"Invent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you think. Only you know we live in the nineteenth century, and we cannot make Providence interpose in the form of a dagger or poison so easily as in former days. Arsenic and verdigris are sometimes used, but it does not answer. Scientific people have had the meanness to invent tests by which poison can be detected ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... female, such as heaven and earth, sun and moon, day and night, south and north. If these traditions really represent the oldest prehistoric creations of the popular mind, it would almost seem that the most ancient Chinese shared that naive sentiment which caused our own forefathers to invent gender. The difference is that, with us, the conception survives merely in the language, where the article or suffixes mark gender, whereas with the Chinese, whose language does not express gender, it survives in their system of metaphysics. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... blindness she had made of him an image absolutely different from the reality, and she had transferred to the phantom of her mind all the hunger for love that was in her. Nothing had disturbed her illusion. With the bold certainty of the blind, who calmly invent what they do not know, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... communities. For myself, I confess that I am slow to believe it. In aristocratic society, the class which gives the tone to opinion, and has the supreme guidance of affairs, being permanently and hereditarily placed above the multitude, naturally conceives a lofty idea of itself and of man. It loves to invent for him noble pleasures, to carve out splendid objects for his ambition. Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions; but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Still, there is no doubt that they signalised his passage from robust old age into a period of physical decline. Much of life survived in the hero yet; he had still to mould S. Peter's after his own mind, and to invent the cupola. Intellectually he suffered no diminution, but he became subject to a chronic disease of the bladder, and adopted habits ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... "Hasn't your situation forced you to lie already? When the child asks why her father and her governess have left us, haven't you been obliged to invent excuses which are lies? If the man who was once your husband isn't as good as dead to you, I should like to know what your Divorce means! My poor dear, do you think you can go on as you are going on now? How many thousands of people have ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... don't imagine that the colonel would invent that sort of thing. For some reason or other, possibly to keep close to the trouble that's coming, the colonel insists upon bringing all his little chit-chat to me. He asked for an interview about ten o'clock this morning and reported to ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... at this time to the works of Dante, which he understood very well with regard to the places described and their proportions, and he would avail himself of them in his conversations, quoting them often in making comparisons. He did naught else with his thoughts but invent and imagine ingenious and difficult things; nor could he ever find an intellect more to his satisfaction than that of Donato, with whom he was ever holding familiar discourse, and they took pleasure in one another ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... how soon a feller gets used to it. I'm rather fond of it, d'ye know? We haven't overmuch to work on in the way o' variety, to be sure, but what we have there's lots of it, an' it gives us occasion to exercise our wits to invent somethin' new. It's wonderful what can be done with fresh beef, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, flour, tea, bread, mustard, sugar, pepper, an' the like, if ye've got ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... service, but the War Office would no doubt test his capabilities of health and brain either in Whitehall or at the Ministere de la Guerre. Eric could count on seeing him almost any day—in England, or, if he could invent a ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... as to what made them act as they had been acting, they answered evasively, and pretended that they had put it up as a joke, to see what he would do. It was the best explanation they could invent at such short notice. And each said to himself, "He never delivered that letter, and the joke is on us, if he only knew it or we were dull enough to come out ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said, "if we draw out a document signed by us and Alexis, saying that we overheard the plot to obtain false evidence against you, the emperor would not believe other false accusations which your enemies might invent?" ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... however, which wore a graver complexion and tormented him beyond endurance. This was the solicitude for his own safety. The people had hated him for years and had proceeded to invent stories about him which might justify its anger. It had been a satisfaction for him to reflect that, for the most part, these stories had not been the causes, but rather the effects of public indignation. But what answer could he make ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... sufficiently under his control to allow him to invent a hurried pretext for leaving her. He had forgotten to buy some tobacco in a shop they had just passed, he said; he would go back for it now, she must walk on slowly and he would overtake her directly; and so he turned and left her to meet ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... save me all farther trouble of demonstrating the errors of ancient art. I do not in the least suspect the picture: the tones of it, and much of the handling, are masterly; yet that foreground tree comprises every conceivable violation of truth which the human hand can commit, or head invent, in drawing a tree—except only, that it is not drawn root uppermost. It has no bark, no roughness nor character of stem; its boughs do not grow out of each other, but are stuck into each other; they ramify without diminishing, diminish without ramifying, are terminated ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Colors and forms and modes, in themselves graceful or beautiful, can become ungraceful and ridiculous simply through inappropriateness. The most lovely bonnet that the most approved modiste can invent, if worn on the head of a coarse-faced Irishwoman bearing a market-basket on her arm, excites no emotion but that of the ludicrous. The most elegant and brilliant evening dress, if worn in the daytime in a railroad car, strikes every one with a sense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... faults with pleasure, and dread to offend a kind though just mother. But she flies into a fit of phrenzy, upbraids me as if I was the most undutiful wretch in existence, rakes up the ashes of my father, abuses him, says I shall be a true Byrrone, which is the worst epithet she can invent. Am I to call this woman mother? Because by nature's law she has authority over me, am I to be trampled upon in this manner? am I to be goaded with insult, loaded with obloquy, and suffer my feelings to be outraged on the most trivial occasions? I owe her respect ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... our souls where his remains.— Tell me, sweet boy, art thou content to die? These barbarous Scythians, full of cruelty, And Moors, in whom was never pity found, Will hew us piecemeal, put us to the wheel, Or else invent some torture worse than that; Therefore die by thy loving mother's hand, Who gently now will lance thy ivory throat, And quickly rid thee ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... secrets," said Moses gently. "And if you take my advice, you never will have. If you have no secrets, my dear, they will never be found out. If you tell your little designs, your best friends will be satisfied, and will not invent ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... course it's bosh. The doctors must invent something, or else what are they paid for? There's one comes to us every day. Comes,— talks a bit,—and ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... Germans and stood out of danger, able to attack, while the Germans stood helpless, and, if the cavalry had not dashed up, all would have been over with them. It is possible, therefore, knowing the defects of both these infantries, to invent a new one, which will resist cavalry and not be afraid of infantry; this need not create a new order of arms, but a variation upon the old. And these are the kind of improvements which confer reputation and ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... hesitate to run two columns or more on Sadie Smith's wedding. The report runs into minute details and anecdotes that all of the "Weekly's" readers know before the paper arrives. But the editor prints everything he can find or invent simply because all of his readers are more or less personally connected with the affair and are anxious to see their names in print and to read about themselves. The liberty that such an editor gives himself is of course ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... attended by a mediocre progress in the ordinary course of study and what the French call lecons d'agrement, and we accomplishments, a critical moment came for Aurore. She was weary of frolic and mischief,—she had tormented the nuns to her heart's content. She knew not what new comedy to invent. She thought of putting ink in the holy water,—it had been done already; of hanging the parrot of the under-mistress,—but they had given her so many frights, there would be nothing new in that. She saw, one evening, the door of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... furiae ullo tempore)." A doctrinal pledge, Melanchthon furthermore explained, was necessary "in order correctly to acknowledge God and call upon Him to preserve harmony in the Church, and to bridle the audacity of such as invent new doctrines." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... oaths, until at last he was so fascinated that he became filled with an uncontrollable desire to swear. So he went out into a field, beyond hearing, and there delivered himself of all the oaths he had ever heard or could invent, and in as loud a voice as possible." After this he felt quite ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... to see how the cunning old fellow had caught me. I have not yet been able to find out how much of truth there was in his story. From the twinkle of his eye I cannot help suspecting that if he did not invent the tale, he embellished it, at least, in order to produce the effect which he certainly did produce. Humour was clearly his predominant disposition, the reflex of which was to be seen, after a mild lunar fashion, on the countenance of his wife. Neither ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... We're at the top of the house. No, no, you must invent some thumping lie. I can't think of one: you can, Julia. Exercise all your ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... things—either that he possessed a stronger reasoning faculty than his great master, Descartes, or a weaker moral sense. In our opinion, it shows the latter. If his moral sentiments had been vigorous and active, they would have induced him, no doubt, either to invent sophistical evasions of such an inference, or to reject the doctrine from which it flows. If a Descartes, a Leibnitz, or an Edwards, for example, had seen the consequences of the scheme of necessity as clearly as they were seen by Spinoza, his moral ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... cudgelled his brains to invent some plan or other by which to set Judie at work and keep her at it ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... with Romeo, and of Imogen's words when Posthumus leaves her. Throughout the play Henry is the poet's favourite, and in the gentle King's lament for Gloster's death we find a peculiarity of Shakespeare's art. It was a part of the cunning of his exquisite sensibility to invent a new word whenever he was deeply moved, the intensity of feeling clothing itself aptly in a novel epithet or image. A hundred examples of this might be given, such as "The multitudinous seas incarnadine"; and so we find here ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... more to his cause than all the stolen jewelry, horses and wagons. Its appeal to the East would be the one secret force needed to rouse the archaic instincts of his pious backers. They would deny with indignation the accusation of murder against his men. They would invent the excuse of self-defense. He did not need to make it. From the deeps of their souls would come the shout of the ancient head-hunter returning with the bloody scalp of a foe in his hand. Brown felt this. He knew it, because he felt it in his own heart. He was ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... science of Social Embryology, he looked thoroughly mystified. As to the new science, he had never heard of it, and as to protection, he thought that the inhabitants of the villages in question were quite capable of protecting themselves. "I could invent," he added, with a malicious smile, "a society for the protection of ALL peasants, but I am quite sure that the authorities would not allow me to ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of course, as a man always will—I got to drinking, and then this scrape came and I had to run. I don't care anything about that row now, or what you believe about it. I'm here, shut off from my home, and that's a worse punishment than any damn lawyers can invent. And the man's well again. He saw I was drunk; but I wasn't so drunk that I didn't know he was trying to do me, and I pounded him just as they say I did, and I'm sorry now I ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... but Uncle Mac was a busy man, Aunt Jane's reading was of a funereal sort, impossible to listen to long, and the other aunties were all absorbed in their own cares, though they supplied the boy with every delicacy they could invent. ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... ultra-critics while admitting the wonders of the Lives of the Saints, reduce them to nothing by rules, which they invent for separating truth from falsehood, as those who profess to believe an infallible authority in the Church make that infallibility to depend on so many conditions, that they may always maintain that the Church, dispersed or ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... "They invent themselves," the ambassador told him. "My point is that the Diplomatic Service cherishes individuals and causes which battle stuffiness and complacency and Golden Ages and monstrous things like that. Not thieves, of course. They're degradation, like body lice. But rebels and crackpots and ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... doubly surprised at your correspondent's error. That James Payn should have borrowed from me is already a strange conception. The author of LOST SIR MASSINGBERD and BY PROXY may be trusted to invent his own stories. The author of A GRAPE FROM A THORN knows enough, in his own right, of the humorous and pathetic ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Leighton himself in other words speaks often. Surely, there must have been an intelligible propriety in the terms, 'Logos', Word, 'Begotten before all creation',—an adequate idea or 'icon', or the Evangelists and Apostolic penmen would not have adopted them. They did not invent the terms; but took them and used them as they were taken and applied by Philo and both the Greek and Oriental sages. Nay, the precise and orthodox, yet frequent, use of these terms by Philo, and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... every conscientious writer or reader will cherish his "historic doubts," when he reflects on the facility with which calumny is sent abroad, the avidity with which it is received, and the careless ease with which men credit what it costs little to invent and propagate, but requires an age of trouble and an almost impossible conjunction of opportunities effectually ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... beaten; the deepened sense of moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance, and the loss of a single vote might wreck it—women, be it remembered, who ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... you, Mrs. Mosby." She wanted to ask about Joe, something in the rapprochement giving rise to thoughts of him, but she realized that Mrs. Mosby was doubtless entirely out of touch with her graceless nephew and would invent some mere plausibility. So she inquired instead after ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... said with perfect good temper. "Shielding a runaway convict is an indictable offence—to say nothing of altering his appearance. As for the money"—he made a little gesture of contempt—"well, do you think it would pay us to cheat you? There is always the chance that a gentleman who can invent things like this explosive and the Lyndon-Marwood torpedo may ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... matter into the vortex and casts the used-up material out—in short, that creates and keeps up the unstable condition, the seesaw upon which life depends? To enable the mind to grasp it we have to invent or posit some principle, call it the vital force, as so many have done and still do, or call it molecular force, as Tyndall does, or the power of God, as our orthodox brethren do, it matters not. We are on the border-land between the knowable and the unknowable, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of ancient learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of metaphysics; a third has brought to perfection the science of astronomy; but it was reserved for the exclusive genius of the present times, to invent the noble art of picturesque gardening, which has given, as it were, a new tint to the complexion of nature, and a new outline to the physiognomy ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... leave of absence of Monsieur de Treville, on some pretext or other which you must invent; I am not very clever at pretexts. Milady does not know me; I will get access to her without her suspecting me, and when I catch my beauty, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... it out, their stock of matches being limited. They then went down to the beach to search for more shell-fish, while Mr Shobbrok remained at the camp to watch the fire. He and the doctor put their heads together to invent various traps, with which they hoped to catch some of the numerous birds flitting about the woods, or any of the smaller ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... stead, I shall know how to make use of him. There is good stuff in the man. I availed myself in time of the full powers given by the R. F. G.; I may inform Father d'Aigrigny, in case of need, of the secret engagements taken by the General towards myself. Until now, I have let him invent for this inheritance the destination that you know of. A good thought, but unseasonable. The ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Him. Where is He? How long has He been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own convenience, like ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... missionary did not know how the bull came to be killed behind his house, and, in spite of all the Maharajah's hints, would not invent a story to account for it. The Maharajah could have accounted for it fifty times over, if it had happened to him. Besides, Dr. Roberts freely admitted having breakfasted upon beefsteak, and didn't know where it had come from! ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... possessing the money, he would still have an extremely difficult part to play. It would be necessary for him to arrive early at the works, to change notes for gold in the safe, to erase many of his pencilled false additions, to devise a postponement of his crucial scene with Horrocleave, and lastly to invent a plausible explanation of the piling up ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a whole life in its tempting glimpses into a past environment and ominous forebodings of the future—all contracted into the space of four or five pages. Chekhov is lavish with his inventiveness. Apparently, it cost him no effort to invent. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... far West. The designs were made in water colors, and although in nearly every instance they were bold and striking, they were difficult to reproduce perfectly upon porcelain with hard mineral colors, and to accomplish this successfully it was necessary to invent new methods and to have recourse to peculiar mechanical appliances, but the effort was successful and the set ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... miscreants! the hideous monsters! the villainous reptiles! Aye! punishment will overtake them; they shall rue this day! All Rome shall rue this day: her streets shall flow with blood and I'll invent such tortures for every man as will turn the firmament red ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... passions are bad or the social mechanism is false, for evil prevails, and to a melancholy extent. If the former be true, then there is no hope of a better state of things, for every means of repression and constraint that human ingenuity could invent has been applied to regulate their action; but all in vain—they have remained unchanged, and in the eyes of the moralist as perverse as ever. If, however, the latter be true—that is, if the social mechanism be false—then there ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... altogether accomplished man of the world, who knew (at least in all companies and places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to do, to make, to seek, and to avoid. Shifty and thrifty as old Greek, or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure. He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate thereof. He looked on it as his ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... a celebrated mechanician, born at Foulby, Yorkshire; was the first to invent a chronometer which, by its ingenious apparatus for compensating the disturbing effects caused by variations of climate, enabled mariners to determine longitude to within a distance of 18 m.; by this invention he won a prize of L20,000 offered by Government; amongst ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... proportion as they increase and improve, invent methods by which they facilitate their reasonings, and, employing general theorems, are enabled to comprehend, in a few propositions, a great number of inferences and conclusions. History, also, being a collection of facts which are multiplying ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... just as he was about to ask his companion if he happened to know a Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who also lived at Brookport. It occurred to him that the question would invite a counter-question as to his own knowledge of Miss Boyd, and he knew that he would not be able to invent a satisfactory answer to ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... it impossible to speak to Bonaparte again on the subject until all should be over. Can there be a more evident, a more direct proof of this than the digging of the grave beforehand? I have repeated Harrel's story just as he related it to me. He told it me without solicitation, and he could not invent a circumstance of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... they invent New tortures for the one by whom they're sent, Inflicting most excruciating pain, During their ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... another time he was timid, vacillating, and ridiculous in his attempts to avert the public eye from his love affair and its consequence. People who knew him intimately were aware that Horatia was his daughter, and in order to throw them off their guard he proceeded to invent a cock-and-bull story of how he came by the child. Here is his letter to Lady Hamilton written in the middle of 1804: "I am now going to state a thing to you and to request your kind assistance which, from my dear Emma's ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... only when it is thwarted in entering the lists and may then turn the flood of its activities into channels of rebellion or revolt against authority. The boy revolts when his father declines to permit him to accomplish the impossible, to invent, discover, explore, to overwhelm. It seems to him that if he received encouragement and help instead of censure at home, the son of the house would soon be recognized by the world as one of the Great Ones ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... confronted by the evidence of a woman who hated him, a woman capable of manufacturing evidence to suit her own ends. But, whatever else she might do, she could not produce a weapon belonging to him, nor could she invent a reason for the crime that could not be disproved. At least this was the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... suicides for Notre Dame: one is drowned by accident, another killed by the bursting of a gun, a third has fallen from a scaffold. I invent the excuse, and the conscience of the priest accepts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... appears. But he has some apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of this darling nephew. John Hayes received the news with anything but pleasure. He had never heard of any brother of Catherine's; she had been bred at the workhouse, and nobody ever hinted that she had relatives: but it is easy for a lady of moderate genius to invent circumstances; and with lies, tears, threats, coaxings, oaths, and other blandishments, she ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... continually operating as an energy of feeling, it compelled the subservience of the intellect; and thus combined the passions with a faculty skilful to guide their direction, to diversify their objects, to invent expedients, and to seize and create occasions. What was it that this intelligent depravity would stop short of accomplishing? Reflect on the extent of human genius, in its powers of invention, combination, and adaptation; and then think of all this ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... may say, though to some it may seem an extravagance, I have never been able to invent the terms that would sufficiently express my admiration of that picture,—I mean, of its color; though as a whole it is admirable for its composition, for the fewness of the objects admitted, for the simplicity and naturalness of the arrangement. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... far; that by a servile and Chinese exactness of imitation we are crippling what originality of genius may exist among our draughtsmen, sculptors, architects. But we at least confess thereby that we cannot invent and create as could our ancestors five hundred years ago; and as long as that is the case it is more wise in us—as in any people—to exhaust the signification and power of the past, and to learn all we can from older schools ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... to was Henry J. Rogers, and, writing of him to Vail on April 26, Morse says: "I am truly grieved at Rogers's conduct. He must be conscious of doing great injustice; for a man that has wronged another is sure to invent some cause for his act if there has been none given. In this case he endeavors to excuse his selfish and injurious acts by the false assertion that 'I had cast him overboard.' Why, what does he mean? Was I not overboard ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... phrases or passages is developed with the power and resource characteristic of Wagner's later work; but it is astonishing that after the baldness and noise of Rienzi he should have gone straight on to invent such music at all. He was still groping his way, and had to trust to the conventional framework of opera construction to a large extent; that is, each act is divided into set numbers, even when the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... inevitable smoking loaf of rye and Indian bread, to accompany the pot of baked pork and beans, but there were specimens of all the newly-made Thanksgiving pies filling every available space on the table. Diana set special value on herself as a pie artist, and she had taxed her ingenuity this year to invent new varieties, which were received with bursts of applause by the boys. These sat down to the table in democratic equality,—Biah Carter and Abner with all the sons of the family, old and young, each eager, hungry and noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and surrender themselves to absolute anarchy in morals and religion the old terminology ceases to be employed in the old way, ceases indeed to have any meaning. The prophet or the philosopher who sets himself to invent a new theory of the universe or a new creed for his followers to embrace, can hardly avoid shocking and horrifying those who are content to use words as their forefathers did and attach to these words the same sort of sacredness that the Hebrews did to the Divine name. There ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... McArthurs, of Ballygrainey, he was as clever a boy as come out of the ten townlands. And then he set up for himself, you know, and lost all, and then he come here. He's doing his best, poor creature, till pay me for what kindness I showed him, by trying to invent things that he says would maybe pay off, some time or other, all ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... rather than exercises are to be commended. There is indeed no comparison for a moment possible between Nature's method of exercise, which is obtained through play, and the ridiculous and empty parodies of it which men invent. The truth is that Nature is aiming at one thing, and man at another. Man's aim, for reasons already exploded, is the acquirement of strength; Nature's is the acquirement of skill. It is really nervous development that Nature is interested ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... somewhat magnificently describes Mrs. Opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'Illustrations of Lying,' moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is henceforth allowed. 'I am bound in a degree not to invent a story, because when I became a Friend it was required of me not to do so,' she writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual. Miss Mitford's description of Mrs. Opie, 'Quakerised all over, and calling Mr. ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... saw veneers with a hand saw; trade cases for movements; move to Bristol; bad luck; lose large sum of money; first cases by machinery in Bristol; make clocks in Mass.; good luck; death of my little daughter; form a company; invent ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... so many orders as Natacha, no one sent them on so many errands at once. As soon as a servant came in sight she seemed to invent some want or message; she could not help it. It seemed as though she wanted to try her power over them; to see whether, some fine day, one or another would not rebel against her tyranny; but, on the contrary, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... may seem strange that story-tellers should care to weave their stories so constantly about the same personages; strange, too, that they should invent stories about men and women who were believed actually to have existed. But it must be remembered that, in those early days, very few could read and write, and that, before printing was invented, books were so scarce that ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... can invent for this strange licentiousness on the part of Victor's ancient transcribers is this:—They must have known perfectly well, (in fact it is obvious,) that the work before them was really little else but a compilation; and that Victor had already abridged in the ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... love. Often it suffices for a man to ride past them at the head of a company of artillery, or show himself at a ball in tight clothes. Sometimes a mere turn of the head, a melancholy attitude, makes them suppose a man's whole life; they'll invent a romance to match the hero—who is often a mere brute, but the marriage is made. Watch the Chevalier de Valois: study him; copy his manners; see with what ease he presents himself; he never puts on a stiff air, as you do. Talk a little more; one would really think you didn't ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... finding us alive and well. He did not think there would be any great difficulty in getting away and bringing us horses. The lleranos were still allowed to come and go pretty much as they liked, and if awkward questions were asked it would be easy to invent excuses. The best time to get away would be immediately after nightfall, when most of the foraging parties would have returned to camp and ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... was racked to invent some false story by which I could escape detection! I thought of saying that they were old ones which I had polished up so as to appear new, and I even filed down the rust on the head of an old nail to see if they would ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... the course of the ages, the wisdom of mankind might invent some language more ideally perfect than Esperanto, but we cannot afford to wait. We want a key language and we want it now. And as by general agreement of all the most competent authorities, Esperanto is the best ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various
... "are the arms of Europe, a part of the earth filled with industrious robbers, whose minds are hourly on the stretch to invent new plagues to torment each other. Of these mortals many are settled on the sea-coasts of our southern provinces, whom I shall persuade through the instigation of that god whom they worship, to join the forces ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the women had never been broken off, though the pretence of ordinary cordiality had long since been dropped. When Mrs. Morrell found it expedient to make this call, she spent several hours trying to invent a plausible excuse. She was unable to do so. Finally she gave it ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... imagin'd new: Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting time toil'd after him in vain: His pow'rful strokes presiding truth impress'd, And unresisted passion storm'd the breast. Then Jonson came, instructed from the school To please in method, and invent by rule; His studious patience and laborious art, By regular approach, assail'd the heart: Cold approbation gave the ling'ring bays; For those, who durst not censure, scarce could praise: A mortal born, he met the gen'ral doom, But left, like Egypt's kings, a lasting tomb. The wits of ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... that he had put out quite half a dozen of the bunches of fire: he had also put out the lives of the six, silly, little things who carried them. For a few swift pressures of his mighty feet had squeezed out their breath and destroyed their power to invent mischief with which to ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... "it is wonderful! It must be sent to Boston for criticism, and we must invent some way of persuading Mr. Lord to give Olive the best instruction to be had. This picture is even better than anything she has done in the painted chamber. I shouldn't wonder a bit, Nancy, if little Beulah were to be very proud of Olive ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... downward and often permanently displaced. Now, add to these errors a belt drawn snugly around the waist, and we have before us a combination of the most malignant elements of dress which it would be possible to invent. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Rebecca, driven to the wall, had to avow the reasons lying behind the sacrifice of the sunshade, her aunt said, "Now see here, Rebecca, you're too big to be whipped, and I shall never whip you; but when you think you ain't punished enough, just tell me, and I'll make out to invent a little something more. I ain't so smart as some folks, but I can do that much; and whatever it is, it'll be something that won't punish the whole family, and make 'em drink ivory dust, wood chips, and pink ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on a subject purely practical, various attempts have been made, to overthrow that system of instruction, which long use has rendered venerable, and long experience proved to be useful. But it is manifestly much easier to raise even plausible objections against this system, than to invent an other less objectionable. Such attempts have generally met the reception they deserved. Their history will give no encouragement ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... indefinable distinction of one differ from the mysterious and peculiar communication of the other?' or 'How does it appear that there is any difference?' there is no living man, I am quite sure, who can invent an ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... there," said the dame; "it's Trotting Nelly's news; and though she likes a drappie, I dinna think she would invent a lee or carry ane—at least to me, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the large drawing-room, everybody played lotto, without enjoyment, while the wind whistled madly around the house. Then they tried telling stories like those they read in books, but no one was able to invent anything amusing. The hunters told tales of wonderful shots and of the butchery of rabbits; and the women racked their brains for ideas without revealing the imagination of Scheherezade. They were about to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Organum showed the means of escape from the errors of two thousand years by means of a new method of thinking and work. Bacon did not invent the new method—it had been used since man first began to reason about phenomena, and was the method by means of which Wycliffe, Luther, Magellan, Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert had worked—but he was the first to formulate ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Angouleme at his fingers' ends; he saw all the difficulties at a glance, and resolved to sweep them out of the way by a bold stroke that only a Tartuffe's brain could invent. The puny lawyer was not a little amused to find his fellow-conspirator keeping his word with him; not a word did Petit-Claud utter; he respected the musings of his companion, and they walked the whole way from the paper-mill to the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... way of telling time, some theory he is free to work out when he is here in the middle of the ocean away from land. Be glad, Jean, that you learned to tell time properly, and that you live with people who are content to use the old method and do not set themselves up to invent a system that is a puzzle to every one ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... said Lestrange. "I mean by conscience the thing which says 'You ought!' That is what seems to me to prove the existence of God, that there is a sense of a moral law which one does not invent, and which is sometimes ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Gambier, grown old, had visibly lost nerve, and he pronounced the use of fire-ships a "horrible and unchristian mode of warfare." Lord Mulgrave, the first Lord of the Admiralty, knowing Cochrane's ingenuity and daring, sent for him, and proposed to send him to the Basque Roads to invent and execute some plan for destroying the French fleet. The Scotchman was uppermost in Cochrane in this interview, and he declined the adventure on the ground that to send a young post-captain to execute such an enterprise would ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... getting expressed in the pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch Robinson had ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... absurd procrastination of the fruits of success, where success was certain. Mr. Stelling was so broad-chested and resolute that he felt equal to anything; he would become celebrated by shaking the consciences of his hearers, and he would by and by edit a Greek play, and invent several new readings. He had not yet selected the play, for having been married little more than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with attentions to Mrs. Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... "I was so hard pushed for it, 'pon my honour, I didn't know what to say. I ain't an author, you know; I can't make a story. I was trying to invent a point, and I couldn't think of any other, and I thought that was just the point likely to make a jolly good dispute. Capital dinners they give at those crack hotels. Why did you throw it all upon me? I didn't begin on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that he could not do. He could make bridges, blow up castles, dig canals, invent a new kind of cannon, build warships, and make underground passages. In days of peace he could design and build houses, make beautiful statues and paint pictures 'as well as any man, be ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... just a fine survival of old days—the old days of which Dickens wrote—and is similar, in many respects, to what the 'White Hart' used to be. As such Dickensians have a great affection for it, and there is no need to invent stories about ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... earth was I to escape from the oppression? They were not people of the world, who would be accustomed to each person doing what they pleased. They expected to be entertained all the time. To get away from them for a moment I would be obliged to invent ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... objection to accompany us, and it is not too far for you," said Mrs. Coleman (who evidently considered me in the last stage of a decline), trotting into the breakfast-room where I was lounging, book in hand, over the fire, wondering what possible pretext I could invent for joining the ladies. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... philosopher Lorenzino for it; he had replied that he was thinking night and day of nothing else, and that he would finish it as soon as he was able. Nevertheless, I was not to set my hopes upon his reverse, but I had better invent one out of my own head, and when I had finished it, I might bring it without hesitation to the Duke, for this would ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... creator—as a realiser of types—were supreme. Many of his dramatis personae no doubt became old-fashioned in a sense; but who can deny the truth to life of the Kirk Elder, the slavey, the policeman, the fussy City man, the diner-out, the waiter (did he not invent "Robert"?), the cabman, the hen-pecked husband, the drunkard, the gillie, the Irish peasant, the schoolboy, and the Mrs. Brown of Arthur Sketchley's prosaic muse? The wealth of his limited fancy, and his power of resolving it into well-ordered design, and presenting ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the PTOLEMAIC (q. v.) system of astronomy; the old belief that the celestial bodies moved in perfect circles round the earth was found to be inadequate to explain the varying position of the planets, a difficulty which led Ptolemy to invent his theory of epicycles, which was to the effect that each planet revolved round a centre of its own, greater or less, but that all these centres themselves moved in procession round the earth, a theory which fell to pieces before the investigations ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... find some way in which he could force himself to die, to invent some device against himself, which would not permit of any hesitation on his part, any delay, any possible regrets. He envied condemned criminals who are led to the scaffold surrounded by soldiers. Oh! if he could ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... grant me that. For when I tell you where I got those pearls you may drive me from you in spite of your promise—drive me from you with the curse of the devout woman on your lips. I might invent some excuse to persuade you to fly with me from California to-night, and you would never know. But I am a man—a Spaniard—and a De la Vega. I shall not lie ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... exercise of the reasoning powers is absolutely sinful—l'homme qui raisonne est l'homme qui peche. Franklin, on the other hand, in a familiar tone of playful banter, vindicates its utility, alleging that it is mightily 'convenient to be a rational animal, who knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination to do.' Examples of this convenience abound. The Barbary Jews were rich and industrious, and, accordingly, their wealth provoke the cupidity of the indolent and avaricious Mussulmans. These latter, whenever ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve him instead of experience. We thus owe something to the staying and restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"—for his works, which are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything unlike the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... but he ought implicitly to follow Nature in the path which she has thus pointed out to him. One chief object with him should be, the cultivation of the minds of his pupils; and the only method by which he can attain success in doing so has now been stated. He must invent, or procure some exercise, or series of exercises, by which the act of "reiteration" in the minds of his pupils shall be regularly and systematically carried on.—He must induce them to think for themselves, and to exercise the ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... passed the pleasantry by. "No," he said seriously; "what you must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for marrying ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... ingenious malice could invent no deeper degradation, and the archbishop might now die. One favour was granted to him alone of all the sufferers for religion—that he might speak at his death; speak, and, like Northumberland, perish with a ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Katherine was not one of them. If it had been possible to see her lover honourably, she would have much preferred it. She was totally destitute of that contemptible sentimentality which would rather invent difficulties in a love-affair than not have them, but she knew well the storm of reproach and disapproval which would answer any such request; and her thoughts were all bent toward devising some plan which would enable her to leave ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security; a poor man ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... practical had vanished, lost in reasoning, and once more he tried to return to it. But it was like trying to see through a brick wall. No man can invent needs for others that he may supply them. To write again to Mr. Burns would be too near the begging on which he had not yet resolved. He never suspected that the parcel he had left at the carrier's house was lying there still—safe in his wife's press, under ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... and hedges in this country, tells me, that of late the demand upon him for these articles is doubled, and sometimes tripled. I have, therefore, listed Dr. Samuel Johnson in some of my memorandums of the principal planters and favourers of the enclosures, under a name which I took the liberty to invent from the Greek, Papadendrion[299]. Lord Auchinleck and some few more are of the list. I am told that one gentleman in the shire of Aberdeen, viz. Sir Archibald Grant, has planted above fifty millions of trees ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... venue expose any inhabitant of Belfast, charged with any offence against the Irish Government, to the certainty of being tried in Dublin or in Cork. If an Irish law cannot touch the law of treason or of treason-felony, the leaders of the Irish Parliament may easily invent new offences not called by these names, and the Parliament may impose severe penalties on any one who attempts by act or by speech to bring the Irish Government into contempt. A new law of sacrilege may be passed which would make criticism of the Irish priesthood, or attacks ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... painful and unpleasant impression that phrase made upon me, with every word, every letter of it, carefully written in the dead man's childish handwriting! Was it worth while, I asked myself, to invent such rubbish at such a moment? But Tyeglev had evidently been pleased with the phrase: he had made use in it of the accumulation of epithets and amplifications a la Marlinsky, at that time in fashion. Further on he had alluded to destiny, to persecution, to his vocation ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... perfectly sure that here were the would-be tenants whom his friend, in the mistaken kindness of his heart, was sending to him. Not that he had the slightest idea of renting his old home, but he dreaded the ordeal of refusing. In fact he was not sure that he could refuse, not sure that he could invent a believable excuse for doing so. Another person would not have sought excuses, would have declared simply that the property was not for rent, but Jed Winslow was not that other person; he was himself, and ordinary methods of procedure were ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the one to invent etiquette," said Patty, "I should have made party calls payable one year after date, and then should have allowed three days' grace at ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... no; her aversion increased daily, and she communicated it to the others; they treated me insolently, and him very strangely—running away whenever he came as if they saw a serpent—and plotting with their governess—a cunning Italian—how to invent lyes to make me hate him, and twenty such narrow tricks. By these means the notion of my partiality took air, and whether Miss Thrale sent him word slily or not I cannot tell, but on the 25th January, 1783, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... place must not be empty. The spot where God dwells is a place of pain; and if he drops out from the heart, there will be a wound in it, mark my word! It is necessary, Pavel, to invent a new faith; it is necessary to create a God for all. Not a judge, not a warrior, but a God who shall be ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... must never be forgotten that in its origin it is wholly Roman, and not at all Anglo-Saxon. Our people showed themselves singularly apt at embracing it, like the modern Polynesians, and unlike the American Indians; but they did not invent it for themselves. Our existing culture is not home-bred at all; it is simply the inherited and widened culture ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive. Eye-witnesses of the greater part ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... there were times too, when she felt—though always with a certain contempt of herself, as when she sat on that sunwarmed stone below the tor—a queer dissatisfaction, a longing for something outside a world where she had to invent her own starvations and simplicities, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart, and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the beautiful ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the nuisance there is, which I consider equally bad. Men, that do not absolutely interrupt you, are yet continually on the fret to do so, and undisguisedly on the fret all the time you are speaking. To invent a Latin word which ought to have been invented before my time, 'non interrumpunt at interrupturiunt.' You can't talk in peace for such people; and as to prosing, which I suppose you've a right to do by Magna Charta, it is quite out ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... darkened forest a terrific hurricane of hail and rain. This put out the fires and drove all the tormentors away but a few impish children, who stayed to pluck nails from the hands and feet of the captives and shoot arrows with barbed points at the naked bodies. Every iniquity that cruelty could invent, these children practised on the captives. Red-hot spears were brought from the lodge fires and thrust into the prisoners. The mutilated finger ends were ground between stones. Thongs were twisted round ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... must be an affair of evident largeness. It was well said, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding Nature." "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to invent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... outrageous in his demands upon the Devil, and put him to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous tasks; but they were all punctually performed, until Simon could invent no new ones, and the Devil sat all day with his hands in ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... seen a horse-yacht? Sometimes it is called a scow; but that sounds common. Sometimes it is called a house-boat; but that is too English. What does it profit a man to have a whole dictionary full of language at his service, unless he can invent a new and suggestive name for his friend's pleasure-craft? The foundation of the horse-yacht—if a thing that floats may be called fundamental—is a flat-bottomed boat, some fifty feet long and ten feet wide, with a draft of about eight inches. The deck is open for fifteen feet aft of ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... childhood that "since they could read and write they used to invent and act little plays of their own, in which the Duke of Wellington, Charlotte's hero, was sure to come off conqueror. When the argument got warm I had sometimes to come in as arbitrator." Long before Maria Bronte died, at the age of eleven, her father used to say he could converse ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... At the first, there was a spoken language only. The next stage was to get this spoken language recorded, not in audible, but in visible symbols. Why should it have been so easy and apparently natural for the old races to invent a visible form of speech-writing rather than an audible form? Why should the ancients have fallen back on the eye rather than the ear as the sense to be instructed? Why should sight-writing have been invented thousands of ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... objective life. I call it a projective life. A man who builds men, or things, for the use of men, lives in the things he builds. He has immortality in this world. A man who builds a house leaves his thought in the form of the house he builds. If he make a road, he lives in the road; if he invent a useful thing, he lives in the invention. A man may live in a ship that he has caused to be constructed, or his mind may see the form of a church, a hall, or a temple, and he may so build after what he sees that he makes ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... vapours of doubt; at another, radiant with the sun-fires of faith made perfect by fruition; it can amaze no considerative fraction of humanity, that the explorer of the indefinite, the searcher into the not-to-be-defined, should, at dreary intervals, invent dim, plastic riddles of his own identity, and hesitate at the awful shrine of that dread interrogatory alternative—reality, or dream? This deeply pondering, let the eager beginner in the at once linear and circumferent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... a phase of human history. We have looked for its significance exclusively in political and cultural regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just nonsense. As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in this: human history, the main part of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... regular right down struggle between the two. I've no patience with this Roberts, from what I 'ear he's just an ordinary workin' man like the rest of 'em. If he did invent a thing he's no worse off than 'undreds of others. My brother invented a new kind o' dumb-waiter—nobody gave him anything for it, an' there it is, bein' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... man. But of women he was tired long since, and even pancake-frying had palled upon him. What had he to do, after forty years of reign;—after having exhausted everything? Every pleasure that Dubois could invent for his hot youth, or cunning Lebel could minister to his old age, was flat and stale; used up to the very dregs: every shilling in the national purse had been squeezed out, by Pompadour and Du Barri and such brilliant ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Madame du Hausset mistakes, through ignorance, but never does she wilfully mislead, like Madame Campan, nor keep back a secret, like Madame Roland, and MM. Bezenval and Ferreires; nor is she ever betrayed by her vanity to invent, like the Due de Lauzun, MM. Talleyrand, Bertrand de Moleville, Marmontel, Madame d'Epinay, etc. When Madame du Hausset is found in contradiction with other memoirs of the same period, we should never hesitate to give her account the preference. Whoever is desirous of accurately knowing ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... not only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well: and "Pickwick" is not, by definition, a Novel at all. Hence, the next book the following year, "Oliver Twist," was important as answering the question: Was the brilliant new writer to turn out very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a tangled representation ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... to invent a story. I couldn't imagine a ghost if I wanted to. I wasn't fit to lie connectedly if I had tried. I just bulled him on to it. Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... resist their influence. The prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good, which seem opposed to ordinary justice, are their doing. The Chinese, not possessing the traditions of the Divine Age, were ignorant of this truth, and were driven to invent the theory of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... only think of some scheme!" I kept on saying to myself, as I walked back with him to our little camp; but the more I tried to invent some plan, the more hopeless it all seemed. The only idea I had was to gather our men together in two bodies, to be hidden among the trees, half on one side of the plain, half on the other, and one of those parties to attack and try to surprise the troop when they came near, when, ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... re-conduct wandering mortals back to nature; who is desirous to place them upon the road of experience; who is anxious that they should actively employ their reason. He is a thinker, who, having meditated upon matter, its energies, its properties, its modes of acting, hath no occasion to invent ideal powers, to recur to imaginary systems, in order to explain the phenomena of the universe—to develope the operations of nature; who needs not creatures of the imagination, which far from making ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... thence. You shall observe nothing more frequent in their weekly papers than a way of affecting to confound the terms of Clergy and High Church, of applying both indifferently, and then loading the latter with all the calumny they can invent. They will tell you they honour a clergyman; but talk, at the same time, as if there were not three in the kingdom, who could fall in with their definition.[4] After the like manner they insult the universities, as poisoned fountains, and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... with girls or boys driving, boats sailing in the air, seemingly propelled by oars, and hobby horses flying round on whirligigs with boys vainly trying to catch each other. No people have ever taken the trouble to invent so many amusements for children as have the French. The people enjoyed being always in the open air, night and day. The parks are crowded with amusement seekers, some reading and playing games, some sewing, knitting, playing on musical instruments, dancing, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... known that. (I am assuming that it is Ethelberta—Mrs. Petherwin—who sends it: of course I am not sure.) We must remember that when I knew her I was a gentleman at ease, who had not the least notion that I should have to work for a living, and not only so, but should have first to invent a profession to work at out of ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... added John, "you know that I couldn't invent a story, to save my life. I've no fancy at all; and have made up my mind, as I can't be agreeable, that I'll at least be useful. Everybody ought to ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... most part, the obvious rules which have been the common property of all generations of critics. One would scarcely ask for originality in such a case, any more than one would desire a writer on ethics to invent new laws of morality. "We require neither Pope nor Aristotle to tell us that critics should not be pert nor prejudiced; that fancy should be regulated by judgment; that apparent facility comes by long training; that the sound should have some conformity to the meaning; that genius is often envied; ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... to invent ingenious speeches to Carteret and to her father. Hatch ingenious schemes and pretty plots—in the style of dear Aunt Felicia almost!—Was that lady's peace-making passion infectious, by chance? And supposing it were, hadn't ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Scouts can readily invent a whistle code of their own. The Western Indians used whistles of bone, in war, and the United States Army can drill ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... old kind, I meant, my dear;" resumed the little man. "What I mean is to invent a religion that is new and novel, has something broad and attractive in it, and that people of a curious turn of mind would pay for enjoying. That's the kind of religion that pays, you see. And if we could put the church on its feet again with something of that kind. It's the propensity people have ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... criticism on Wallace and Weismann. It is in allusion to the misnomer of Wallace's book, "Darwinism," that he introduces the term "Wallaceism" {0d} for a theory of descent that excludes the transmission of acquired characters. This was, indeed, the chief factor that led Charles Darwin to invent his hypothesis of pangenesis, which, unacceptable as it has proved, had far more to recommend it as a formal hypothesis than the equally formal germ-plasm hypothesis ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... up, in lieu of reading matter, from the table in your dentist's waiting room, first broke into the paradise of the society column by way of this resort. For a woman with money and the press-agent type of mind it is not a difficult thing to accomplish. One must think of sensational things to do—invent a new fad in dress, or send one's dog riding each day in a special wheel chair, or bring down one's own private dancing instructor or golf instructor at $5,000 for the season. Above all, one must be nice to the correspondents of newspapers. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... where such correspondence of position has constantly to be spoken of, it is denoted by the word "homology" and its derivatives; and for Geology (which after all is only the anatomy and physiology of the earth) it might be well to invent some single word, such as "homotaxis" (similarity of order), in order to express an essentially similar idea. This, however, has not been done, and most probably the inquiry will at once be made—To what end burden science with ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... man in New York to whom he felt he could turn in his dilemma, and that was Ned Buntline. One who could invent plots for stories, and extricate his characters from all sorts of embarrassing situations, should be able to invent a method of escape from so comparatively simple a perplexity as a tavern bill. Will's confidence in the wits of his friend ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... parts, or fasciculi: they are bound in one volume, quarto, 1787, &c.; but, unfortunately for those who love curious and carefully executed works, it is rather rare in this country. The Notitia Historico-Critica de libris ab art typog. invent., by PLACID BRAUN, in two parts, or volumes, 1788, 4to., with curious plates, has long been a desideratum in my own collection; and my friend Mr. Beloe, who is luckily in possession of a copy, enjoys his triumph over me when he discovers it not in my bibliographical ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... my neighbour Mrs. Jones to me one day, "what shall I do for good help? I am almost worried out of my senses. I wish somebody would invent a machine to cook, wash, scrub, and do housework in general. What a blessing it would be! As for the whole tribe of flesh and blood domestics, they are not worth ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... stove." In searching the Scriptures I used the very best spiritual telescopes in my possession, and gladly availed myself of all discoveries of divine truths made by profounder intellects and keener visions than my own; but I leave this self-styled "advanced age" to invent its own comets, and ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... closed. Receding steps sounded in the corridor outside. Irene reeled back to her chair and sat down. A moment later Buckton appeared. He was ghastly pale, trying to recover calmness and invent a plausible explanation as to why he had been called to the door. She gazed ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben |
