"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a painting-jacket and slippers, he still preserved his sense of differences, and his appreciation of graces he had no time to cultivate. During the preparations for the Brys' TABLEAUX he had been immensely struck by Lily's plastic possibilities—"not the face: too self-controlled for expression; but the rest of her—gad, what a model she'd make!"—and though his abhorrence of the world in which he had seen her was too great for him to think of seeking her there, he was fully alive ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... as the big tractor lumbered up another rise, and the huge plastic bubble of Sun Lake City came into view far down ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his temper, but ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... expansion.... Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were drown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less animated clay ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... only preserved to us such masterpieces as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should realise something of the exquisite skill in plastic art which had been attained in antiquity and has never been attained since. But we might perhaps imagine that these were altogether exceptional pieces and the choicest gems possessed by the world of the time. Yet the preservation of these is but an accident, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those natures—sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge life—which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat. Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work. Crepitude, K.C., Oxford's counsel, was in less joyous mood. Priam was Crepitude's own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously declined to open his ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are important solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman's hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... in as your simple opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... hadn't told—him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic. ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... exquisite scenery around him, although he was not able at the moment to assign the precise source of his blissful tranquillity. Like a true musician, he was satisfied to seize the sentiment of the scenes he visited, while he seemed to give but little attention to the plastic material, the picturesque frame, which did not assimilate with the form of his art, nor belong to his more spiritualized sphere. However, (a fact that has been often remarked in organizations such as his,) as he was removed in time and distance from the scenes in which emotion ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... over the stupendous solitudes of the northern Rockies, the soul of man, with all its complex impulses, is but so much plastic material which it shapes to its own inscrutable ends. For the man whose lot is cast in the heart of these wilds, the drama of life usually moves with a tremendous simplicity toward the sudden and sombre tragedy ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... are the cowed,—we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is for a parent or teacher to ruin a child's constructive ability, to change a naturally, positive creative mind to a negative, non-producing one, by chilling the child's enthusiasm, by projecting into his plastic mind the idea that he is stupid, dull, lazy, a "blockhead" and good-for-nothing; that he will never amount to anything; that it is foolish for him to try to be much, because he has not the ability or physical stamina to enable him to accomplish what many others ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... in the matter which it draws round it. Only thought-forms of this third class can usefully be illustrated, for to represent those of the first or second class would be merely to draw portraits or landscapes. In those types we have the plastic mental or astral matter moulded in imitation of forms belonging to the physical plane; in this third group we have a glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes. Yet this very fact, which makes them so interesting, places an insuperable barrier in ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Holy One, Thy care Wrought us from the plastic clay, Made us Thine own image bear, And for our perfection fair Did ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... nature's plastic pains Would seem to've fashioned for those Eastern reigns When eunuchs flourisht, and such nerveless things As men rejected were the chosen of kings;—[12] Even he, forsooth, (oh fraud, of all the worst!) Dared to assume the patriot's name at first— Thus Pitt began, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating of manners ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... is, as in Asia, a principle, but it is morality impressed on individuality, and consequently denoting the free volition of individuals. Here, then, is the union of the moral with the subjective will, or the kingdom of beautiful freedom, for the idea is united with a plastic form. It is not yet regarded abstractly, but intimately bound up with the real, as in a beautiful work of art; the sensible bears the stamp and expression of the spiritual. The kingdom is consequently true harmony; it is a world of the most charming but perishable, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... debates and lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got right in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline's adoration of Raymond Parsloe Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression upon her plastic emotions. When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking—which was seldom—she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race. She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved the ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Osmond's artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy's innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... necessity, some one person should have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... natural scenery of the present day that it is impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael. In what a very different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of this century! They ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... screamed to a stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger climbed out, ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her sympathies. Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play a part for others. Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to be so plastic off the stage. She was stringing her hand to strike a blow as men strike, and women when they do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence relatively normal ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... of the lunar craters there has been much discussion. Some have considered them to be evidence of violent volcanic action in the dim past; others, again, as the result of the impact of meteorites upon the lunar surface, when the moon was still in a plastic condition; while a third theory holds that they were formed by the bursting of huge bubbles during the escape into space of gases from the interior. The question is, indeed, a very difficult one. Though ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... refined manners have been in large proportion among the banished Poles, and the exiles of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished than that ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and sense of his own prophetic mission to the exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which exercised so marked an influence on his New England ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... artistic sensibility pervading every form of life like the nervous structure of the huge frame—a sensibility so delicate, alert and universal that it seemed to leave no room for obtuseness or error. In such a medium the faculty of plastic expression must develop as unconsciously as any organ in its normal surroundings; to be "artistic" must cease to be an attitude and become a natural function. To Claudia the significance of the whole vast revelation was centred in the light it shed on one tiny spot of consciousness—the ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... unfreezable oil, less sensitive to percussion, friction, and increase of temperature, and to possess a greater solvent power for collodion-cotton than ordinary nitro-glycerine. It can thus be used for the preparation of explosives of high stability, which will maintain their plastic nature even in winter. The di-nitro-glycerine is a solvent for tri-nitro-glycerine, it can therefore be mixed with this substance, in the various gelatine explosives in order to lower the ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... landfills. These days householders may be offered incentives (or threatened with penalties) by their municipalities to separate organic, compostable garbage from paper, from glass, from metal or from plastic. Individuals who pay for trash pickup by volume are finding that they can save considerable amounts of money by recycling their own organic wastes at ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... unrestricted course, Though Fancy followed with immortal force? There's not a blossom fondled by the breeze, There's not a fruit that beautifies the trees, There's not a particle in sea or air, But nature owns thy plastic influence there! With fearful gaze, still be it mine to see How all is fill'd and vivified by Thee; Upon thy mirror, earth's majestic view, To paint Thy Presence, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... us from our shelter to "Lay the book down, dear, and come to tea." For, to speak in better words than my own, "It is the books we read before middle life that do most to mould our characters and influence our lives; and this not only because our natures are then plastic and our opinions flexible, but also because, to produce lasting impression, it is necessary to give a great author time and meditation. The books that are with us in the leisure of youth, that we love for a time not only with the enthusiasm, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People die as they ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Hale is much less academic than the other sculptures arranged in this gallery. Compared with the high standard of American small plastic art his works are somewhat dry, though always ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... history has its time, and the order of Jesuits can never rise to any great eminence in an age in which knowledge is so rapidly spreading. We think differently. A society so capable of adaptation to any circumstances, whether political, religious, or social, plastic in nature to meet every desired impression, talented, highly learned, wealthy, and among others, embracing in its order some men of such pure and admirable life as to be cited as examples of virtue and Christian character, with the protection the American flag throws around all under its folds, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... materials such as clays, peats, and other soft or plastic materials, it is idle to assume that these do not possess pressure-resisting and arching properties. For instance, a soft clay arch of larger dimensions, under the condition described early in this paper, would undoubtedly stand ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... many primitive people, and so consider themselves above all laws but their own. She was captured many years ago in an attempt to overthrow the rule of Wananda upon a small satellite planet. Wananda did not kill her, but placed her in suspended animation within the protective crystal plastic. Our queen intends to revive her and study her mind for her wisdom, but we have not had time because of the press of events. Soon, now, she will become a tool in our hands to build greater the ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... he, Cliffe, persuaded her—there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain—then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough? He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thinks of the tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... men," said the De Goncourts. A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man—stern, firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay. And with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter shook. When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately. The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light—it all depends ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... unquestionable. They, generally speaking, believed in the eternity of matter, and conceived some of its qualities to be so essentially necessary to its existence that no divine agency could alter them. They ascribed to the Deity a plastic power, a power not of creating or annihilating, but only of moulding, disposing and moving matter. So over mind they generally give him the like power, considering it as a kind of emanation from his own greater mind or essence, and destined to be ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... jolted under her weight, began skidding, then held firm to the two guy ropes remaining. A horde of gray creatures hurled themselves on those lines as a hatchway opened above and a ladder dropped down. The men scurried up the ropes just as the plastic dome of the Control Tower ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... no longer absolute. Sudden crises threaten the stability of nations and civilizations. Safety lies alone in the ability to go forward, to progress. Psychology teaches us that if authoritative opinions, convictions, or "complexes" are stamped upon the plastic brain of the youth they tend to harden, and he is apt to become a Democrat or Republican, an Episcopalian or a Baptist, a free trader or a tariff advocate or a Manchester economist without asking why. Such "complexes" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "We are appealed to, or at least 'the young and rising naturalists with plastic minds,* [On the Nature of the Limbs, page 482] are adjured." It will be seen that the inverted comma after "naturalists" is omitted; the asterisk referring, in a footnote (here placed in square brackets), to page 482 of the "Origin," seems to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... my thought, And swift along the past it strays, And much of strange event surveys, What history's faithful tongue has taught, Or fancy formed, whose plastic skill The page with fabled change can fill Of ill to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more plastic his nature, the more prosperous will ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and of the Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and plastic political development of the English race. Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... white clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our china manufactures ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... this—that she had been writing to an old friend, and her manner for the time, as well as her expression, was affected by her mental proximity to that friend;—so plastic—so fluent even—was her whole nature. Indeed Alec was not long in finding out that one of her witcheries was, that she was never the same. But on this the first occasion, the alteration ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge. That's my secret, signore! It's as light, you perceive, as cork, and yet as firm as alabaster! I frankly confess that I really pride myself as much on this little stroke of chemical ingenuity as upon the other element ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... domestication on the action of the reproductive system{195}. It would appear as if the reproductive powers failed in their ordinary function of producing new organic beings closely like their parents; and as if the entire organization of the embryo, under domestication, became in a slight degree plastic{196}. We shall hereafter have occasion to show, that in organic beings, a considerable change from the natural conditions of life, affects, independently of their general state of health, in another and remarkable manner ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... and pale; her bold features, almost emaciated, displayed the framework of departed beauty, and if her high white forehead and waxen face were free from lines and wrinkles, it must have been because time and grief could find no plastic material there in which to trace their story. She was a very tall woman, too, and carried her head erect and high, walking with a firmness and elasticity of step such as would not have been expected in one whose outward appearance conveyed so little impression of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... grow to the dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dreamily as in his fiery youth he had listened to the songs of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause, though unconsciously—defending the vocation of art as the embellisher of external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and material nature, which is finite; for ever seeking in the unseen and the spiritual the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from heav'n Yet threatens, when his mutt'ring thunder rolls. Of one already I descried the face, Shoulders, and breast, and of the belly huge Great part, and both arms down along his ribs. All-teeming nature, when her plastic hand Left framing of these monsters, did display Past doubt her wisdom, taking from mad War Such slaves to do his bidding; and if she Repent her not of th' elephant and whale, Who ponders well confesses her therein Wiser and more discreet; for when brute force And evil will are back'd with ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes redundant ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... dance; they do not merely shamble to and fro in a crowd, crumpling their clothes and ruffling their tempers, and call it a set of quadrilles. They have ample space for the sweeping movements and complicated figures of all the orthodox ball dances, and are generally gifted with sufficient plastic grace to carry them out in style. They carefully cultivate dances calling for a kind of grace which is almost beyond the reach of art. The mazurka is one of the finest of these, and it is quite a favorite at balls on the banks of the Neva. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... if our aims in Poetry be of a grand and elevated character, we must transport ourselves from the actual to a possible stage. It is the privilege of Art to furnish for itself whatever is requisite, and the accidental deficiency of auxiliaries ought not to confine the plastic imagination of the Poet. He aspires to whatever is most dignified, he labors to realize the ideal in his own mind-though in the execution of his purpose he must needs accommodate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He did not repel her. That first repulsion had been ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and various plastic cement materials are used for modeling mouths, of which papier mache is probably the best; plaster paris is often used in an emergency but is brittle and heavy. For modeling use finely ground paper pulp mixed with glue and plaster or whiting. Only practice ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... formations of millstone grit and limestone that rest upon the shale have generally avoided crumpling or distortion, and thus give the mountain views the appearance of having had all the upper surfaces rolled flat when they were in a plastic condition. Denudation and the action of ice in the glacial epochs have worn through the hard upper stratum, and formed the long and narrow dales; and in Littondale, Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and many other parts, one may ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... be invented before anybody can be bored with it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret Nature.' An internal necessity, yes—except in the case of the Bore Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's anything but secret sense of ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... jerkily, "had electronic base-measuring instruments. Some of their elements had to be buried in plastic because otherwise they ionized the air and leaked current like a short. If I had that instrument now—No. I'd have to take the plastic away and it couldn't be ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among the vaguer poets of Portugal ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Mathematics will soar into its highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy may be scaled by those whose aptitude for abstract thought has been awakened by elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial and plastic art, of architecture, and of music will offer a thorough discipline in the principles and practice of art to those in whom lies nascent the rare faculty of aesthetic representation, or the still rarer powers of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... colon when filling it up. It also helps to make sure that the stomach is empty of any fluid for one hour prior to the colonic. Resume drinking after the colonic sessions is completed. If you are one of these rare people who 'toss their bile', just keep a plastic bucket handy and some water to rinse out the mouth after, and carry ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... propagated by any method of either soil or air layering. The writer(14) while experimenting with aerial layering in 1945 found one instance of root production on a hickory where the branch was girdled at the base of the one-year wood. This method offers possibilities, especially now that polythene plastic is available for retaining moisture in the moss about the girdle or wound on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... peas, carrots, and fried potatoes—they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle of ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... his plastic nature caused him to imitate to a certain extent, and almost unconsciously, the manners and customs of those around him. He became stoical, he pretended to an indifference which often he did not feel, and he never spoke of the friends who had disappeared ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his fingers. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... scientist nodded. Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... half-sister, who was keeping house for the marquis, provided the introduction), and, calling each other "cousin" and "gossip," these two shared rooms together in perfect simplicity of soul and held several conversations which reflect, I suppose, Mr. BERNARD CAPES' views on the plastic arts and life in general. And why, in passing, he should continue to heap ridicule on staid Victorian respectability I cannot for the life of me imagine. The plucky and unorthodox thing nowadays surely is to make game ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aerial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... merges itself in another—a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... subject-matter and momentum to arts and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. Thus comprehension of the passion of love is necessary to the appreciation of numberless songs, plays, and novels, and not a few works of musical and plastic art. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... employer so much as that he has a restless temperament and craves change. His disposition is full of mirth and sunshine, and not a little of the fine flavor of Southern wit and humor is due to his influence. His nature is plastic, and while he is easily molded into a monster, he is also capable of a high degree of culture. Many Negroes are thoroughly honest, notwithstanding their bad environment and hereditary disposition to steal. Negro servants are trusted with the keys to households to an extent that, probably, is not ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... his hands, and his comrades, who had reasonably steady nerves, were almost appalled when he poised himself to throw it. There was only a thin strip of cotton fabric between the flying sparks and the plastic yellow rolls of powder. Still, the bag was thrown, and Saunders set off with it, while Weston stood gasping a moment ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light—it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... most useful instruction. The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination of the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of the plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In verse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine; in prose the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... expressions imposed upon the antique, artistic imaginings instead of historical reproductions. The so-called fascination of the past depends in part upon these expressions of ours, which we weave into historical expressions. Thus in hellenic plastic art has been discovered the calm and serene intuition of life of those peoples, who feel, nevertheless, so poignantly, the universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints "the terror of the millennium," ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... may interest the critic, but we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted by the little we know of art's beginnings. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... fry. One could "see life" there too, though, as usual, most of the artists were very respectable people. It was a respectable art then in vogue in England. Frith was the giant of the day, and from the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's to pictures such as the "Rake's Progress" the plastic arts had a moral tendency. Even the animals of Sir Edwin Landseer were the most decorous of all four-footed creatures; Killigrew blasphemed by calling the admired paintings still-life studies of animals. But then Killigrew was from Paris and chanted the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... strange pranks with snow; snow is the most plastic medium it has to mould into images and symbols of its moods. Here one of these promontories would slope down, and the very next one would slope upward as it advanced across the open space. In every case there had been two walls, as it were, of furious blow, ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities. In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production, always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of this period in the political field ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... up wholeheartedly to social chit-chat. Usually he liked his time to himself and resented the intrusion of the outer world, for he who had chosen jugglery for his walk in life must neglect no opportunity of practising: but so favourable was the impression which Sally had made on his plastic mind that he was delighted to converse with her as long as ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... confidently they might believe in the final success of their struggle, they could not fail to see the immense odds and fearful obstacles against which they would have to contend. The debauched masses who had been molded and kneaded by the plastic touch of slavery into such base uses, were the only possible material from which recruits could be drawn for a great party of the future, which should regenerate our politics and re-enthrone the love ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... probably the most painful experience in their lives. Barbara had come to it softened and ready to meet him half way. The right kind of humility in Monty would have found her plastic. But she had very definite and rigid ideas of his duty in the premises. And Monty was too simple minded to seem to suffer, and much too flippant to understand. It was plain to each that the other did not expect to talk, but they both realized that they owed ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted out of its rear, wobbling from side to side for ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the poem Philo we regard as ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the more did I perceive, while developing the scenes and music of Young Siegfried, that I had only increased the necessity for a clearer presentation of the whole story to the senses. I now see that, in order to become intelligible on the stage, I must work out the whole myth in plastic style. It was not this consideration alone which impelled me to my new plan, but especially the overpowering impressiveness of the subject-matter which I thus acquire for presentation, and which supplies ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... gives a fine proportion to the limbs; whilst the heavy and gross resist her by their weight. So women that take physic during their pregnancy, have slighter children indeed, but of a finer and more delicate turn, because the suppleness of the matter more readily obeys the plastic power. However, these are speculations which ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined as they are with a high degree of refinement and delicacy, his compositions owe much of their peculiar charm. The absence of scorn distinguishes the fourth "Scherzo," Op. 54, from the other three; but, like ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... a young person is plastic, easy to take impressions, strong to retain them. And the "old man" or the "governor," whether he is father, friend, or employer, or all three, has infinitely more influence than either he or the young man ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... strengthen his grasp of it and develop it to an indefinite and unforeseen degree. One actual method of the use of thought is to use it, creatively, for the immediate future. The time that is just before one is plastic to any impress. It has not yet taken form in events or circumstances, and it can, therefore, be controlled and determined. One may sit quietly and alone for a little time at night, calling up all his thought force, and by means of it create the next ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... stepped confidently out into the topsy-turvy corridors of the Niccola. He was about the size of a ten-year-old human boy, and features which were definitely not grotesque showed through the clear plastic of his helmet. His pressure suit was, engineering-wise, a very clean job. His whole appearance was prepossessing. When he spoke, very clear and quite high sounds—soprano sounds—came from a ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... will know we mean business," he said, gesturing toward the heap of metal and plastic that had once been the pride of the Carron City police force. Then he signalled to the others and they all ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... highest sense, but the tresses and the drapery were most skillfully arranged to look like the work of the chisel. It is significant of the measure of Miss Anderson's art, that in her animated moments subsequently she should not have excelled the plastic grace of this first picture. At the same time, to her credit it must be said, that she never fell much below it. Her movements on the stage, her management of her drapery, her attitudes were full of classic beauty. Actresses there ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... ever seemed to affect Caroline; and to the romantic descriptions of love she was so indifferent that it might have appeared to a common observer as if she was, and ever would be, a stranger to the passion. By the help of the active and plastic powers of the imagination, any and every hero of a novel could be made, at pleasure, to appear the exact resemblance of each lady's different lover. Some, indeed, professed a peculiar and absolute exclusive ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... march is played. Father Hudson resumes the plastic, immobile, and almost invisible attitude which he occupied at the opening of the play. The Choruses file silently out, one on each side ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... the concrete was mixed not quite wet enough to be plastic. If mixed too wet the charge was liable to be "lost," and if dry it would choke the chute. An excess of gravel permitted water to ascend in the tube; and an excess of sand tended to check ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... certain period of life beyond which the plastic mind of man becomes incapable of acquiring any new impressions. He merely elaborates and displays the stores he has garnered up in his youth. There are indeed some rare exceptions to the rule; but few, very few, can learn a language after the age ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English. She divined from this he had been out of the country—possibly had returned to New York on a British ship. How well she knew his plastic intelligence! It was so characteristic and easy for him—this little affectation.... She was quite cold to him. Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax—put ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... burst into a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the intensity of the thought or wish which called ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... necessary. Antique art has frequently treated these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive Here, Ilithyia, the protecting goddess of child-bearing, Persephone, and Artemis, all these plastic art represents as goddesses of fate, weaving the thread of life, and, at the same time, protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. Only a few representations ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... if we have a surface that retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or agent, that is efficacious in ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... extraordinary increase in the number of educational institutions and the conceited tribe of teachers originated thereby. These very people, using these very means, are fighting against the natural hierarchy in the realm of the intellect, and destroying the roots of all those noble and sublime plastic forces which have their material origin in the unconsciousness of the people, and which fittingly terminate in the procreation of genius and its due guidance and proper training. It is only in the simile of the mother that we can grasp the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... system. On the contrary he endows him with a good many disagreeable qualities; he makes him bright, sharp, and full of vitality, with a strong bent for mischief. He is high-tempered, quarrelsome, and disobedient, and yet in the hands of one who understands his mental peculiarities plastic as dough. It is the aim of the author to show how utterly useless it is to treat such boys—and our schools are full of them—in exactly the same manner as those of different character and temperament, and to demand that teachers have the right to adapt ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... flesh." He thinks Reynolds "would have acknowledged the supremacy of beautiful nature, uncontrolled by the severe line of mathematical exactness," had he lived to see the Elgin marbles. "The outline of life, which changes under every respiration, seems to have undulated under the plastic mould of Phidias." This is well expressed. He justly animadverts upon the silly fashion of the day, in lauding the vulgar imitation of the worsted stockings by Thom. The subjects chosen were most unfit for sculpture,—their only immortality must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... their progress inevitable and easy. The importance of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... inclination toward criminal adventure, her supreme self-confidence, all her bravado, were but the superficial though strong tendencies developed by her unfortunate environment; that within that cynical, worldly shell there were the vital and plastic ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... drink. They had no difficulty in finding the spoor of the lost jaguar, indeed it was the first thing to attract their attention upon stepping ashore, and as Earle gazed down upon the deep indentations in the plastic mud he execrated the thieving alligator afresh, for the prints were as big as the palm of his hand, indicating that the beast must have been a particularly ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... by flattening the first pill of clay upon the intended site (say the corner of a room); she then spreads it in a thin layer over a surface of about two inches, and retires for another ball of clay. This she dabs upon the plastic foundation, and continues the apparently rude operation until some twenty or thirty pills of clay are adhering at equal distances. She then forms these into a number of neat oval-shaped cells, about the size of a wren's egg, and in each cell she deposits one egg. She then flies ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... of their essence dull, but they must sometimes be submitted to, and the truism as to a book's possible influence on the young and impressionable cannot here be avoided. What it is that decides if the book is to stamp itself on the plastic mind, or if the mind is to assert itself and stamp on the book, is a detail that admits less easily of dogmatism. The Companionage of Finn remained in being for but two periods of holiday. Before the boys had returned to school, it had seen its ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... admitted. "Yes, it is true. But after all," he added cheerfully, "I believe that our disagreements are mainly upon the surface. The Countess is a woman of wide culture and understanding. Her mind, too, is plastic. She has few prejudices." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... circumstances be departed from, and which could only be modified in their operation by legal quibbles that left to them their nominal integrity. The new law could therefore only be administered by a class of men trained specially for the purpose, of which the plastic customary law borne down the stream of history from primitive times, and insensibly adapting itself to new conditions but understood in its broader aspects by all those who might be called to administer it, had little need. The Roman law, the study of which was started at ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... perceives the inmost. Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... here is the orator rising to plead the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... James, "but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literateness, wiped out." One of our latter day philosophers tells us that "happiness is a matter of habit; and you had better gather it fresh every day or you will ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... complete mental and emotional expression of the singer, to the development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous a force may be seen in the lives of ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs. It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature. But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases: the sensitive, intellectual and moral. Man feels, thinks and loves. He is en rapport with the physical world, with the spiritual world, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Industries: small-scale consumer goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products processing; oil refining, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... our vote, Who stood the scorching when we wrote; And paler than the milky way, We'll bake the plastic face of CLAY. ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... to see from the life-story of such insects, that the course of the story is not rigidly fixed; the creature in its various stages is plastic, open to influence from its surroundings, capable of marked change in the course of generations. And so the seasonal changes in the history of the individual from egg to imago point us to changes in the age-long history ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word "Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... thee 'mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... realize that just as, in the period of childhood, the plastic state of life, changes of structure and appearance are more rapid than in the mature man, after {70} traits and characters have become more fixed, so by analogy we may assume that this was the way of the human race and that in the earlier period changes were more rapid than they are to-day. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar |
