"Inventive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Cleanthes taught us that our desires were to be subdued by philosophy alone. In this city, their acute and inventive scholars take us aside, and show us that there is not only ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of the strange anomalies which so often surprise and perplex the student of human character. As a misdirected toe-nail, injured by pressure, sometimes turns round, and, re-entering the flesh, vexes it into a sore, it would seem as if that noble inventive faculty to which we owe the parable and the epic poem, were liable, when constrained by self-love, to similar misdirections; and certainly, when turned inwards upon its possessor, the moral character festers or grows ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... archery, or that it did not happen to any particular person of whom it is told, is stark impudence. The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that might easily occur to any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic caprices of some story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices of some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Robbins Building, an imposing pile of vita-crystal. It rose high into the air, overtopping even the great Memorial Tower. Martin Robbins had been wealthy, very much so. He had been a physicist of world repute, and this building was a monument to his inventive genius. The top floors were devoted to marvelously equipped laboratories. On the roof were the living quarters—dwelling of many rooms surrounded by an alpine garden. All Great New York stretched beneath. In the distance the green waters ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... the number of States in this Union has nearly doubled, the population has almost quadrupled, and our boundaries have been extended from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Our territory is checkered over with railroads and furrowed with canals. The inventive talent of our country is excited to the highest pitch, and the numerous applications for patents for valuable improvements distinguish this age and this people from all others. The genius of one American has enabled our commerce to move against ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... the first literature in the world, and the first place among the nations in the race of life. The Gael and Cymry, who represented among us that Celtic element, differed in characteristics, but they had in common an artistic feeling, a happy audacity, inventive power that made them, as it were, the oxygen of any combination of race into which they entered. He had often quoted the statement made by Mr Fergusson in his "History of Architecture," that, but for the Celts, there would hardly have ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... that it has required an illimitable series of ages to evolve even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now—clever and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies, and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and include all that it contains—in a word, all things in any way related to it. Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... an hour the children proceeded on their journey. Jenny soon felt thirsty. Orso, in whom had awakened his Indian inventive faculties, began to pluck cactus fruits. They were in abundance, and grew together with the flowers on the same leaves. In plucking them they pricked their fingers with the sharp points, but the fruit was luscious. Their sweet and acid flavor quenched at once their ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... wiped a sympathetic eye. "Oh, Daff, I'm so sorry for you; just at the time, too, when——" He dared not proceed, awed by Dill's protesting pathos. "Come, now," he ventured presently, "why shouldn't we let Ignace in on this? He's so inventive; he's ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... some form of inventive genius. Tom Swift is a bright, ingenious boy and his inventions and adventures make the ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... debt to memory by observing that he could recall every tree he had passed, and draw each shrub from memory. We are indebted to the mechanical genius of Watt for the steam engine; but, before beginning his work, the inventive faculty asked memory to bring forward all objects, forces and facts suggested by and relating to that steaming tea kettle. Genius cannot create without material upon which to work. It is given to the eye ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... give her the best cabin," etc. etc. The Duke wisely abstained from pressing his cause, or asking why she qualified her plans. At last he got away, after promising to do every conceivable and inconceivable thing which she should now or at any future time evolve from the depths of her inventive feminine consciousness. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with your mother to-morrow morning and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... "Frou-Frou," written in collaboration with Meilhac, being one of the greatest theatrical successes of his century. He soon, however, forsook the drama for fiction. His first novel, "Monsieur and Madame Cardinal," published in 1873, gave ample promise of the inventive genius and gift of characterisation that were fully realised nine years later in "L'Abbe Constantin." The tale, an exquisite study of French provincial life, came as a distinct revelation of French life and character ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Negro's mind followed slavishly in the beaten path of imitation. He has demonstrated that he possesses also a high order of intellect by his inventive genius. The "lubricator" now being used on nearly all the railroad engines in the United States was invented by a colored man, Mr. E. McCoy, of Detroit, Michigan. Eugene Burkins, a Negro, was inventor of the Burkins' Automatic Machine Gun, concerning which Admiral Dewey said it was "by far the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... went away to seek his fortune in Louisiana: the son never heard of him more. The lady-president of a charitable society, Mademoiselle Marx, took pity on the abandoned child: she fed him on bones and occasionally beat him. She was an ingenious and inventive creature, and made her own cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is for ever demonstrating the merits of his implement. Soon, discovering that he was thankless and unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called "The ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... of the war pas . . . exhibits the inventive faculty of the New Zealanders better than any other of their works. . . . Their shape and size depended much on the nature of the ground and the strength of the tribe. They had double rows of fences on all unprotected sides; the inner fence, twenty to thirty feet high, was formed of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... not alike inventive in the spirit world. The inventor, by his fertile brain, constructs an article which the majority desire to possess, and for that article they give him an equivalent. It may be a picture or it may ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... Charles Goodyear, a Connecticut hardware merchant of an inventive turn of mind, went to a store to buy a life preserver. He could find only imperfect ones, but they drew his attention to the study of rubber, and presently he was thinking of it by day and dreaming of it by night. Rubber became a passion with him. He felt sure some way could ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... do?" demanded Mrs. Gilson; while Mr. Gilson, being of a ready and inventive mind, exclaimed, "By Jove, you ought to kidnap her and ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... may long for leisure for purposes of study or meditation," I remarked, "he cannot get out of the harness, if I understand you rightly, except in these two ways you have mentioned. He must either by literary, artistic, or inventive productiveness indemnify the nation for the loss of his services, or must get a sufficient number of other people to ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... There was in Antwerp an Italian named Gianobelli, a man of great science and inventive power. He had first gone to Spain to offer his inventions to Philip, but had met with such insolent neglect there that he had betaken himself in a rage to Flanders, swearing that the Spaniards should repent their treatment of him. He ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... into a language, then read and understood from one end of Europe to the other, fictions which, but for them, would have doubtless remained for ever unknown. It is however difficult to attribute to them an inventive faculty, such as would permit them to merit the title of creators. The numerous passages in which one feels that they do not fully understand the original which they imitate, and in which they attempt to give a natural significance to circumstances ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... instructed to go and find Erik. He brought him to Persia, where for some months Erik's will was law. He was guilty of not a few horrors, for he seemed not to know the difference between good and evil. He took part calmly in a number of political assassinations; and he turned his diabolical inventive powers against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian empire. The Shah took a liking ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... expressions are always hyperbolical; there has been no prince of painters; I mean that Gaudenzio Ferrari's feeling was profound, whereas Raphael's was at best only skin deep. Nevertheless Signor Morelli is impressed with Ferrari's greatness, and places him, "for all in all, as regards inventive genius, dramatic life, and picturesqueness * * far above Luini." Bernardino Luini must stand so very high that no one can be placed far above him; nevertheless, it is hard not to think that Gaudenzio Ferrari was upon the ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... when he was preparing for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had written—or largely helped to write—General Forrest's autobiography. He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a Methodist. The members of the ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... is the art of putting into words what you think or feel, in such a way as to make the best of it—presupposed, that what you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in most cases of audacity, and who by discipline ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... architect, his canvas may glow with the marvellous coloring of Titian or repeat the rare and delicate grace of Correggio, the triumphs of his chisel may reflect honor upon England and his age; the inventive genius of Jones, painfully elaborating, through long and suffering years of obscure poverty, the crude conceptions of his boyhood, may confer inestimable benefits upon his race; the scientific discoveries of Robinson may add incalculable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... certain evidence of the existence of mind? Is light a certain evidence that there is light, or a source of light? Is not reasoning a proof that there is something which reasons? Can there be light without a cause? Can there be invention without an inventive being? The mind is like a telescope in this respect, that it shows itself in showing that about which it is occupied. The man who is content to believe what he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels, is only a sensuous believer—an animal, and not a man. Reason's ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... persons possessed of moderate capital, who do not themselves enjoy the power of invention in the mechanical and chemical arts, but who are tolerable judges of such inventions, and excellent judges of human character. Such persons might, with great success, employ themselves in finding out inventive workmen, whose want of capital prevents them from realizing their projects. If they could enter into a limited partnership with persons so circumstanced, they might restrain within proper bounds the imagination of the inventor, and by supplying capital to judicious schemes, render a service ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... meeting every week, composed of members of high-school age, and studying Shakespeare particularly; there is a dressmaking and aid society meeting two evenings a week, to study the cutting of patterns, garment-making, etc.; a food-study and cooking club, also meeting two evenings a week; an inventive and mechanical club, meeting two evenings a week, and tending to develop the inventive and mechanical genius of a group of young men; an art club; and a boy's club, with music, games, reading-lessons, reading ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... Lost dogs, it may be remembered, had a habit of following Shovel's father, and he not only took the wanderers in, but taught them how to beg and shake hands and walk on two legs. Tommy had sometimes been present at these agreeable exercises, and being an inventive boy he—But as Elspeth was a nice girl, let it suffice to pause here and add shyly, that in time ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Cedric then hastened in quest of his friend Athelstane, determined at every risk to himself to save the prince. But ere Cedric penetrated as far as the old hall in which he himself had been a prisoner, the inventive genius of Wamba had procured liberation ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... can I account for the whimsical subintelligiturs of our numerous harmonists—for the curiously inferred facts, the inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental and supplemental history which, in the utter silence of all historians and absence of all historical documents, they bring to light by mere force of logic? And all ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind, and wanted me to share his boyish sports. But I did not like to ride in a wheelbarrow, nor to walk on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on his sled and I always got a tumble, if I tried, for I was rather a clumsy child; besides, I ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... from the ever-inventive West, and consists of a penholder formed of tightly rolled paper which in some ingenious manner holds the pen permanently ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 29, May 27, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... have seemed that he had not so known. The first of these was when he had abandoned an improving practice in Dublin to work as his father's partner in his native Cluhir, the second, when, preliminary to that return, he had married a lady, alleged, by inventive and disagreeable people, to have been his cook. The disagreeable people had also said disagreeable things as to the nature of the stress that had prompted the marriage. But it was now twenty years since the Mangans had been ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... subdivisions of time which we now enjoy. Unrest, progress, discontent with things that be, we must acknowledge, have, from the appearance of the first clock to the present hour, been the powers which have driven on the inventive genius of watch and clockmakers to designate some new and more acceptable system for regulating the course of the movement. In consequence of this restless search after the best, a very considerable number of ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... however, made inventive by necessity, Gamelin had conceived a new and happy thought, as he at any rate believed,—an idea that was to make the print-seller's fortune, and the engraver's and his own to boot. This was a "patriotic" pack ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... this was only "provisional." His scientific gifts, his inventive genius, with so many pounds on his back, did not rise high, but they should yet! He had youth's lavish estimate of time and strength, and therefore did not see, for a long time, that the large family, the large house were weighing him farther and farther down. If only he could ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... one of its inmates says, the "privilege" of receiving the souls of sinners while their bodies are yet alive on earth, animated by demons. With this horrible conception we seem to have reached the highest mark of Dante's inventive power. Only two names are mentioned, but one feels that if the owners of them ever came across the poem in which they had earned so sinister a commemoration, their sentiment towards the poet would hardly be one of gratitude.[33] These are the last of his contemporaries ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... sent a fervent prayer that this mechanical thing—the product of man's inventive genius through a thousand years—would have a last grasp of energy ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... a divine assurance ought to make me bold in will and majestic in labour. I ought to be inventive in chivalrous enterprise, and I ought to covet the hardest parts of the field. If the mighty Ally will never fail, I should never be afraid of the marshalled hosts of wickedness. "One with God is in a majority." "He always wins who sides with ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... ugliness was apparent. He measured over six feet and was loose-jointed and ungainly; he had big flat feet, and big bony, capable hands; and his features, which were big and bony too, seemed in proportion to nothing but his general ungainliness. Swan was an inventive Yankee with no background and no tradition. He could not even claim the proverbial Connecticut farm. His people had been dreary commercials in a middle-sized New Hampshire town, and he had worked his way through college to fit himself for a scientific career. His memory ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... willing to stigmatize as trash, not worth the room to store or the money to bind, are the very materials which the man of the future will search for with eagerness, and for some of which he will be ready to pay their weight in gold. These representatives of the commercial, industrial, inventive, social, literary, political, moral and religious life of the times, should be preserved and handed down to posterity with sedulous care. No historian or other writer on any subject who would write conscientiously ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... is anything which introduces a characteristic element into the creation of the photoplay as against all other arts, it may be found in the undeniable fact that the photoplay always demands the cooeperation of two inventive personalities, the scenario writer and the producer. Some collaboration exists in other arts too. The opera demands the poet and the composer; and yet the text of the opera is a work of literature independent and complete in itself, ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... natural habit that neither distance nor time can change) I thought of my native country and of the complicated organization of its many bureaucratic departments that only too often clogs the boldest Italian enterprise and raises an insurmountable barrier before creative and inventive genius compelling it to seek elsewhere ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... got wonderful results from their pate tendre, and became wildly enthusiastic over the pieces the china-designers turned out. And well they might for the French were an inventive, art-loving people who certainly got fine results from their early china-making. To understand the place art occupied at that time you must remember that the Court was a centre for all those who were interested in beautiful things. The King was ever on the lookout for what was ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... the incident is sufficient to prevent its having occurred in reality or to more than one inventive imagination. It must therefore have been brought to Europe from the East and adapted to local conditions at Dort and Swaffham. Prof. Cowell suggests that it was possibly adapted at the latter place to account for the effigy of the pedlar and ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... of Ireland, being out a-hunting, had, in the act of leaping a fence, the misfortune to have one of the skirts of his coat torn off; upon which his lordship tore off the other, observing, that to have but one left was like a pig with one ear! Some inventive genius took the hint, and having made some of these half-coats, out of compliment to his lordship, gave them the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... silver has not been due to any legislation in America or Europe, nor to any decrees or despotic policy in Asia, but to the inventive faculties of one Charles Burleigh, of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the inventor ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency which is, I think, discernible, though in a less ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... to go from the Belvedere to the Palace under loggie, and also to go from the Palace to the Belvedere in the same way, and likewise, by means of various flights of steps, to ascend to the level of the Belvedere. Whereupon Bramante, who had very good judgment and an inventive genius in such matters, distributed two ranges of columns along the lowest part; first, a very beautiful Doric loggia, similar to the Colosseum of the Savelli (although, in place of half-columns, he used pilasters), and all ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all America of that day thought a genius ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... have seen that there was a fortifying thought within her. Just as when inventive power is working with glad ease some small claim on the attention is fully met as if it were only a cranny opened to the sunlight, it was easy now for Dorothea to write her memoranda. She spoke her last words to the housekeeper in cheerful tones, and when she seated herself in the carriage ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... which had occurred, and the plan which had been meditated, Fanny entered gaily into the scheme. Mrs Forster had long been her abhorrence; and an insult to Mr Ramsden, who had latterly been designated by Mrs Forster as a "Pill-gilding Puppy," was not to be forgotten. Her active and inventive mind immediately conceived a plan which would enable her to carry the joke much further than the original projectors had intended. Ramsden, who had been summoned to attend poor Mr Spinney, was her sole confidant, and readily entered into a scheme ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... activity, and in this he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of young men of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... dance, and I am no exception. I am not up to waltzing or any of the newfangled round dances, but give me a Highland schottische, or a square dance, when there is an inventive genius to call off the figures and prescribe plenty of variety. There was no professional caller-off at Interlaken, but Lincoln Todd did duty for one as he danced. When he tired of it, and led off into a round of waltzes, ripples, jerseys, bon tons, rush ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... he thought that his youth was going and soon he would have lost it and nothing would have been accomplished. His work seemed more aimless now that there was the certainty of his leaving it. He became skilful in the designing of costumes, and though he had no inventive faculty acquired quickness in the adaptation of French fashions to the English market. Sometimes he was not displeased with his drawings, but they always bungled them in the execution. He was amused to notice that he suffered from a lively irritation when his ideas ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... "has lagged behind Europe, and must be driven up alongside of it. We are told that ours is a young country. That is all nonsense. Besides, we have no inventive power. Khomakof[A] himself admits that we have never invented so much as a mousetrap. Consequently we are obliged to imitate others, whether we like ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... happened that?" said Hetty, hurrying on so swiftly towards the Square that even Pierre's brisk little legs could hardly keep up with her. Pierre's inventive faculty came ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... in the mean time, satieted with Melanthe, and as much in love with Louisa as a man of his temper could be, was contriving all the ways his inventive wit could furnish him with to get handsomely rid of the one, and attain the enjoyment of the other. As he had spent many years in a continual course of gallantry, and had made and broke a thousand engagements, he easily found expedients for ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... servants' use in carving) were fond of such preparations as could be partaken of without table ware. The reclining position at table made it almost necessary for them to eat H.; such dishes gave the cooks an opportunity for the display of their skill, inventive ability, their decorative and artistic sense. As "predigested" food, such dishes are decided preferable to the "grosses-pieces," which besides energetic mastication require skillful manipulation of fork and knife; such exercise was unwelcome on the Roman couches. Modern nations, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... endures. Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the foundation of America's great shoe industry. Machinery had already been applied to shoe manufacture, but only to a limited extent; under the pressure of war conditions, however, American inventive skill found ways of performing mechanically almost all the operations that had formerly been done by hand. The McKay sewing machine, one of the greatest of our inventions, which was perfected in the second year of the war, did as much perhaps as any single device ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... prince replies, "No more my sire will glad these longing eyes; The queen's fond hope inventive rumour cheers, Or vain diviners' dreams divert her fears. That stranger-guest the Taphian realm obeys, A realm defended with encircling seas. Mentes, an ever-honour'd name, of old High ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... comparison in an extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... philosophers; I am only surprised at his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... strongly of art and design; that this perfection of consistency was not the characteristic of any history ever written by an honest man, and that no doubt it had been elaborately contrived by a single highly inventive mind." ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocracies—it may be, worshipped after their death ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... had discovered nothing—he, ordinarily the most inventive of the four; but it must be also said that the very name of ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... although he is described as "lover, idealist and sometime fugitive from justice," comes at last to strange and beautiful happiness, it is difficult to believe that an author could have evolved such a book out of his own inventive faculties. One feels rather that Mr. Edwards has dared to reveal the emotions of creatures who are actual flesh and blood; emotions at times strange and terrible, frail and beautiful at others, yet ever tinged with human appeal. Mr. Edwards has never written anything like HIGH STREET before. Readers ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... never known the restraint of civilized society. A party of them lay in wait for the unfortunate Warden of the Forest, surprised him while hunting alone and unattended, and slew him with every circumstance of inventive cruelty. They cut off his head, and resolved, in a bravado, to exhibit it at the castle of his brother-in-law. The laird was absent, and the lady reluctantly received as guests, men against whom, perhaps, she was afraid to shut her ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself. The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an 'advisory ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... examinations, says: "First, we must observe that all examinations imply the existence of examiners, and examiners, like other mortal beings, lie open to the frauds of designing men, through the uniformity and sameness of their proceedings. This uniformity inventive men have analyzed and reduced to a system, founding thereon a certain science, and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... large instruments are used for delicate and exact observations of Right Ascensions and Declinations of stars of different magnitudes. Meridian, and altitude and azimuth circles, are important astronomical appliances, which owe their existence to the inventive skill of this ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... them up a bit, and as he never went about without a small Testament in his pocket, he was able to lighten the time by reading portions of it aloud. After that they took to relating their "lives and adventures" to each other, and then the inventive spirits among them took to "spinning long-winded yarns." Thus a couple of weeks passed away, during which these unfortunate prisoners of war went through every stage of feeling between hope and despair ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... away, this particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere; he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... wounded on the battle-field. Make me the model of an ambulance into which the disabled can be placed safely and comfortably, and which is arranged in such a manner that it may be taken asunder and transported on horseback with the train of the army. You are an inventive genius, and I shall expect you with your model in the course of a week. Now let your postilion blow again. Good-by!" He waved his hand kindly to the mechanician, and then hastened back into his cabinet. The Duke de Cadore was there ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... perseverence in developing a still more marvellous one. He lacked constantly the something necessary and local which gives to certain very inferior painters the inexpressible superiority of a savor of soil. It could not be said that he was not inventive and new, yet one experienced on seeing no matter which one of his paintings that he was a creature of culture and of acquisition. The scattered studies in the atelier first of all displayed the influence of his first master, of solid and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... person of a verb, singular and plural, join a noun, according to your taste or comic talent. Should you be deficient in the inventive faculty, apply for assistance to one of the senior boys, which, in consideration of your fagging for him, he will readily give you. If yourself a senior boy, apply to ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... of salads there may be great display of taste and individuality. By a judicious selection from materials that may be kept constantly in store, and with one or two window boxes, in which herbs are growing, any one, with a modicum of inventive skill, can so change and modify the appearance and flavor of her salads that she may seem always ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame is inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask—there is so much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... so constantly in images that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly approaching ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... awaiting expression, in a multitude of minds. This most eloquent thing it was which, from Massillon's lips that day, moved his susceptible audience to rise, like one man, and bow in mute act of submission to the truth of his words. The inventive and curious reader may exercise his ingenuity at leisure. He will strive in vain to conceive any other exordium than Massillon's that would have ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... and social arrangements get leave to flourish. If we were to limit our view to humbly endowed nations, or the common class of minds in those called civilized, we should see absolutely no conceivable power for the origination of new ideas and devices. But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... had a most inventive mind; for, as soon as they reached their own little bay, he once more astonished Fritz—who was glad enough to get so far, but puzzled as to how he would ever arrive at the hut, knowing that the lad would never be ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... at college age: Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Nicholai Tesla, James Watt, Heinrich Hertz, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Henry Ford. The admissibility of this group of the world's scientific and the inventive leaders is shown here." Baker pointed to a minute dab of red on ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... the Gaddi Palace, which is truly a cause of marvel and amazement, when one observes the lovely vestments in it, so many and so various, and the vast number of ancient helmets, girdles, buskins, and barques, adorned with all the delicacy and abundance of detail that an inventive imagination could conceive. There, with a multitude of beautiful things which overload the memory, are represented all the ways of the ancients, the statues of sages, and most lovely women: and there are all the sorts of ancient sacrifices ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... long, careful, technical. Bonbright set his mind to the task and listened well. He was even interested, for there were interesting things to see, processes requiring skilled men, machines that had required inventive genius to devise. He began to be oppressed by the bigness of it. The plant was huge; it was enormously busy. The whole world seemed to need axles, preferably Foote axles, and to ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... compass; he made of it a handsome band. To what purpose would he proceed to apply the ligature? Would he wrap it about his throat—his head? Should it be a comforter or a turban? Neither. Peter Augustus had an inventive, an original genius. He was about to show the ladies graces of action possessing at least the charm of novelty. He sat on the chair with his athletic Irish legs crossed, and these legs, in that attitude, he circled with ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Nature will be sure to whisk the hair away from your ears where you want it, and into your eyes where you don't want it, besides crowning you with magnificent disorder in the morning. But as I have always believed that no evil exists without its remedy, I had long been exercising my inventive genius in attempts to produce a head-gear which should at once protect the ears, confine the hair, and let the skull alone. I regret to say that my experiments were an utter failure, notwithstanding the amount of science and skill brought to bear upon them. One idea lay at the basis of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... not a bit spoiled by all this flattery and homage. He worked all the harder; resolved to achieve yet greater triumphs in science than he had yet done. An opportunity soon arose to turn his knowledge and inventive powers to account in a very important way. For a long time the English public had every now and then been horrified by the terrible explosions which took place in the coal mines. These explosions resulted often in an appalling ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... combine with this insight—this extraordinary sanity of social judgment—the power of great inventive and constructive thought, and then, at last, we have our genius, our hero, and one that we well may worship! To great thought he adds balance; to originality, judgment. This is the man to start the world movements if we want a single man to start them. For as he thinks ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... his inventive powers. He made a locomotive and then a steamboat, perfect in every part, even to the minutest, using nothing but his knife, hammer, and a small chisel. He constructed a clock with his jack-knife, ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... at once satisfied men of science and amused people of fashion. His energy was unbounded; there was a fascination in his personal character and manner. He was a genial and delightful lecturer, and his inventive genius was continually finding something new. A first suggestion of the process of photography was dropped incidentally among the records of researches that attracted more attention. Davy had been little more than a year at the Royal Institution when he was made its ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... trying to crochet but had dropped her needle. It lay in the grass at her feet. She could see it but she could not pick it up. She had not as yet acquired the skill and the inventive faculty of an invalid. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... boy he had been the pride of his family, as a youth, its hope of fame and fortune; he was clever, handsome, inventive, original, everything that society and his kind admired, but he criminally fooled them and their expectation, and they ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... in the bush I have understood, as never before, the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have. There is that second edition of Far From the Madding Crowd now, with its delicious woodcuts by ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a story ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... schoolmaster. Ye'll be an inventor yet, lad, a benefactor to your kind, and an honor to your country. I'm not raising false hopes in ye, without observing your qualities. You've the quick eye, the slow patience, and the inventive spark. You can find your own tools and all, and don't stop where other folk leaves off: witness yon bluebells ye took to make skies with! But, bless the lad, he's not heeding me! Is it the bit of garden you're looking at? Come out then." And, putting the biography back ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... contrivances. In the last two years and a half they have secured from the government exclusive rights in five hundred machines and other devices. In the line of machinery, pure and simple, the patent-office reports show they have exhibited great inventive capacity. Among remarkable patents of theirs, are patents for electrical lighting, noiseless elevated roads, apparatus for raising sunken vessels, sewing-machine motors, screw propellers, agricultural tools, spinning-machines, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... one sense benefactors: although they do not generally originate improved modes of thought and action, they at least prevent the adoption of crude theories and ill-digested measures. To meet the criticism of these opponents, inventive genius must more carefully bring its ideas and plans to the test of practical experiment and thorough investigation; and as truth must ultimately prevail, it cannot be considered unjust or injurious to insist upon its presenting its credentials. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... much changed from the man with whom I canoed and camped. He was too much a part of nature—too natural—to be separated from his mountains, trees and glaciers. Somewhere, I am sure, he is making other explorations, solving other natural problems, using that brilliant, inventive genius to good effect; and some time again I shall hear him unfold anew, with still clearer insight and more eloquent words, fresh secrets ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... assume that, by the adoption of more efficient machinery than was at present in general use, at least one-half of the coal consumed could be saved. There was, therefore, in the mines of Great Britain alone a wide and lucrative field for the inventive ingenuity of mechanical engineers in economizing fuel, and especially in the successful application of new methods for dealing with underground haulage, in the inner workings of our collieries, more especially in South Wales, where the number ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... nowadays have any chance of being sustained, it is indispensable that the reader find himself under the guidance of some nearly extinct species of legendary, who, in addition to an impulse towards antiquarian research and an unweakened faith in the mediaeval halo, shall possess an inventive faculty in which delicacy of sentiment is far overtopped by a power of welding to stirring incident a spirited variety of the elementary human passions." Well, that long-winded effusion doesn't refer to you at ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy |
