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Potential   Listen
noun
Potential  n.  
1.
Anything that may be possible; a possibility; potentially.
2.
(Math.) In the theory of gravitation, or of other forces acting in space, a function of the rectangular coordinates which determine the position of a point, such that its differential coefficients with respect to the coordinates are equal to the components of the force at the point considered; also called potential function, or force function. It is called also Newtonian potential when the force is directed to a fixed center and is inversely as the square of the distance from the center.
3.
(Elec.) The energy of an electrical charge measured by its power to do work; hence, the degree of electrification as referred to some standard, as that of the earth; electro-motive force.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books



... simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor. Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language. They are indeed potential language, and the symbols employed presuppose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech; but for the most part it is in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed. There are words unwritten and untranslatable into any nouns that are nevertheless ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... somewhat broken in spirit on first entering our establishment, but as the days went by she became happier, and so enterprising and ingratiating that we hastened to smother in its infancy a shameful doubt as to whether or not we had introduced into our sympathetic bosoms a potential viper. Morning, noon and night there was continuous scrubbing, polishing and beeswaxing; at all moments one was meeting a pink and breathless Victorine, and the house echoed to an interminable stream of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various

... rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential, wealth of the land is wrapped up ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... changes,—one so marvellous, indeed, that for a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was passing through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own potential self—I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the symptoms such as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man experienced in the natural history of the infinite, that the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... drew near which I had set for my call on the first of the potential mothers assigned me by the Eugenic Staff, I re-read the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... of evil in connection with ethics. The ethical problem is not the existence of evil, but the emergence of good; not, that is, why do men do wrong, but why do they do right. That life should cease to be is not at all wonderful, but that with so many potential dangers around the organism, the actions of living beings should become so automatically adapted to their surroundings as to shun the actions which destroy life, and perform such actions as maintain it—at least, to such an extent as secures ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... and put down each delicate fragment of potential artistry; and linger at leisure in the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... less developed countries with the potential for above-average economic growth; see less ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... involve such prodigious and concentrated short term release of high temperature energy that it is necessary to consider a variety of potential ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

... in midstream, instead of getting entangled with the weeds and pebbles near the bank, gather to itself so large a volume of water, that, when it reaches the sea, it has become a great independent force; so is each of us endowed, as we come into this life, with a spark of the Great Reality, with potential force to draw from the Infinite in proportion to our conscientious endeavours to keep ourselves free from the deadening effects of mundane frivolities and enticements, turning our faces ever towards ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of this ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... supports to his faith which he needed before he passed from the "what Knows". Christianity is a religion which is only secondarily a doctrine addressed to the "what Knows". It is, first of all, a religion whose fountain-head is a Personality in whom all that is spiritually potential in man, was realized, and in responding to whom the soul of man is quickened and regenerated. And the Church, through the centuries, has been kept alive, not by the letter of the New Testament, for the letter killeth, but ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... the Soviet officials did not realize the potential of the new craft was apparently correct," the President said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian radar. The disabled ship had had some trouble with its ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett

... destroyed second growth by adequate seed trees or artificial seeding. The latter danger may easily warrant public alarm manifested by restrictive laws. Universal ground burning of green timber will distinctly reduce the prospect of unassisted natural reforestation on the great area of potential timber land in which, as a resource, regardless of ownership, the public is vitally interested. Under present conditions at least, a large proportion of this is likely to be logged without any view to a future crop. It is questionable whether any state should, or will, legally approve ground ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen

... through the department stores, for instance, of a large city and observing each of the young faces in turn behind the counters, it will be rarely that you will not feel reasonably certain that the secret thoughts of all that vast army circle persistently about some man, impinging or potential. And wherever you make your studies, from excursion boats to the hour of release at the gates of a factory, you must draw the same conclusion that sex reigns, that it is the most powerful factor in life and will be so long ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... undeserved contempt, and much ill feeling rose against them among the clergy, but the clergy were somewhat prejudiced in their judgment. The order of St. Dominic, which a century before gloried in the approbation of the pope, and in the enjoyment of his potential bulls, now winced under gloomy and foreboding frowns. The sovereign Pontiff Honorius III. gratefully embraced the service of these friars, and confirmed their order with important privileges. His successor, Gregory IX., ratified these favors ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... summer collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 had gradually worked its way northward from Petrograd on the Petrograd-Kola Railroad with the intention of shipping for the Western fighting front by way of England. They had been of potential aid to the Allied military missions during the summer and now were permitted by the Serbian government to be joined to the Allied expedition. They were accordingly put into position along the Kola Railroad. These troops, of course, as well as thousands of British troops which ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... always and admittedly a potential rebel, no man was ever less a revolutionary. As much a constitutionalist as Hampden or Washington, he was so by temperament and by inheritance. The tradition of parliamentary service had been in his family for two generations. Two years after his ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... reflective would each have inanimate, and common and emphatic animate—fifteen. Double these for the plural, and we have thirty forms; and that multiplied by the sixteen tenses of the indicative, potential and subjunctive moods gives 480 forms of third person. The first and second persons have the same, minus the inanimate subject, or 20 each for each tense, making 640 more, or 1120 all together in those three moods. ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird

... world." Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity of truth Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of the earth; and in his own American hemisphere, the uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more their announcer than ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... weakness or ignorance because he can, or if he secures an advantage through credulity or trickery, he must settle for the crime before a judge who is absolutely just! If he has this education, which is a constitutional ingrafting from the mother's blood, fructified by a like potential father, he will be almost immune from all diseases. This is an education that can not be secured unless the individual has the prenatal and environing influences to differentiate these static attributes of his nature, and, if he has, the result will be that all these qualities ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.

... knowledge conveyed best to the worker cannot be overestimated. Through this knowledge, the worker is able to increase his output, and thus insure the lowered costs, that provide the funds with which to pay his higher wages,—to increase his potential as well as actual efficiency, and best to cooeperate with other workers ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth

... no sense of time value. To-morrow is as good as to-day, next week as this week. A foreman without a sense of time value is no good. And he does not value material. Waste to him is nothing. Another fatal defect. The man to whom minutes are not potential gold and material potential product can never hope to be a manufacturer. If only I had not been away from home! But the thing is, what is to ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor

... Broadview and Lancaster best under his conditions. Mr. Becker's choice is McDermid but he thinks Crath No. 1 a potential commercial variety. Mr. Oakes likes Crath No. 1 and Ill. No. 3. Mr. Etter lists Burtner and Alleman as his best varieties. Mr. Fateley especially favors one tree because of nut and bearing qualities. Other growers have not as yet ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... mean to let it discourage me," said Julian, "though the potential is mightily different from the actual." Nor did he suffer it to discourage him, or weaken his endeavours. His life soon began to flow once more in its usual, even, and quiet course. It did not take him long to discover that it was possible to live happily without ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... fire, strength, and action. These attributes seemed to cling about him. There was something vital and compelling in his presence. Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit. In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired. The life in him was marvelously significant. The dust, the dirt, the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... its salient features in the Gospel biography. For this reason, S. Paul speaks as we have seen[211] of the birth of the Christ in the disciple, and of His evolution and His full stature therein. Every man is a potential Christ, and the unfolding of the Christ-life in a man follows the outline of the Gospel story in its striking incidents, which we have seen to be universal, and ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... and his innate optimism was over-clouded. This seemed no longer the Raymond Ironsyde he had known from childhood. It was not even the Raymond of a month ago. He perceived how potential qualities of mind had awakened in the new conditions. He was philosophically interested. So deeply indeed did the psychological features of the change occupy his reflections, that for a time he overlooked their immediate ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... the free movement of this regulator. A fraction of a volt increase or decrease of potential produces a considerable movement of the finger, sufficient to govern the steam pressure, and in ordinary work it is found possible to maintain the potential within one volt of the standard at all loads within the capacity of the machine, excepting only a slight momentary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... Persistence of Matter and Energy: the physical principle that, in all changes of the universe, the quantities of Matter and Energy (actual and potential, so-called) remain the same.—For example, as to matter, although dew is found on the grass at morning without any apparent cause, and although a candle seems to burn away to a scrap of blackened wick, yet every one knows that the dew has been condensed from vapour in the air, and ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... fine of instinct, with the inherited inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... origin of kinship terms. If we take a crucial case of kinship terminology, we find that a child applies the same term to its actual mother as to all the women whom its father might have married, to its potential mothers in fact. If therefore we have to choose between the gradual extension of the terms from the single family to the group or their original application to a group, this instance seems decisive in ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... central system is early fixed. At any age this number is accordingly represented by the granules as well as by the cells which have already undergone further development. During growth the proportion of developed cells increases, and sometimes, owing to the failure to recognize potential nerve cells in the granules, the impression is carried away that this increase implies the formation of new elements. As has been shown, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... "Indian Boyhood," that brilliant Sioux author, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, great-grandson of Cloudman or Man-of-the-sky, that potential friend of the missionaries in pioneer days at Lake Calhoun, graphically ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell

... Ocelots to electromag liners, to bear them to the great event. Goodies by the thousand were stamped out to hawk to the faithful: Badges, banners, bumper stickers, wallet cards, purse-sized pix of Sowles, star-and-cross medallions and lapel pins.... The potential proceeds of the Rally alone ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds

... all this wretched business it is doubtful whim to pity the more: the blind stupidity of the fossilized conservatives incontinently throwing an empire away, forfeiting their influence over a people whom they, by temperament and experience, should have been fitted to control and govern; or the potential cruelty of perverted human nature in the dark Frankenstein who would wreak upon the rulers in their decadent days the most hideous of the methods in the system that produced him, as he planned his festive holocaust and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... those who have not; and I therefore contend that I am perfectly justified in wreaking my vengeance upon any of them who chance to fall into my power. And, in any case, if I should blow out your brains I shall at least have rid myself of one potential enemy. Therefore—" ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... it, will be charged negatively, as shown at B. On closing the switch the opposite charges rush together and form a current which flows to and fro between the metal plates. [Footnote: Strictly speaking it is the difference of potential that sets up ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins

... officials? Kao Tsu and his supporters, as farmers from eastern China, looked down upon the trading population to which farmers always regard themselves as superior. The merchants were ignored as potential officials although they had often enough held official appointments under the former dynasty. The second group from which officials had been drawn under the Ch'in was that of the army officers, but their military functions had now, of course, fallen to Kao Tsu's ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... year 1850,—due to special causes, which, though suggestive, were not adequate, and summarized as to results in the paralyzing Clayton-Bulwer Treaty,—the importance of the Central American Isthmus has been merely potential and dormant. But, while thus temporarily obscured, its intrinsic conditions of position and conformation bestow upon it a consequence in relation to the rest of the world which is inalienable, and therefore, to become operative, only awaits ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... civilized society is gone, and our property, our liberty, our rights, privileges and life, just lie at the mercy of every unjust man, and any violent and excited band of the wicked!—So important to us is the potential dominion and regular ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer

... undelivered? Could the world have been appreciably worse off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on "might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... rhythmic units may be marked by differences in tone-quality as well, and thus the potential complexity is greatly increased; but in spoken language, as has been said, this element of rhythm is negligible. In speech-rhythm, however, the three conditions of time, stress, and pitch are always present, and therefore no ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... just as deserving of the rank of distinct species as many now listed in scientific books, it only shows that our lists are sadly at fault, and that they are not all species that are called species. These experiments merely indicate that the parent form possesses more potential characters than it can give expression to in a single individual form, some of them being necessarily latent or hidden, and that when these latent ones show themselves they must do so at the expense of others which become latent or hidden in their turn. This ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... discovered the futility of attempting to smash through the German lines without an adequate supply of high-explosive shells with which to destroy the heavy wire entanglements. Moreover, in maintaining a curtain of fire between the German lines and potential reenforcements, it was necessary to increase the artillery arm of the service. At this time the Germans could fire four shells to one by the British. Another very essential equipment in which the British were lacking was machine guns. The German army had developed machine-gun warfare ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... distant from perfection. On account of its hierarchical inferiority, matter is often presented as the second, or correlatum, and form as the first, or relatum. This difference in rank is so strongly marked, that these two correlations are likewise conceived in a different form—that of the potential and the actual. Matter is the potential, imperfect, roughly outlined element which is not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so. Form is the actual, the energy, the entelechy which actualises the potential ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... a hundred or more, and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according to my idea, the title of a book very often renders the rest of it unnecessary. "Moral Teratology," for instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of "Essays Potential, not Actual," suggests sufficiently well what I should be like to say in the pages it would preface. People hold up their hands at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his own choice. That was a fine ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... during the great War for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent to heights undreamed of—is amazing now: what will it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... stone has lodged on a height, it may not fall back for years, or perhaps ages, and until it does, the force expended in raising it is temporarily lost, being represented only by what, in the language of the new theory, is called potential energy. The coal imbedded in the earth is considered by the theory as a vast reservoir of force, which has remained dormant for many geological periods, and will so remain until, by being burned, it gives out the stored-up force in the form of heat. Yet it is not supposed that this force is a material ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... deliver us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever element of mystery may enter into ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favours every anarchic tendency. Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy? For the English to lose belief in themselves—not merely in their potential goodness, but in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good—would mean as hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history. To doubt their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course, the highest) ethical ideal, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... metamorphosis of the primary (branchial) arches which yield the vessels in their normal adult condition, we obtain in this history an explanation of the signification not only of such of their anomalies as are on record, but of such also as are potential in the law of development; a few of them will suffice to illustrate the meaning of the whole number:—lst, The interventricular as well as the interauricular septum may be arrested in growth, leaving an aperture in the centre ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... radically, differed in the quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more enduring and more ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... bulk of the Negro race in practical subjection and bondage. The solidifying of the South had already made the South not only practically independent within the Union, but the overshadowing power, potential enough to make, and unmake, the rulers and policies of the Democratic ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... animals. On the other, formidable, mysterious, vast, were slowly crystallising, without disturbance, without display, the mighty opposing forces. In the clarified air of the first autumn frosts this antagonism seemed fairly to saturate the stately moving days. It was as yet only potential, but the potentialities were swelling, ever swelling toward the break ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... proportion as man develops, he grows out of his narrow surroundings, both physical and mental and even moral; he enters a larger and larger world. The religious expressions of his nature in the local provincial and even national stages of his life cannot satisfy his larger potential life. Only the religion of humanity can do this. And this is the religion of Jesus. The white light of religion, no less than that of scientific truth, has no local or national coloring. Perfect truth is universal, eternal, unchangeable. Occidental or Oriental colorations ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... had reached the battery, and eager gunners were tearing away the trees and shrubbery that covered them. In an incredible space of time the great grey guns, sinister, potential of death, lay open to the bright sky. The crews gathered round, each man to his place. The shell was pushed home, the gunners ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... seems to me more conformable to my dignity and to the serious character of the business." The Decrees, as touching the United States alone, were to be quietly withdrawn from action, but not formally revoked. They were to be dormant, yet potential. As convenience might dictate, it would be open to say that they were revoked [in effect], or not revoked [in form]. The one might, and did, satisfy the United States; the other might not, and did not, content ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... least growing only a little. The bacteria clinging to the dry hair can grow but little, if at all, and those in pure water multiply very little. When dried as dust they are entirely dormant. But each individual bacterium or spore has the potential power of multiplication already noticed, and as soon as it by accident falls upon a place where there is food and moisture it will begin to multiply. Everywhere in Nature, then, exists this group of organisms with its almost inconceivable power of multiplication, ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn

... animals. What remains is the life of action of a reasonable being. Now of reason as it is in man there are two parts, one obeying, one possessing and considering. And there are also two aspects in which the active or moral life may be taken, one potential, one actual. Clearly for our definition of the chief good we must take the moral life in its full actual realisation, since this is superior to ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... example of energy misdirected and it is the greatest potential energy in the universe. Really to want something means that we must be willing to sacrifice everything necessary to attain our wish, and to concentrate and direct all our efforts in its attainment. To do this, we must be efficient, we must be healthy, we must strive day and night, and we must ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... reserved for traitors, actual and potential. It must have been brought into use only after the cult had fallen upon evil days, and then only when the Chief himself was in danger. Beating to death, hanging, and poison were ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... sphere of society. You could see in his figure how strong he was, and in his face how brave he was. He was a good fellow, too; "tendir and trew" as the Douglas of the ballad; sincere, frank, thoroughly truthful and honorable. Every way he seemed to be that being that a woman most wants, a potential and devoted protector. Whenever Clara looked in his face her eyes said, without ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... America, as he possibly might have done, it most likely excited no particular emotion in his phlegmatic bosom. He could not have imagined that the exportation of a little singing-girl to New York should interfere with a potential venture of his own in fair linen. The gods kindly hid the future from his eyes, so that he might enjoy the comic vexation her lively sallies caused to Doctor Bartolo in the play, unknowing that she would be the innocent cause of a more serious provocation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,—give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... W. Johnson, as chemist to the Conn. State Ag. Society, made accurate analyses of 33 samples of peat and muck sent him by gentlemen from different parts of the State. The amount of potential ammonia in the chemically dry peat was found to vary from 0.58 in the poorest, to 4.06 per cent in the richest samples. In other words, one deposit of muck may contain seven times as much nitrogen as ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris

... utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power, haughtily dispensing with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... him with amused compassion. "You are but an experiment. If it works out, we will seek others who are also deemed potential expediters to do similar work. Now, are there ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... more to what was doubtless the most terrific burden placed upon the colonial woman—the incessant bearing of offspring. In those days large families were not a liability, but a positive asset. With a vast wilderness teeming with potential wealth, waiting only for a supply of workers, the only economic pressure on the birth rate was the pressure to make it larger to meet the demand for laborers. Every child born in the colonies was assured, through moderate industry, of the comforts of life, and, through patience ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... which on this side or that may compel ruin, you are met with a very easy rejoinder. "The Chicago Board of Trade"—it is the same apologist who speaks—"is a world-renowned commercial organisation. It exercises a wider and a more potential influence over the welfare of mankind than any other institution of its kind in existence." This assurance leaves you dumb. You might as well argue with a brass band as with a citizen of Chicago; and ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... work consists partly in displacing the shattered masses. The proportion of useful work obtainable has been variously estimated at from 14 to 33 per cent. of the theoretical maximum potential." ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential or actual activity, is simply a new name for the Aristotelian Form.[19] In modern biology, up till within quite recent times, the Aristotelian conception held undisputed sway; living matter was endowed with "vital force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... is trying to increase trade with other countries in the region yet most of Turkey's trade is still with OECD countries. Despite the implementation in January 1996 of a customs union with the EU, foreign direct investment in the country remains low—about $1 billion annually—perhaps because potential investors are concerned about still-high inflation and the unsettled political situation. Economic growth will remain about the same in 1999; inflation ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... he was thinking of other things. "After all," he said to himself—"after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he's already somebody and I'm still only potential..." ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... teach him. In the shop, as he hurried out, his eyes saw many things never seen before. He coveted them all, especially such as shone in steel or brass or bright new wood. He hardly knew their names; but what beautiful playthings they would make. All movable objects are potential playthings to him. He makes them also, like the Creator, out of nothing; if he wants a horse he has it on the instant by straddling a stick or tying a string to a companion. He has epic uses for his father's tools, his mother's knitting needles; they can slay a thousand foes at one stroke and the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... of vision keep their thought on us. They never forget that we are 100 million strong and that we dare do new things; and they dearly love to ask questions about—Rockefeller! Our power, our adaptability, our potential wealth they never forget. They'll hold fast to our favour for reasons of prudence as well as for reasons of kinship. And, whenever we choose to assume the leadership of the world, they'll grant it—gradually—and ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... that the men of common hard labor in my country would resent a blow as quickly as the man on horseback—that even the poor black—emancipated the other day from the subjugation of slavery by a masterful and potential race, stands up in conscious manhood, and that the teachings of the day are that consistently with the progress of the country—as one respects himself, he must be respected—and that the air and the earth have the inspiration and the stimulus of freedom. The Chinese and Japanese ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... condition or "potential" between the plates by which the current is started has been called the electromotive force, or force which puts the electricity in motion. The obstruction or hindrance which the electricity overcomes in passing through ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... always maintained these views. The conduct of Sir Robert and his cabinet was, therefore, justly held to be opposed to the practice of parliament and the doctrines of the constitution. Much of the odium of this procedure fell upon the Duke of Wellington, who was supposed to be the potential adviser of Sir Robert in this matter, and whose despotic sympathies, betrayed in many ways, gave great offence to the people. Had not the previous ministers, by their inconsistency, incompetency, and truckling to O'Connell and the Irish priest party, forfeited the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... other existent things), changes at the end of each Kalpa. He, however, who lies at the Root and who is endued with supreme might and puissance, lies in the waters when universal destruction comes (in the form of the potential Seed of all things). Kesava is that Creator of pure Soul who courseth through all the eternal worlds.[1386] Infinite and Eternal as He is, He fills all space (with emanations from Himself) and courseth through the universe (in the form of everything ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... the faculty of the University of Wisconsin tells of some amusing replies made by a pupil undergoing an examination in English. The candidate had been instructed to write out examples of the indicative, the subjunctive, the potential and the exclamatory moods. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... attention, he was the bland medium which handed her on. Her consciousness was fixed on young Mr Murchison, quite occupied with him: she could not imagine why they had not asked him long ago; he wasn't exactly "swell," but you could see he was somebody. So already she figured the potential distinction in the set of his shoulders and the carriage of his head. It might have been translated in simple terms of integrity and force by anyone who looked for those things. Miss Milburn was incapable of such detail, but she saw truly enough ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... usually test for multiplicity of facts acquired, rather than for power developed. College teaching usually does not perceive that the mind is a reacting machine containing a vast amount of pent-up potential energy which is ready to react upon any presentation; that development takes place only as this self-activity expresses itself; that education is evolutionary rather than involutionary. Teaching is, therefore, a process of arousing, sustaining, and directing ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... driving wheel base, the track rails in front and rear of the same are at all times entirely free from current, and no danger whatever can occur by coming in contact with the rails between successive motors. Moreover, the potential used in the present arrangement, while sufficient to overcome the extremely low resistance of the moving circuit, is too small to cause an appreciable loss of current from that portion of the rails in circuit, even under the most unfavorable conditions of the weather. In practice ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... important to keep to certain simple rules, of which these are the chief:—(1) Never discharge below a potential difference of 1.85 (or in rapid discharge, 1.8) volt. (2) Never leave the cells discharged, if it be avoidable. (3) Give the cells a special full charging once a month. (4) Make a periodic examination ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Now, if we would make any progress in the spiritual side of science—and every department of science has its spiritual side—we must always keep our minds fixed upon this "innermost within" which contains the potential of all outward manifestation, the "fourth dimension" which generates the cube; and our common forms of speech show how intuitively we do this. We speak of the spirit in which an act is done, of entering into the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... the improvisation of order out of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front immediately. There seemed to be no possibility which there was not ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... perceive the potential political power of women voters, he first declared, as a "private citizen," that suffrage was all right for the women of his home state, New Jersey, but that it was altogether wrong to ask him as President to assist in bringing it about for all the women of the nation. He also interested ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent degree—personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth. By the rational compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in the infinite character of its potential destiny. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or evil on circumstances which we do not make for ourselves. This dependence is in itself, no doubt, a fact; but it ceases to be so for us when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless recipes for eliciting moral health from circumstances which are the plague of modern literature, and which one of ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose. The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... God, he will speak the clearest grandest word of guidance which he can utter intelligible to his creatures. For us, that word must simply be the gathering of all the expressions of his visible works into an infinite human face, lighted up by an infinite human soul behind it, namely, that potential essence of man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God. If God should thus hear the cry of the noblest of his creatures, for such are all they who do cry after him, and in very deed show them his face, ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald

... fishermen were familiar with its banks at a time when Virginia and New England were given over to solitude and the Redskin. Commercially it is the centre of the most bountiful fishing industry in the world, and the great potential wealth of its mines is now beyond question. On all these grounds the story of the colony is one with which every citizen of Greater Britain should be familiar. The historians of the island have been capable and in the main ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... reverence only to the infinite, and they turn from you. Whatever their manner of scorning your protest may be, within themselves it leaves a sense of aching void. For the noble soul of the man, that potential king which is within us all, knows full well that this household idol may be cast down and destroyed at any moment,—that it is without finality in itself, without any real and absolute life. And he has been content ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... idea of power, dependent upon circumstances internal to the agent—can. May is simply permissive; can is potential. In respect to the idea of power residing in the agent being the cause which determines a contingent action, can is in the same relation to may as will is ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for our engines we receive through plants from the inorganic world. For the plant, as we have seen, stores up as potential energy in its compounds the actual energy of the sun's rays. And thus man lives and thinks by energy, obtained originally from the sun. But man not only consumes food and fuel. The complicated ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... by men who came primarily for business. The spirit of the age was that of competition and they came primarily for profits. Their business came from the farms, but they felt little sense of obligation to them. Every village was a potential city in their eyes and its growth and the rise of real estate values was of more concern to them than the development of the community's basic industry of agriculture. The village craftsman and business man gets most of his living from the farms and ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... notes, estimated to amount to no less than six thousand million marks, are now a source of embarrassment and great potential loss to the Belgian Government, inasmuch as on their recovery of the country they took them over from their nationals in exchange for Belgian notes at the rate of Fr. 120 Mk. 1. This rate of exchange, being ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... government by the only possible remedy, and to rescue the Roman people from falling under what the author deemed a tyranny like that of the Convention. He had acquired his politics in the atmosphere of 1847, from the potential liberality of men like Radowitz, who declared that he would postpone every political or national interest to that of the Church, Capponi, the last Italian federalist, and Tocqueville, the minister who occupied Rome. His object was not materially different from that of Antonelli ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... This would reduce the efficiency to about 6 per cent. for the best, and 3 per cent. for the ordinary non-condensing engines; and if to this we add the inefficiency of some boilers, it is certain that many small engines do not convert into power more than 2 per cent. of the potential energy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various

... crowning trial of his faith and constancy. When the people, by free and lawful choice, had placed honor and power in his hands; when his signature could convene Congress, approve laws, make ministers, cause ships to sail and armies to move; when he could speak with potential voice to other rulers of other lands, there suddenly came upon the government and the nation the symptoms of a fatal paralysis; honor seemed to dwindle and power to vanish. Was he then, after all, not to be President? Was patriotism dead? ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... kingdom, toward that dark, chill, central realm where, transformed as a gnome, she clutches her votaries, plunges into the primeval abyss-the matrix of time—and sets them the Egyptian task of weighing, analyzing the Titanic "potential" energy, the infinitesimal atomic engines, the "kinetic" force, the chemical motors, the subtle intangible magnetic currents, whereby in the thundering, hissing, whirling laboratory of Nature, nebulae grow into astral ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and in December 2001 received strong support from donor and lending countries at a triennial Consultative Group review. In 2001, exploratory oil wells in tracts 80 km offshore indicated potential extraction at current world oil prices. A new investment code approved in December 2001 improved the opportunities for direct foreign investment. Ongoing negotiations with the IMF involve problems of economic reforms and fiscal discipline. Substantial ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... comes from [Greek: kore] and [Greek: alion], because it is a maritime product used to make ornaments for maidens. In any case coral is a "giver of life" and as such identified with a maiden,[394] as the most potential embodiment of life-giving force. But this specific application of the word for "giver of life" was due to the fact that in all the Semitic languages, as well as in literary references in the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, this phrase was understood as a reference to the female organs of reproduction. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... still be signally beneficial and helpful to every section and every enterprise of the people. To this policy we are all, of whatever party, firmly bound by the voice of the people—a power vastly more potential than the expression of any political platform. The paramount duty of Congress is to stop deficiencies by the restoration of that protective legislation which has always been the firmest prop of the Treasury. The passage of such a law or laws would strengthen the credit ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... to overcome the various resistances other than grade, and that has been dissipated, but the energy required to translate the vehicle against the resistance due to grade has been transformed into potential energy and can be partially or wholly recovered when the vehicle descends a grade, provided the physical conditions permit its utilization. If the grade is so steep as to cause the vehicle to accelerate rapidly, the brakes must be applied and loss of energy results. ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... been,—and wondered. It was six years ago: if it had lived, it would have been as old as Carry. The arms which were folded loosely around the sleeping child began to tremble, and tighten their clasp. And then the deep potential impulse came, and with a half-sob, half-sigh, she threw her arms out, and drew the body of the sleeping child down, down, into her breast, down again and again as if she would hide it in the grave dug there years ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... of the fine arts sends its messages to the human soul by virtue of a fourfold capacity: Firstly, the imitation of the voices of Nature, such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of animals; secondly, its potential delight as melody, modulation, rhythm, harmony—in other words, its simple worth as a "thing of beauty," without regard to cause or consequence; thirdly, its force of boundless suggestion; fourthly, that affinity for union with the more definite and exact forms of the imagination (poetry), by which ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... that he recollected, save in a phrase that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... Universal Root and of the Boundless Power—the Parabrahman (That Which transcends Brahma), Mula-Prakriti (Root-Nature), and Supreme Ishvara, or the Unmanifested Eternal Logos, of the Vedantic Philosophers. The next stage is the potential unmanifested type of the Trinity, the Three in One and One in Three, the Potentialities of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva, the Preservative, Emanative, and Regenerative Powers—the Supreme Logos, Universal Ideation and Potential Wisdom, called by Simon the Incorruptible ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... young blood ran swiftly in his veins and life was all before him, Mr Birdsey had played football. Once a footballer, always a potential footballer, even to the grave. Time had removed the flying tackle as a factor in Mr Birdsey's life. Wrath brought it back. He dived at young Mr Waterall's neatly trousered legs as he had dived at other legs, less neatly trousered, thirty years ago. ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... me in this rough method, or not, I should like to submit to those of whom I am a potential, but of whom I may not be an actual, colleague, and to others who may be interested in this most important problem—how to get the Education Act to work efficiently—some considerations as to what ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... had been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft the boy, and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in certain directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft, potential instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was not only that he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the faintest breath of harmony or ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... not, of what value was all this vast storehouse of potential civilization and progress to be to the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... enabled to change their forms and make thereby a more individual development. Secondly, the metamorphosis of energy which has shown us that all the so-called real forces in inorganic nature, the mechanical forces and their complements, the so-called potential energies, heat, radiation (light, radiating heat), electricity, magnetism, chemical energy, are different forms of universal motion, which pass, under certain conditions, the one into the other, so that in place of those of the one which disappear, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... least, which are not incompatible with criminal tendencies—was his "middle name" (as he might have phrased it), so that in his proper social environment he was not apt to make social mistakes. This environment, however, could not but be constituted, in the main, of convicts either actual or potential; and there was probably no citizen, however high his standing or spotless his ostensible record, who in this official's estimate might not have prison gates either before him or behind him, or both. To be able to maintain, under the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... its beginning was a mere nun on the battle-field, binding up wounds and wiping the damp from dying brows. But since then it has had time and opportunity to become strong, bold, masculine, potential. Once it had only the knowledge and power to alleviate evil consequences; now it has both the knowledge and the power to deal with evil causes. Now, I say to you, leave this emotional A B C of human charity to nuns and mite societies. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... concluded, Lucia did not mean war. She meant, as by some great armed demonstration, to exhibit the Riseholme spirit in its full panoply, and then crush into dazzled submission any potential rivalry. She meant also to exert an educational influence, for she allowed that Olga had great gifts, and she meant to train and refine those gifts so that they might, when exercised under benign but autocratic supervision, conduce to the strength and splendour of ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his own companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father's table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale and sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... their retainers, agents, vassal tenants and slaves, they lived in princely and licentious style, knowing no law in most matters except their unrestrained will. They beheld themselves as ingenious and memorable founders of a potential landed aristocracy whose possessions were more extended than that of Europe. Wilderness much of it still was, but obviously the time was coming when the population would be fairly abundant. The laws of entail and primogeniture, then in full force, would ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... Messer Valdicampo. This had been placed at his disposal, and there he proposed to lie the night. They had supped—the Duke, de' Alvari, Gismondo Santi, Messer Valdicampo, his wife and two daughters, and a couple of friends, potential citizens of Cagli, whom he had invited, that they might witness the honour that was being done his house. It waxed late, and the torpor that ensues upon the generous gratification of appetite was settling upon the company when Armstadt—Gian Maria's ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... mood of solemn and tender exaltation all the world seemed to him full of light. He found a new element of something lovable in the persons whom he had most disliked; and Montanelli, who for five years had been his ideal hero, was now in his eyes surrounded with an additional halo, as a potential prophet of the new faith. He listened with passionate eagerness to the Padre's sermons, trying to find in them some trace of inner kinship with the republican ideal; and pored over the Gospels, rejoicing in the democratic tendencies of ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... hath, in his effect, a voice potential/As double as the duke's] [Warburton had given a source in Dioscorides and Theocritus for "double"] This note has been much censured by Mr. Upton, who denies, that the quotation is in Dioscorides, and disputes, not without reason, the interpretation ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... found lying at her feet. Mme. de Lauriston was justly alarmed and demanded cancellation of the sale. Not only was this done, but the police, in order to prevent another such accident, required that a notice be fixed to Lisette's loose-box informing any potential buyer of her ferocity, and that any sale would be null and void unless the buyer declared in writing that he ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... lowered himself into a narrow passage, took a lizard's way between brush and boulder, pausing only when he reached the Tatar for a quick check on the potential enemy. ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... on the German emigrant steamer had seen the coming of the shabby little English trader with bumping hearts. Till then the crew, with (so to speak) their backs up against a wall, had fought the fire with diligence; but when the nearness of a potential rescuer was reported, they discovered for themselves at once that the fire was beyond control. They were joined by the stokehold gangs, and they made at once for the boats, overpowering any officer ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... were made to carry this Act into effect. Commissioners were appointed; a General Order was issued by the Lord Lieutenant, and in due time that most potential of documents, a Treasury ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... as if the outcome of the affair were a matter of utter indifference to them.) "D'ye tell me a month alongside men that have sailed with me before won't make sailors of them, eh? Tchutt, I know different.... Sailors they'll be before we reach the Horn." (Here one of the potential 'sailors' ran to the ship's side, intent on an affair of ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... position I witnessed the trial of them all. I saw tanks dragging rotary plows and others equipped with devices like electricfans but with blades of hardened steel sharpened to razor keenness. The only thing this latter gadget did was to scatter more potential nuclei ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... Do not very strict minded people pretend that the passions and vices mean the same things? Is vice ever more seductive than when it wears the cloak of virtue? Wherefore in order to corrupt virtuous souls it is sufficient for it to appear in a potential form. This is the form in which the Platonicians deified it. In all ages, in order to justify the passions, it was necessary to apotheosize them. What am I saying? Am I so bold as to play the iconoclast with an accredited superstition? ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... the fact that the other party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can expand or contract without reference to reason or record; a potential infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton

... The Potential implies possibility, liberty, power, will; as, Tahgemewan kahnahbuge, it may rain; Kegahwesenemin kiya kahmenequamin, we shall eat ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield

... evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. Growth can and does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant; and the more carefully ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... the world lightly, as it comes. His blunders bruise and wound him. He punishes himself for all his vagaries. Rose-Ann is not a Puritan, but she too has instincts that will not surrender, any more than Felix's, to the doctrines which they both profess: jealousy sleeps within her, and potential motherhood. She and Felix come to feel that they have shirked life by their deliberate childlessness and that life has deserted them. Yet separation proves unendurable. So they resume marriage, vowing "not to ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... Hayne: "I have a boy whose eyes are blue as your 'Aethra's'. Every day when my work is done I take him in my strong arms, and lift him up, and pore in his face. The intense repose, penetrated somehow with a thrilling mystery of 'potential activity', which dwells in his large, open eye, teaches me new things. I say to myself, Where are the strong arms in which I, too, might lay me and repose, and yet be full of the fire of life? And always through the twilight come answers from the other world, 'Master! ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... occupying and owning a given territory. Tuath in course of time came to be applied indifferently to the people and to their territory. Fine, sometimes designating a whole tribe, more frequently meant a part of it, occupying a distinct portion of the territory, a potential microcosm or nucleus of a clan, having limited autonomy in the conduct of its own immediate affairs. The constitution of this organism, whether as contemplated by the law or in the less perfect actual practice, is alike elusive, and underwent changes. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... never profited by the warning. He dressed in excellent taste, almost conspicuously, and the gay and expensive details of his toilet suggested a man given over to liveliness. As a matter of fact, this liveliness was potential rather than actual. Mr. Crossley was always intending to resume the giddy ways of the years before he became a great man, but was always so far behind in the important things to be done and done at once ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... into two classes, saints and sinners. The consistent socialist says: Every man is my brother. The consistent Christian (like the theist of every name—Jew, Mohammedan, Buddhist and the rest) says: Every true believer is my brother, but those who are not are only potential brethren. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... talons. He was the spirit of regnant labor as he stood there, his hands outreaching to rend and crush his audience. I was aware of a faintly perceptible shrinking on the part of the listeners before this figure of revolution, concrete, potential, and menacing. That is, the women shrank, and fear was in their faces. Not so with the men. They were of the active rich, and not the idle, and they were fighters. A low, throaty rumble arose, lingered on the air a moment, and ceased. It was the forerunner of the snarl, and I was to ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... dancing apart once more and re-exerting that enormous pressure, the piston of the engine would be driven back and then the entire cylinder burst into fragments as the gas sought exit. In a word, then, a portion of liquid air has a store of potential energy which can be made kinetic merely by drawing upon the boundless and free supply of heat which is everywhere stored in the atmosphere we breathe and in every substance about us. The difficulty is, not to find fuel with which to vaporize it, as in case ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... emanation or evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... presented in the proper place, To proper placemen, every Russ credential; And was received with all the due grimace By those who govern in the mood potential, Who, seeing a handsome stripling with smooth face, Thought (what in state affairs is most essential) That they as easily might do the youngster, As hawks may pounce upon ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... young populations (high percentage under age 15) need to invest more in schools, while countries with older populations (high percentage ages 65 and over) need to invest more in the health sector. The age structure can also be used to help predict potential political issues. For example, the rapid growth of a young adult population unable to find ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Ohio assumed the lead in this legislation, and if the fundamental principle is maintained here, the plan, by its demonstrated worth, will be adopted elsewhere. This means the ultimate loss of ill-gotten millions by potential interests that have grown rich from the tears, blood and maimed bodies of our working people. They will not give it up without a continued struggle. Your duty to humanity and to your ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... And the last thing they dreamed of was that their kindly loan was destined to yield them a better return than all the years of their naval service, for their fifty pounds had gone into the pocket of a potential millionaire, who was endowed with the faculty, rare in millionaires, of not forgetting the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy



Words linked to "Potential" :   potentiality, electrical phenomenon, potential unit, resting potential, latent, voltage, action potential, possible, evoked potential, possibility, prospect, likely, potential energy, prospective, high-potential, cortical potential, potency, electric potential, potential divider, elastic potential energy



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