns support the r00f, but no two are alike, and great fertility of invention is manifested in the execution Of the ornaments. The summit of Taragarh hill, overhanging Ajmere, is crowned by a foot, the lofty thick battlements of which run along its brow and enclose the table-land. The walls are 2 m. in circumference, and the fort can only be approached by steep and very ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and in large part attributable to, a new mechanical invention. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... from their sockets, staring from a wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough surely for the wildest German tale ever written, a unique singularity, which removes it beyond the reach of invention. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... streets (there is but one of much consideration), immensely entertained by the picturesque contrasts. There was more life and amusement here in five minutes, he declared, than in five days of what people called scenery—the present rage for scenery, anyway, being only a fashion and a modern invention. The Friend suspected from this penchant for the city that the Professor must have been brought ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... kinds of osier weaving, brick making, pottery and all kinds of clay or porcelain work; together with many other things that would suggest themselves as time passed and the capacity of the farm was increased by the invention of better machinery and ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... we know that these old British farmers were sufficiently scientific agriculturalists to have invented wheeled ploughs,[23] and to use a variety of manures; various kinds of mast, loam, and chalk in particular. This treatment of the soil was, according to Pliny, a British invention[24] (though the Greeks of Megara had also tried it), and he thinks it worth his while to give a long description of the different clays in use and the methods of their application. That most generally employed was chalk dug out from pits some hundred ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... from the Scheldt and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions. When the sky is troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the grandeur of the lines. Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi, exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly illuminated by a stormy day, and standing out in irregular blotches against the scenic background of a sky entirely black or entirely white, and full of tempest. A more original ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the early morning he wrote or walked. Evenings he devoted to Mrs. Taylor; either writing to her or for her, or else seeing her. On Saturday afternoons they would usually go botanizing, for botany is purely a lovers' invention. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... selections and finding in them much pleasure, as well as improvement in taste and knowledge. With the spread of education and with the great increase of literature among all civilized nations, more especially since the invention of printing and its vast multiplication of books, the making of volumes of selections comprizing what is best in one's own or in many literatures is no longer a mere matter of taste or convenience as with the Greeks, but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... instance to the point I may mention that when attending as a member of the Representative Assembly at Mysore in 1891, I happened to meet the Dewan and some of his officers in the veranda outside the great hall where our meetings were held, and his attention was attracted to a coffee peeler—the invention of a native who thought this a good opportunity for introducing his machines to the notice of the public, and had some cherry coffee at hand to show how they worked. The Dewan at once inspected the machine, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... countrymen Sixty Years since, than in writing a work, which, though it may be, in its facts, almost true, and in its delineations perfectly accurate, will yet, in sixty years hence, be regarded, or rather, probably, disregarded, as a mere romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... church yeelded that immersion, or dipping, was lawfull, but in this could countrie not so conveniente. But they could not nor durst not yeeld to him in this, that sprinkling (which all y^e churches of Christ doe for y^e most parte use at this day) was unlawfull, & an humane invention, as y^e same was prest; but they were willing to yeeld to him as far as y^ey could, & to y^e utmost; and were contented to suffer him to practise as he was perswaded; and when he came to minister that ordnance, he might so doe it to any ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... things." [7] Every year from that day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe. The last one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera, the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony, and the many other applications of electricity. As one by one new areas of power have thus come ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... and dab the whole family once a week? The young'uns might be soused in it every Saturday night, and the nigger might fix the elderly folks with a whitewash brush. Then there wouldn't be no bother a washing your clothes or yourself, which last is an invention of the doctor to make people sick, because it lets in the cold in winter and the heat in summer, when natur' says shut up the porouses and keep 'em out. Besides, when the new invention was tore at the knees ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... I assign, O Brutus, why, as we consist of mind and body, the art of curing and preserving the body should be so much sought after, and the invention of it, as being so useful, should be ascribed to the immortal Gods; but the medicine of the mind should not have been so much the object of inquiry while it was unknown, nor so much attended to and cultivated after its discovery, nor ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... content ourselves with the accidental aristoi produced by the fortuitous concourse of breeders. For I agree with you, that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly, bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness, and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... peculiar dignity, Mr. Bossolton was, it must be confessed, sometimes at a loss to conclude it in a period worthy of the commencement; and this caprice of nature which had endowed him with more words than thoughts (necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention) drove him into a very ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this was simply the plan of repeating the sense by ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mathematician, place him in the front rank among mathematicians of all time; and yet the services that he rendered to mathematical science were surpassed by his extraordinary capacity for the combination of theory with practice. His powers of invention, of broad generalisation, of originality of thought were almost unbounded. Among the mathematical problems with which he dealt successfully were the theory of numbers, the squaring of the circle and the calculation of chances. To him we owe the conception of the law of the conservation of energy, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... mother, she reproached herself somewhat for the birth of Putois, and not without reason. Because, after all, Putois was the child of our mother's invention, as Caliban was the poet's invention. Without doubt the faults were not equal, and my mother was more innocent than Shakespeare. However, she was frightened and confused to see her little falsehood grow inordinately, and her slight ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... the man to whom the parcel is to be sent is definitely known to be prejudiced against cigarettes, don't send him pipe tobacco or a pipe. There are smokers who hate cigarettes just as there are some people who think that the little paper roll is an invention of the devil. If any one has a boy over there, he—or she—had better overcome any possible personal feeling against the use of cigarettes and send them in preference to ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... partly covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its excellencies are forgot, its faults are now forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every artifice of representation. It is despised and rejected of men, and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness set up in opposition or in preference to it. It is to this humor, and it is to the measures growing out of it, that I set myself (I hope not alone) in the most determined opposition. Never before did we at any time in this country meet upon the theory of our frame ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His wit, too, is usually pregnant ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... the States of Holland, without any burden to the people. It was the settling of a certain small seal or stamp to be used in the Provinces ("id autem erat parvi sigilli in Provinciis constitutio"). For the working this invention he had taken into partnership one John van den Brook; and the States of Holland had promised the partners 3000 guilders yearly, equal to about L300 English, for the use of the thing. Not a farthing, however, had they ever received, though the States had benefited so much; and now, as they ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... circumstance which can justify violence is anger. The only circumstance which can justify the taking of human life is anger. And anger may be expressed by a rope or a knife-edge, but not by a roundabout or any other morbid invention of a cold-blooded philosopher such as the electric chair, or the lethal chamber. In the same way, if flogging is to continue as a punishment, it must be inflicted by a man and ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... invented the press. Thus it was that in the preceding ages the warm and animated words of the missionary were necessarily the only organ which Christianity had at command to proclaim its principles; but scarcely did this invention come to second the progress of modern civilisation, than it foresaw the future ally destined to complete the intelligent and social labour which ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... an air of ease and confidence in the answers of Abigail, which illustrates the promptness of invention and assurance of their grounds which the girls manifested on all occasions. They were never at a loss, and challenged scrutiny. Hutchinson gained no advantage, and no one else ever did, in an encounter ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... The discovery of the telescope was very fine in its way; but the invention of the microscope was, after all, a much more sensible affair. We may look at the mountains of the moon, and the spots on the sun, until we have rendered our eyes, for all practical purposes, useless for a month, and yet not bring to light one secret worth knowing, one fact that, as inhabitants ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the hours That wisdom decks in moral grace, And thine invention's fairy powers, The charm improv'd of nature's face; Propitious come! in silence laid Beneath thy olive's grateful shade, Pour the mild bliss that sooths the tuneful mind, And in thy ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... up the shortcomings of the Executive with ceaseless vigilance. To Sir Peregrine Maitland and Attorney-General Robinson it was a veritable thorn in the flesh. There was abundant occasion for criticism, and it was seldom, if ever, that Collins resorted to pure invention for the purpose of attacking the innumerable abuses of the time. There was always a sufficient substratum of truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... He advised them to lie down with their eyes shut in the berth which was now vacated, the occupants being called off to their respective duties, and the assistant-surgeon having retired into the dispensary to concoct a specific against sea-sickness of his own invention, which made him and those he persuaded to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... set aside for ever. But the notices which I have been considering suggest another reflection. Is the historical position which the writer of this letter takes up at all like the invention of a forger? Would he have thought of placing himself at the moment of time when Ignatius is supposed to have been martyred, but when the report of the circumstances had not yet reached Smyrna? If he had chosen this moment, would he not have ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... war as we had been accustomed to. It was a newer and more deadly game, and I had to watch my splendid army eaten away as waves eat a sandhill. Never once did I get a chance of forcing close action. These new tactics that had come from Phorenice's invention, were beyond my art to meet or understand. We were eight to her one, and our close-packed numbers only made us so much the more easy for slaughter. A panic came, and those who could fled. Myself, I had no wish to go back and earn the axe that waits for the unsuccessful general. I tried to die ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... no machine comes in to take away a man's or woman's power of earning their living, like the spinning-jenny (the old busybody that she is), to knock up all our good old women's livelihood, and send them to their graves before their time. There's an invention of the enemy, if ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... frequently than the pot, and where, in general, no one was at home to take care of the child. Then he would cry; but what nobody knows, that nobody cares for, and he would cry till he was tired, and then he fell asleep; and in sleep one feels neither hunger nor thirst. A capital invention is sleep. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and seventy-two pages, to which were added FIFTEEN pages of errata. The pious monk wrote an apology for these inaccuracies, which, if true, proved that his case was indeed a cruel one—clearly proving, moreover, that even if the devil had originally assisted Doctor Faustus and Gutenberg in the invention, his brimstone majesty very soon became sick of his bargain. The monk avers that he wrote the work to circumvent the artifices of Satan, and that the devil, ever on the alert, undertook to circumvent him. For this purpose Satan, in the first place, caused the MS. to be drenched in a kennel, until ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that "progress" which is promised for the future, it is like the necessity for the past, purely an invention of Mr. Parker; if I receive it, I must receive it simply as matter of prophecy. If the necessity has continued so long, then, for aught I know, it may continue for ever; the evil is all too certain,—the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... my cozen Roger, and Creed: and mighty merry; and by and by to dinner, which was very good and plentifull: (I should have said, and Mr. George Montagu), who come at a very little warning, which was exceeding kind of him. And there, among other things, my Lord had Sir Samuel Morland's late invention for casting up of sums of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... "it sounds like a wild invention from some story-teller's pen, and I should laugh in your face but for the proofs you have given me. But you must not stay here in this country. It is as much yours as any lucky adventurer's, but your right would be disputed in a hundred ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... him while he was experimenting and perfecting the new projectile. The company couldn't undertake to do that, but I personally financed Mr. Kauffman, having confidence in his ability. He has been six months getting the invention made, tested and ready to submit to government experts, and up to the present it has cost a lot of money. However, it is now considered perfect and Mr. Kauffman has brought it here to-night to exhibit ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house? Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress"; and another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact words: "La gloire est le soleil des morts." It would be easy to compile ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... preacher continued, speaking of different improvements, and lastly of the invention of daguerreotypes and photographs. He called the attention of his hearers to this almost miraculous art of indelibly fixing the expression of a countenance, and drew a lesson as to the permanent effect of our daily looks and ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... churches, increased in Paris, at one time at least fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in that place, that has not been increased,—brothels, gaming-houses, everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... high-seas, or steamboat on the river, the roar of commerce, far more than the work of the husbandman. We are an agricultural people, we of the South and West—and especially we Southerners, with our poverty of invention, our one staple, our otherwise helpless habits, incident to the institution which, however it may be our curse, is still our wealth, and to which, for the present time, we are bound, Ixion-like, by every law of necessity. What does this tariff promise? ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... many groups—even the Low Archipelago—but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've never touched. Compared with any of the hulas, set and fixed in each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by a wind and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... passing Novalesa, reached, after the evening had closed, the small and antient town of Susa, which had formerly guarded this pass of the Alps into Piedmont. The heights which command it had, since the invention of artillery, rendered its fortifications useless; but these romantic heights, seen by moon-light, with the town below, surrounded by its walls and watchtowers, and partially illumined, exhibited an interesting picture to Emily. Here they rested for ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and the steam engine. In other words, to convert the business of farming from an agricultural pursuit, where the labor of men and women was the chief factor of production, to a mechanical pursuit, in which the chief element of cost and power were machines, the invention of a single generation. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Modern science and invention, civic and economic progress, the growth of humanitarian ideas, and the approach to Christian unity, are all combining to give woman and woman's work a central place in the social order. The vast machinery of government, especially in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... say a few words in justification of the Historical Romance, in its relation to history. Any one, with no preceding profound study of history, who takes a few well-known historical facts as a foundation for an airy castle of romantic invention and fantastic adventure, may easily write an Historical Romance; for him history is only the nude manikin which he clothes and adorns according to his own taste, and to which he gives the place and position most agreeable to himself. ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying Tintoret. The catalogue appeared in "Stones of Venice," which was suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes—a new invention which delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... seriously, for his tone was so quiet, and matter of fact, that they could scarce credit that he had passed through such an exciting adventure; and the three were so accustomed to hoax each other, that it struck them both as simply an invention on the part of their comrade, so absolutely improbable did ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... the complexity of modern life which enforces moderation. Science has created vast populations and huge industries, and also given the means by which single minds can direct them. Invention gives these gifts, and compels man to use them. Man is as much the slave as the master of the machine, as he turns to the telephone or the telegram. In this fierce turmoil of the modern world he can only keep his judgment intact, ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... thought he, "is about a hundred pounds of high-grade dynamite, or a gallon of nitroglycerin. Better still, a dozen capsules of my own invention, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... disappointed, it is true—hurt, even, at having been deprived of any voice in the matter. She had been looking forward so much to carrying out her pet schemes, to enjoying her friends' admiration of the wonders wrought by her artistic invention. And she had never thought of George, somehow, as likely to have any strikingly original ideas on the subject of decoration, although she liked him ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... the Conquest to the year 1304, tells us expressly, that he did this, not because he could add much to the histories of Bede, William of Newburgh, and Matthew Paris, but "propter minores, quibus non suppetit copia librorum." (25) Before the invention of printing, it was necessary that numerous copies of historical works should be transcribed, for the instruction of those who had not access to libraries. The transcribers frequently added something of their own, and abridged or omitted ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... wonderful Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were shaken might be removed, as things that are made—cosmogonies, systems, theories, prejudices, fashions, of man's invention: while those things which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to the mind and will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came forth, even the bosom of God ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "under the pretext of dining with some one living in his vicinity I shall go to Leppich and shall remain with him for a long time; it will be a feast to me to become more closely connected with a man whose invention will render military art superfluous, free mankind of its internal destroyer, make of you the arbiter of kings and empires and the benefactor ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... fact. Pray proceed." As he said this Arnold glanced across the table at Natasha, and a swift smile and a flash from her suddenly unveiled eyes told him that she, too, was thinking of how the world's history might have been altered had the Tsar's million been paid for his invention. Then the Princess ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... of Dionysus takes us back, then, into that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much there as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo Santo at Pisa- -the family of Noah presented among all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around the press from which the first wine is flowing, a painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... all his life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse. So he sits all day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: "I don't s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little spades and pails." I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak, grey eyes ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... scarcely show the development of anything. What was true at the end of the first year of their partnership seems to be true at the end of the second, third, fourth and fifth. After a time when their grotesque performance was a fixed and settled thing, there was little need for the invention of novelty or for rehearsal. Week after week, month after month, year after year, they reproduced their almost stereotyped entertainment. Here and there, according to the idiosyncrasy of the audience, they introduced some variety. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... said Raven, after his third slice of toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... is highly probable that in the twenty-five years preceding the panic of 1873, owing to the progress of invention, those industries in the United States employing much machinery were unduly stimulated in comparison with other industries, and that the readjustment was a slow and painful process. After the collapse vast numbers left the manufacturing to enter ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the click o' the lock; so I fancy the priming had got damp and didn't catch. I was in a great quandary now what to do, for I couldn't concoct in my mind, in the hurry, any good reason for firin' off my piece. But they say necessity's the mother of invention; so just as I was givin' it up and clinchin' my teeth to bide the worst o't and take what should come, a sudden thought came into my head. I stepped out before the rest, seemin' to be awful anxious to be at the savages, tripped my foot ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the comparatively few games that gives a large amount of activity to a large number of players playing at the same time. The game as here given is the invention of Miss Cora B. Clark and Miss Caroline M. Wollaston of New York City, by whose kind permission the game is here printed. It has proven to be a ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... country, Mr. Grandon, they manage their daughters differently; not always better, perhaps, but they do not leave them unprotected to the world, to beg their bit of bread, maybe. I have put everything in my invention. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of new kinds of characters, probably the most popular is his invention of the British soldier in India. He avers that he "loves that very strong man, Thomas Atkins"; but his affection has not blinded him to the faults of the beloved. Mr. Atkins drinks too much, is too careless a gallant in love, has been educated either too much or too little, and has other ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... irrepressible race of at least a hundred and twenty millions, endowed with rare capacities for organization, cohesion, self-sacrifice and perseverance, whom no treaties can bind, no scruples can restrain, no dangers intimidate. At any moment a new invention, a favourable diplomatic combination, would suffice to move them to burst all bounds and resume the military, naval ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the bookstalls of London to find the material which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example, Sir Herbert Croft's volume, Love and Madness, the supposed correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft's. Borrow accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... children to bed, only to find that her fertility of imagination in the afternoon was to prove her undoing in the evening; for her memory was by no means as reliable as her powers of invention. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... barely off the sand of the beach when a shot sounded, and the wind of the bullet made his eyes smart. Invention was automatic in his mind. At the noise, he fell forthwith on his face, crashing across a bush, so that his head was up and his pistol in reach of his hand. Thus he lay, not moving, but searching through half-closed eyes the maze of green before ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... beaucheouz idee, I juz take a pencil"—he drew one from his pocket—"check! I check it. So w'en I wead the same book again, then I take notiz I've check that idee and I look to see what I check it faw. 'Ow you like that invention, eh?" ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... variety at all. To me, one of the highest triumphs of the siege is the achievement of MacNalty, a young lieutenant of the Army Service Corps. For nights past he has been working in the station engine shed at an apparatus of his own invention for boiling down horses into soup. After many experiments in process and flavouring, and many disappointments, he has secured an admirable essence of horse. This will sound familiar and commonplace to people who can get a bottle ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... upon this occasion, repeat what is now familiar history—how, by the invention of the cotton-gin, and the consequent enormous increase of the cotton crop, slave labor in the cotton States, and slave breeding in the Northern slave States, became so profitable that the slaveholders were able, for many years, largely to influence, if not control, ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... Major, "have pity. It's not any canvas woman that I want—By Jove!" He caught sight of an invention of Felicien Rops, a pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "What do ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... say, was done at Belem, Lisbon. The interior is Gothic, unlike all others in the islands; and the piers, lofty and elegant, imitate palm-fronds, a delicate flattery to 'Las Palmas' and a good specimen of local invention. There are a nave and two aisles: four noble transversal columns sustaining the choir-vault adorn the walls. The pulpit and high altar are admirable as the choir; the only eyesores are the diminutive organ and the eleven side-chapels with their caricatures of high art. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... has been a failure. I took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a pleasant impression. It is not a mere invention, but a compound of the words smile and eyelash. A smile suggests good humor; eyelashes soften the expression and are the only features that never blemish a face. Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer and propitiate. Yet it exasperates. It is really very ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... said, 'Take her there yourself.' Sommers beckoned to the woman to follow him. He took her to one of the little compartments on the inner corridor, which was lined with strange devices: electrical machines, compressed air valves, steam sprays—all the enginery of the latest invention. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... egg or ovum is a simple cell, as in the case of other animals. When I had explained this pregnant fact and its significance in my History of Creation, it was described in many of the theological journals as a dishonest invention of my own. The fact that the embryos of man and the dog are, at a certain stage of their development, almost indistinguishable was also denied. When we examine the human embryo in the third or fourth week of its development, we find it to be quite different ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... Parliament was passed, confirming the patent to Mr Stead, as though it had been regularly filed within the prescribed period. A second patent was afterwards obtained, but that related more particularly to the form of blocks. The first patent, which had been infringed, was for an invention consisting of a mode of paving with blocks of similar sizes and dimensions, of either a sexagonal, triangular, or square form, so as to make ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... man of about forty, and the epithet of "Red" had been given to him in consequence of the color of his hair. In expression his countenance was by no means unhandsome, being florid and symmetrical, but hard, and with scarcely any trace of feeling. His brows were far asunder, arguing ingenuity and invention, but his eyes, which were small and treacherous, glared—whenever he became excited—with the ferocity of an enraged tiger. His shoulders were broad, his chest deep and square, his arms long and powerful, but his lower ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... constitute its greatest terrors; that a human hand must give motion to the Guillotine as well as to the axe; and that either accustoms a people, already sanguinary, to the sight of blood, I think little is gained by the invention. It was imagined by a Mons. Guillotin, a physician of Paris, and member of the Constituent Assembly. The original design seems not so much to spare pain to the criminal, as obloquy to the executioner. I, however, perceive little ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to me!" Then Psyche fell down at her feet, and sweeping the floor with her hair, washing the footsteps of the goddess in her tears, besought her mercy, with many prayers:—"By the gladdening rites of harvest, by the lighted lamps and mystic marches of the Marriage and mysterious Invention of thy daughter Proserpine, and by all beside that the holy place of Attica veils in silence, minister, I pray thee, to the sorrowful heart of Psyche! Suffer me to hide myself but for a few days among the heaps of corn, till time have softened the anger of the goddess, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... would have an end. Progression then would cease, Invention have no earnest friend, And ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... yea, and a garden of pleasure in an Island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves when they would take the air of the sea, which had all kind of garden herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver of an invention and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil, who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad and other times into a pigmy, who makes him repeat the same things a hundred times, who makes him dispute on theology, who, by a serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of firearms, represents the devils cannonading in heaven? Neither I nor any man in Italy could take pleasure in those melancholy extravagances; and the marriage of Sin and Death, and the snakes brought ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... to 12 inches wide, 50 feet long, and run at the rate of 10,000 feet a minute. They are even made with the cutting teeth on both edges, so that the log can be sawed both going and coming. This idea was unsuccessful until the invention of the telescopic band-mill, Fig. 35. In this the entire mechanism carrying the wheels on which the band-saw revolves can be moved up and down, so as to bring the point where the saw leaves the upper ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... that nothing is more beautifying than powder. See how exquisitely it lies on the front ringlets, and how airily it is distributed over the entire peruke. Vraiment, I am proud of my invention." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "Let anyone," says Dinsmore, "scrutinize the list of names of distinguished men in our annals; names of men eminent in public life from President down; men distinguished in the Church, in the Army, in the Navy, at the Bar, on the Bench, in Medicine and Surgery, in Education, trade, commerce, invention, discovery—in any and all of the arts which add to the freedom, enlightenment, and wealth of the world, and the convenience and comfort of mankind; names which have won luster in every honorable calling—let him scrutinize the list" and he will be astonished to find how large a proportion ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... only by patience and care, At last, that he brought his invention to bear. In youth 'twas projected, but years stole away, And ere 'twas complete he was wrinkled and gray; But success is secure, unless energy fails; And at length he produced the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... pressures of the hand, as well as countless nothings, were expected and enacted, in the bi-weekly reports you rendered to those of your friends who followed the case. Whereas for the curate it was possible to simulate immense ardour, without needing either to humble your pride or call invention to your aid: the worship took place from afar. The curate was, moreover, no unworthy object; indeed he was quite attractive, in a lean, ascetic fashion, with his spiritual blue eyes, and the plain gold cross that dangled from his black watch-ribbon—though, it must ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... unrelished fear and excitement that he always caused her, she returned to her seat under the tree, and began to wonder what Festus Derriman's story meant, which, from the earnestness of his tone, did not seem like a pure invention. It suddenly flashed upon her mind that she herself had heard voices in the garden, and that the persons seen by Farmer Derriman, of whose visit and reclamation of his box the miller had told her, might have been Matilda and John Loveday. She further recalled the strange agitation ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... passages, stairways, and galleries (both of pictures and of curios) that were thus enriched, but the boudoirs, retiring-rooms, and more private apartments as well. It was not simply a house of luxury, but of all the comfort that modern invention can furnish. It was said that the money lavished upon one or two of the noble apartments would have built a State-house (though not at Albany), and that the fireplace in the great hall cost as much as an imitation mediaeval church. These ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Iglesias answered; "and, since their invention, my bank holidays. Latterly I got three weeks' holiday in the summer, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and the natural one. For we are acquainted with the natural one—the one which we should have chosen instinctively. So it will be enough if the effort of comic invention bears on the other, and on the other alone. No sooner is the second set before us than we spontaneously supply the first. Hence the following general rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE NATURE EXPRESSION OF AN ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... a frame-up!" he exclaimed, pulling a little cylinder off the instrument into which he had inserted the telephone receiver. "I thought it might be and I have preserved the voice. This is what is known as the telescribe—a recent invention of Edison which records on a specially prepared phonograph cylinder all that is said—both ways—over ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... hopes you could give me a little time to help me on my gyroscope invention," went on the aged man. "But I suppose it will keep until you come back. It ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... invention did not stop there. One morning the earliest excursionists saw a sort of Robinson Crusoe marooned on the strip of beach near the wreck. All that heartless fate had left him appeared to be a machine on a tripod and a few black bags. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... no prank too grimly grotesque for Nature to play in this solitude. O'Neil felt that his own ingenuity was quite unequal to the task of combating this peril. Set against forces so tremendous and arbitrary human invention seemed ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... I have now said, and farther to show the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage which will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his majesty's favor, I told him of an invention discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder into a heap, on which the smallest spark of fire falling would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together with a noise and agitation greater ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... the bright notion was conceived, and made public, that the poison used was a "white powder" of unknown components, which did its work slowly, and killed the victim some time after it had been administered. Thus, by a bold and brazen invention, an impossible falsehood was made ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... himself flat upon the floor, face downward, this time as a necessary preliminary to rising after a manner of his own invention. Mysteriously he became higher in the middle, his body slowly forming first a round and then a pointed arch, with forehead, knees, and elbows touching the floor. A brilliantly executed manoeuvre closed his Gothic period, set ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... of the moon is not a mere poetic invention or a lover's fancy. Mr. Moncure Conway reminds us that glam, in its nominative form glamir, is a poetical name for the moon, to be found in the Prose Edda. It is given in the Glossary as one of the old names for the moon. ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... new and damnable custom. The literal meaning of bidah is "an innovation or invention, anything new;" but the word is commonly used in the sense of "heresy" or "heterodox innovation," anything new being naturally heretical in the eyes ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... good-will; "for I should not like to think, Father Michael, that, when we set out on the last long journey, we are to travel for ever in different ways. Thou may'st tarry awhile, if thou seest fit, in thy purgatory, which is a lodging of thine own invention, and should therefore suit thee, but I trust to continue on, until fairly housed in heaven, miserable and unhappy sinner, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... "Idle tales, the invention of overheated brains," rejoined Richard. "Trust me, the abbot's rest will not be broken till the day when all shall rise from their tombs; though if ever the dead (supposing such a thing possible) could ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth |
