"Perpetual motion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period. It possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected with the experiments—the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown by Professor Wise and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was half Italian, (being glad of coming out of little Barbary, and a universal tippling-house,) I would take no notice of it; being well satisfied, that the mathematicians of our times can no where find out the perpetual motion so well as here, where the goblets of Germans are an evident demonstration of its possibility—they think they cannot make good cheer, nor permit friendship or fraternity, as they call it, with any, without giving the seal brimful of ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... universe, we have running through them all the principle of the conservation of motion, which is to matter the source of all its activities, energies, and powers. Motion, therefore, might almost be said to be eternal. We have heard from time to time of the term perpetual motion. Philosophers have from time to time endeavoured to discover some application of this perpetual motion, but all efforts in this direction up to the present have proved futile. In one sense there is no such thing as perpetual motion. In another sense, that is from the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... tradition is handed down by Berthold that the moon is Mary Magdalene, and the spots her tears of repentance. [63] Fontenelle, the French poet and philosopher, saw a woman in the moon's changes. "Everything," he says, "is in perpetual motion; even including a certain young lady in the moon, who was seen with a telescope about forty years ago, everything has considerably aged. She had a pretty good face, but her cheeks are now sunken, her nose is ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Dr Thomas Young demonstrated that certain curved surfaces suspended by a thread moved into and not away from a horizontal current of air, but the demonstration, which approaches perilously near to perpetual motion if the current be truly horizontal, has never been successfully repeated, so that there is more than a suspicion that Young's air-current was NOT horizontal. Others had made and were making experiments on the resistance offered to the air by flat surfaces, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is only the discoverer; they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by means of the empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the bodies that move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these three accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... friends, who rejoiced to see that the Honourable Tom Dashall was again to be numbered among the votaries of Real Life in London; while the young squire, whose visionary orbs appeared to be in perpetual motion, dazzled with the splendid equipages of the moving panorama, was absorbed in reflections ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of Apician food preparation become plain and clear in the light of social evolution. "Evolution" is perhaps not the right word to convey our idea of social perpetual motion. ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... Ixion wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer tortures unimagined even by the High Gods. Compared with it our degrading experience on the sands seven years ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster for doing right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha'd, and that leaped and danced—perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked—has been reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness that was bland or proper, and goodness that was pious or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My God to Thee," or goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness with ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... vibrates to the neighbour ear, On the still bosom of the air Is borne and heard distinctly there— 190 The palace of an ancient dame Whom men as well as gods call Fame. A prattling gossip, on whose tongue Proof of perpetual motion hung, Whose lungs in strength all lungs surpass, Like her own trumpet made of brass; Who with an hundred pair of eyes The vain attacks of sleep defies; Who with an hundred pair of wings News from the furthest quarters brings, 200 Sees, hears, and tells, untold before, All ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... of value, no standard of value," it said in its conclusions; "economic science tells us this, just as mathematical science tells us that there is no perpetual motion or quadrature of the circle, and that these never will be found. Now, if there is no standard of value, if the measure of value is not even a metaphysical illusion, what then is the law which governs exchanges? . . . . . As we have said before, it is, in a general way, SUPPLY and DEMAND: that ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... he felt a presentiment that something was about to happen. He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his. He coughed slightly, and two streams of blood issued from the corners of his mouth and flowed upon his night robe; his hands ceased their perpetual motion; he had breathed his last. His wife, perceiving it, uttered a cry and fell upon her knees by the bedside. Georges, in surprise and affright, mechanically made the sign of ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... as a perpetual motion scheme, of course, is not worthy of serious notice from a society devoted to science. It has no noteworthy novelty of construction or conception. Mr. Gary is afflicted with the very old delusion of the cut-off or shield of magnetism, which is to cost less than what comes from it. His cut-off is ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... the place assigned to it by Adams. But anyone in the situation of the astronomer-royal knows that almost every post brings absurd letters from ambitious correspondents, some of them having just discovered perpetual motion, or squared the circle, or proved the earth flat, or discovered the constitution of the moon or of ether or of electricity; and in this mass of rubbish it requires great skill and patience to detect such gems of value as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... flagging spirits, weak to quiet them down. He took Bohea with his facts, and Hyson with his fancy, and mixed them to secure the necessary afflatus to write his books of science and travel. Upon Hyson he would have attempted the Iliad, upon Bohea he would undertake to square the circle, discover perpetual motion, or reform the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... be employed in whatever mode his will shall decide. I bar the case of travelling, or any of those schemes for passing the day, which by their very nature take the election out of his hands, and fill up his time with a perpetual motion, the nature of which is ascertained from ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... presented, we have with much deliberation concluded to denounce Bernal Diaz as a myth." For the evidence here promised we have searched with a patience of investigation which, if applied to the problem of perpetual motion or squaring the circle, could not, we humbly think, have been wholly unproductive; and these are the results. "The author of 'Bernal Diaz' says the march to Jalapa was accomplished in one day;—a proof that he never saw the country.... ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... had been consummated it would have borne to "frenzied finance" the same relationship that perpetual motion does to mechanics. By it a few men could gamble forever with the entire assets of the policy-holders of this corporation for their own personal benefit. If my readers will imagine the same scheme applied to several other great insurance companies ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... stool of office in the doctor's consulting room, swinging his legs. Would-be discoverers of perpetual motion might have received many hints from Bubble, though he himself would have scorned to consider the swinging of legs as motion. He was under the delusion that he was sitting perfectly still. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... whole "czimbalom" playing is such a jest, so grotesque; the player's arms jerk and wave continuously; his whole shoulder and head are in perpetual motion; whereas, with the piano, the five fingers do all; the artist's relation to the piano is that of my lord to his children, whom he addresses from a far-off height; the czimbalom-player is "per tu" with ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... and the finest Mechlin lace, addressed most of her discourse to her sister, that she might have the pleasure every minute of uttering 'Your ladyship,' in order to show what she herself expected. And as she spoke, her fingers were in perpetual motion, either adjusting her tucker, placing her plaits of her robe, or fiddling with a diamond cross, that hung down on her bosom, her eyes accompanying her fingers as they moved, and then suddenly being snatched off, that she might not be observed to think of her own dress; yet was it plain, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... Bath chairman. His face was rather inclined to be handsome; the features regular, a pleasant smile upon his lips, and a deep dimple in his chin. But his most remarkable feature was his eye; it was small, but piercing, and seemed to possess that long-sought desideratum of the perpetual motion, since it was utterly impossible to fix it for one moment on any object: and there was in it a lurking expression, which, though something of a physiognomist, I could not ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... netts a clear six per cent. on his farm, and I think you will allow that he may go to bed at night with little fear of the nightmare of a starving labourer disturbing his slumbers. Not that he troubles sleep much, for he is the nearest thing to perpetual motion I ever saw, not excepting even the armadillo at the Zoological Gardens, and he has more "irons in the fire" than there ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... secrets of Nature is a passion with all men; only we select different lines of research. Men have spent long lives in such attempts as to turn the baser metals into gold, to discover perpetual motion, to find a cure for certain malignant diseases, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... trick of dropping his eyes to his boots. When he raised them, the effect was to alter his whole expression. His eyes, well-open, keenly observant, in perpetual motion, lent an air of alertness, of shrewdness, ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... were deaf to truth, and knew not that one good man counts for more than thousands; but he held the existing order in no superstitious reverence. Strife, he says, is the source and the master of all things. Life is perpetual motion, and repose is death. No man can plunge twice into the same current, for it is always flowing and passing, and is never the same. The only thing fixed and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... propensities were more active, and in the days before I entered my teens I used always to reply to similar demands, that I would be a "king's messenger"! I knew no other life which approached so nearly to perpetual motion. "The road" was my paradise, and it is a true saying that the child is father to the man. The Shakespearian passage which earliest impressed my childish mind and carried with it my heartiest sympathies was the song of ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... you what I'll do. You go out there and look over his setup. If you can't find his gimmick in half a day, I'll come out and show it to you. But I warn you, some of these things are very tricky—like the old perpetual motion machines. You've got to have your wits about you. Is that ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... silken side gliding in and out snakewise, and only his fierce eyes burning bright with gleaming flashes between the gloom of the jungle. Once I had seen him, I could follow with ease his sinuous path among the tangled bamboos, a waving line of beauty in perpetual motion. The Maharajah followed him too, with his keen eyes, and pointed his rifle hastily. But, quick as he was, Lord Southminster was before him. I had half expected to find the pea-green young man turn coward at the last moment; but in that I was mistaken: I will do him the justice to say, whatever ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... to the enemy (deep-mine water) as it is. There can't a drowned-out mine peep its head out but I'm thrust upon it. Well, well, it always was the trick of my countrymen to make a good thing too common. Better rust to death than be scoured to nothing by this perpetual motion." ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... road: it does not return through these tubes, but through softer ones, called veins. Thus far he could go, and the story of the "circulation" of the blood is very interesting; but the cause of the heart's perpetual motion, and the blood's continuous flow, this ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... a philosopher is no longer a savant: he is a talker. Legislators and poets were once profound and sublime characters: now they are talkers. A talker is a sonorous bell, whom the least shock suffices to set in perpetual motion. With the talker, the flow of speech is always directly proportional to the poverty of thought. Talkers govern the world; they stun us, they bore us, they worry us, they suck our blood, and laugh at us. As for the savants, they keep silence: if they ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology. "It is proper, however," Fontenelle remarks, "to apply one's self to these inquiries; because we find, as we proceed, many valuable discoveries of which we were before ignorant." The same thought Cowley has applied, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to witness their violation at any moment and to remain unastonished. For see, if the compass lied and the sun did not keep its engagements, why should not objects lose their mutual attraction and why should not a few bushel baskets of force be annihilated? Even perpetual motion became possible, and I was in a frame of mind prone to purchase Keeley- Motor stock from the first enterprising agent that landed on the Snark's deck. And when I discovered that the earth really rotated on its axis 366 times a year, while ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... USE OF LEVER.—This lack of knowledge of first principles, has bred and is now breeding, so-called perpetual motion inventors (?) all over the civilized world. It is surprising how many men, to say nothing of boys, actually believe that power can be made without the expenditure of something ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... of Ensal's bewildered state of mind is a problem to be handed over to the type of man engaged in the search for perpetual motion and does not come within the purview of a simple author. Man who tames the lion, harnesses the winds, makes a whimperer of steam and cowers the lightning—this same vainglorious, triumphant man is simply helpless in the presence of a woman's tears! Ensal stole quietly to his seat and ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... excess; but her chief attribute is her tongue, which has solved the secret of perpetual motion. Had it kept silent even for a few seconds at lunch time today, that sharp-eyed and rabbit-eared detective would never have known of the second picture—your picture—because I can eke out my exhibits by ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... permission to go into an inner chamber and see her mother. It was granted, and we went into a sort of saloon, over-looking the Neckar; very small, very bright, and very close. The floor was slippery with polish; long narrow pieces of looking-glass against the walls reflected the perpetual motion of the river opposite; a white porcelain stove, with some old-fashioned ornaments of brass about it; a sofa, covered with Utrecht velvet, a table before it, and a piece of worsted-worked carpet under it; a vase of artificial flowers; and, lastly, an alcove with a bed in ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... will be that we shall no longer waste our time over the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only one course is open to us. We must refer to Environment. The natural life owes all to Environment, so must the spiritual. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... head, whilst warmer currents, rising from our bodies and coming into contact with the cold glass, impart to it their excess of heat. Being thus contracted in bulk, and rendered specifically heavier, they in their turn descend, and thus a perpetual motion is kept up in the mass of air. This effect is attended with much inconvenience to those who inhabit the room, and is in great measure prevented by the use of double windows, which prevent the rapid cooling and production of troublesome ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... directly behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and incessantly on perpetual motion—to all of this he paid not the slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in the bottom of the sea. He got ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents. And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another world; it gives fresh views of the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... and great anticipations were cherished of a golden age about to dawn upon Austria. "His toilet," writes one of his eulogists, "is that of a common soldier, his wardrobe that of a sergeant, business his recreation, and his life perpetual motion." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... grass so vivid and shiny, nor air so soft. Above her head the cherry-buds were swelling, almost ready to burst. From the open windows of the house, down the street, sounds from a patient piano, flattered by distance, betokened that Kitty Allen was struggling with "Perpetual Motion"; Missy, who had finished her struggles with that abomination-to-beginners a month previously felt her sense ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... globe, wherein he blew or made a perpetual motion by the power of the four elements. For every thing which (by the force of the elements) passes, in a year, on the surface of the earth (sic!) could be seen to pass in this cylindrical wonder in the shorter ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... our heads instead of our heels, and cite our baldness as proof, there are persons who would believe him. It has been urged that flight to the moon in an aeroplane is possible—the want of air is no hindrance! The belief in perpetual motion is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes charm birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake-skin will "charm" birds also—the bird is ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Daffy. They'd put it in the eccentric section of a library, with books on perpetual motion and the fourth dimension. But if you'd let ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... is on the whole a general tendency for the denser matter to settle towards the centre. The conditions are much like those which obtain in a bucket of water which contains in suspension a number of kinds of matter of different degrees of density. Since the water is kept in perpetual motion, the different kinds of matter are diffused through it; but in spite of that, the densest matter is found in greatest quantity nearest to the bottom. So that though we must not at all think of the various subdivisions of the astral world as lying above one another as do the coats ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... scheme, as might have been expected, others just as wild arose. A company was formed with ten million dollars of capital for importing walnut trees from Virginia. A company for developing a wheel to go by perpetual motion, with a capital of four million dollars. A company for developing a new kind of soap. A company for insuring against losses by servants, with fifteen million dollars capital. One scheme was entitled: "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... head-dress of Miss Folly—for this was she—was still more peculiar than her figure. An immense plume of peacock's feathers stuck upright in her frizzled red hair, which was all drawn back from her forehead, to show as much as possible of her face. Her great goggle eyes were rolling about with a perpetual motion to match that of her tongue; and her cheeks, rouged till they looked like peonies, were dotted over with black bits of plaster. I don't know, dear reader, whether Miss Folly be an acquaintance of yours; if ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... outer temple the noise, confusion, and perpetual motion, are bewildering. Crowds on clattering clogs pass in and out; pigeons, of which hundreds live in the porch, fly over your head, and the whirring of their wings mingles with the tinkling of bells, the beating of drums and gongs, the high-pitched ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... in a moment. The stillness of the vessel, after its perpetual motion, gave her an odd sensation, not unlike what she had felt when it first began to move; but she was quickly dressed and on deck. There were a good many people there, and the water all round was alive with boats and shipping of every description, but Lucia's eyes naturally turned ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get an idea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced on its needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall not go on tilting forever, it is because something is wrong with the mechanism of the world ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... squat, red-faced, crowds the erratic scholar. A third. The rain is bringing them in in numbers. These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities—the old-book store is suddenly alive with ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... perpetual motion, this conflict, these great thrills of movement, we are to find the source of the clays which cover a large part of our globe to a depth of hundreds of feet. Where are those exposures of granite on the face of the earth from which ice or water ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... produce. It was also the crop that brought the largest returns in the shortest time. Wheat raising was merely a summer's job, with a prospective winter's outing in some city center. It was and is still the lazy farmer's trick. It was an effort similar to that of attempting the invention of a perpetual motion machine; it was an attempt, if not to get something for nothing, at least to get something at the lowest cost, regardless of the future. But nature cannot be cheated, and the modern farmer has learned or is learning rapidly, that he must rotate and diversify his ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... centres. A tall sophomore reached up confidently to grab it, but she found her hands empty. T. Reed had jumped at it and batted it off sidewise. Then she had slipped under Cornelia Thompson's famous "perpetual motion" elbow, and was on hand to capture the ball again when it bounced out from under a confused mass of homes and centres who were struggling over it on the freshman line. The freshmen clapped riotously. The sophomores looked at each other. Freshman teams were always rattled, and ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... hospitable thoughts and providing something agreeable in the shape of an entertainment for every night. Every moment of the day, too, of every day was filled up. It seemed to Mrs. Ketchum that "those English people," as she called them, were never idle, and had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... sentiments. It will indeed be replied, that I am not a competent judge; that pleasure is incompatible with pain; that joy is excluded from sickness; and that the felicity of a schoolboy consists in the perpetual motion of thoughtless and playful agility, in which I was never qualified to excel. My name, it is most true, could never be enrolled among the sprightly race, the idle progeny of Eton ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... this case, just as it is in the utilisation of waterfalls situated far from the busy mart and factory. Hardly any natural source of power presents so near an approach to constancy as the ocean billows. Shakespeare takes as his emblem of perpetual motion the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... this mischief? Look at Leland. He is in perpetual motion. Reading, writing, walking the streets, he is always fast, in dead earnest. Somewhat too fast. There is a certain slowness about your strong man. You never associate the idea of mental depth and power with your quick-stepping man. You cannot conceive of a Roman emperor or a Daniel Webster as ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... to their own statements. One thing I will concede is, that the Republicans and gold standard Democrats are certainly on their past statements entitled to the $1,000,000 offered by the United States patent office for the invention of a perpetual motion, would not they have a complete and perpetual motion in their bank issuing money with the Government completely separate from the banking business, for we see the bank issue would be made of paper, so we have the perpetual motion in this simple problem. Rags make paper, paper ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,— stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the happy hit and to explain it to ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... full of the vagaries of this class of organizations. I hope to refer to this work hereafter, but just now I will only say that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of those ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of figure, by the continual collision of bodies. In a material world the acting powers must be material: in a whole every part of which is essentially in motion, there is no occasion for a power distinguished from itself; the whole must be in perpetual motion by its own peculiar energy. The general motion, as we have elsewhere proved, has its birth from the individual motion, which beings ever active must uninterruptedly communicate to each other. Thus every ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her censurers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... are in favour of it to show us its visible result. Europe is not at this moment, so far as I know, speaking of it broadly, and making allowance for certain improvements in its general civilization, more free politically than it was before. The balance of power is like perpetual motion, or any of those impossible things which some men are always racking their brains and spending their time and money ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... jewelry and novelties on the street corners may net a living income in large cities to those who are experienced in such work, usually called "faking." It is not at all probable that it could be made a profitable calling in Texas.—X.Y.Z. Perpetual motion stands at the head of the absolute impossibilities of life; therefore, the government has never offered a prize for the solution of this mythical problem.—RANGER. Nitro-glycerine is one of the most dangerous ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... crowded with variety of knowledge, and heated with intenseness of thought; it proceeds often from the consciousness of uncommon powers, from the confidence of those, who having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... pony jogged over the bridge in Lynde's Hollow and along the Green Gables lane. Marilla's face was rather grim. It was ten miles from East Grafton and Davy Keith seemed to be possessed with a passion for perpetual motion. It was beyond Marilla's power to make him sit still and she had been in an agony the whole way lest he fall over the back of the wagon and break his neck, or tumble over the dashboard under the pony's heels. In despair she finally threatened ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... disqualified them. They danced the "tango," and the "bango," and the "flango," and all the "light fantastics" until their feet went on strike, and their ear drums had become phonographic and reproduced the music with a perpetual motion which could not be stopped. Every lady was eager to reveal the dancing secrets to mine host, and before the evening was over he could waltz, tango, and do many ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... surgeon rose quickly, as if to take note of the tapestries and count the rafters, but gained the door before anyone else, and relaxing his sphincter in advance, he hummed a tune on his way to the retreat; arrived there he was compelled, like La Balue, to murmur words of excuse to this student of perpetual motion, shutting the door with as promptitude as he opened it; and he came back burdened with an accumulation which seriously impeded his private channels. And in the same way went to guests one after the other, without being able to unburden ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... since that a certain ancestor—or was he only a great-uncle?—I forget—had a taste for mechanics, even to the craze of the perpetual motion, and could work well in brass and iron. The creature was probably some invention of his. It was a real marvel how, after so many years of idleness, it could now go as it did. I confess, as I contemplate the thing, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... we are getting! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished, though we do sometimes pause for a few moments in our long forced march to watch the labours of some pale mechanician, seeking after perpetual motion, and indulge in a little, dry, cackling laugh at his expense." And again: "For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shamefaced to hide itself in dim churches flourishes greatly, filling the soul with ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Moon Hoax. Do none of you remember the Hydrarchos Sillimannii, that awful Alabama snake? It was only a little while ago that a grave account appeared in a newspaper of a whole new business of compressing ice. Perpetual motion has been the dream of scientific visionaries, and a pretended but cheating realization of it has been exhibited by scamp after scamp. I understand that one is at this moment being invented over in Jersey City. I have purchased more than one "perpetual motion" myself. Many persons will remember ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... suspicious of easy solutions. He stands aloof from men who claim to have found the panacea and regards men of such abounding enthusiasm as belonging to the same group of the pathetically deluded as the believers in the machine of perpetual motion. The farmer keeps the greatest distance from day dreaming and can never have charged against him as a characteristic fault that menace of self-supporting fancy which is so insidious in its attack upon the mental wholesomeness of ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... building resounded heavy thuds and the din of grinding as of machinery in perpetual motion which made the very foundations of the rocks quiver. On the bridge stood another armed man with whom the new arrivals exchanged watchwords and the same thing was done at the door of the stone building where the old man made ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... summed up a whole doctrine in a sign, a whole series of tendencies and revelations in a word. What was the object of the aspirants to knowledge? They sought for the secret of the great work, or the Philosophal Stone, or the perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle, or the universal medicine; formulas which often saved them from persecution and general ill-will, by exposing them to the charge of folly; and each of which expressed one of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... alone in this wretched country, peddling beeswax and eggs for hog and hominy, chills and fever; but I was once a schoolmaster with $1,200 a year, down in Connecticut; wine and women did it. But,' said he, 'I'll be rich yet—I've got it—I've discovered perpetual motion, and the world ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Another poor sufferer shows his first symptom by having his wife's relations come and live with him. One ends in the asylum and t'other in the poorhouse; that's the main difference in them cases. Jim Jones fiddles with perpetual motion and Sam Smith develops a sure plan for busting Wall Street and getting rich sudden. I take summer boarders maybe, and you collect postage stamps. Oh, we're all looney, more or less, every one ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Sin Saxon say, "and then let go. That was his idea. Well! Only it seems to me there's been especial pains taken to show us it can't be done. Or else, why don't they find out perpetual motion? Everything stops after a while, unless—I can't talk theologically, but I mean all right—you ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the establishment of a company "to make deal boards out of saw-dust." This is no doubt intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to shew that dozens of schemes, hardly a whit more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... afforded unusual facility. There was, however, but a limited supply of heads willing to be fingered, and Maurice returned to the most abiding of his tastes, and in an empty room at the Old Court laboured assiduously to find the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... single line out of thousands all equally full of light. Before us, Saint Paul said, 'In Deo vivimus movemur et sumus.' In our day, less believing and more learned, or better instructed and more sceptical, we should ask the Apostle, 'To what end this perpetual motion? Whither leads this life divided into zones? Wherefore an intelligence that begins with the obscure perfection of marble and proceeds from sphere to sphere up to man, up to the angel, up to God? Where is the Fount, where is the ocean, if life, attaining to God across worlds and ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... opinions of the world, voiced by those generally acknowledged to be the best exponents of the art—experiments carried on amid a storm of jeers and derision, almost as contemptuous as if the search were for the discovery of perpetual motion. In this we see the man foreshadowed by the boy who, when he obtained his books on chemistry or physics, did not accept any statement of fact or experiment therein, but worked out every one of them himself to ascertain whether or ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... 'tan't one thing it's another—cookin', washin', ironin', making butter and cheese, and 'tween spells cuttin' and sewin', and if she ain't doin' that, why, she's braidin' straw to sell to the store or knitting—she's the perpetual motion ready found, ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... want it three times a day and all the time. So he kept up a fidget, and a struggle, and a turning over, and he gave the whale no time to assimilate him. The man knew that if he was ever to get out he must be in perpetual motion. We know men that are so lethargic they would have given the matter up, and lain down so quietly that in a few hours they would have gone into flukes and fish bones, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... in common with several other Army Corps in a grand march; our Division, with its two ambulances; our General with his five,—and our proportionate number of pack horses and mules. The obstinacy of the latter animal was sorely punished by the apparent effort during that march to teach it perpetual motion. Halt the Division did statedly, but there was no rest for the poor mule. Experience had taught its driver that the beast would take advantage of the halt to lie down, and when once down no amount of tugging ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... he assimilates his life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in jumping down ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... surrounding the world a void which contains the world; that there could be no such thing as Time unless there is a soul, for time being the number of motion, number is impossible except there be one who numbers; that, perpetual motion in a finite right line being impossible, but in a curvilinear path possible, the world, which is limited and ever in motion, must be of a spherical form; that the earth is its central part, the heavens the circumferential: hence the heaven is nearest ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... no farther. Now it is demonstrated, that all Body must necessarily be finite; and consequently, that Power which is in Body is finite too. If therefore we can find any Power, which produces an Infinite Effect, 'tis plain that it is not in Body. Now we find, that the Heav'n is mov'd about with a Perpetual Motion, without any Cessation. Therefore if we affirm the Eternity of the World, it necessarily follows that the Power which moves it, is not in its own Body, nor in the other Exterior Body; but proceeds from something altogether abstracted ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... floor, and under it on each side stretched two long hobs or chimney corner seats, on which nearly a dozen persons could sit of a winter evening. Mrs. Burke, a smart, good-looking little woman, though somewhat advanced in years, kept passing in a kind of perpetual motion from one part of the house to the other, with a large bunch of bright keys jingling at one side, and a huge house-wife pocket, with a round pin-cushion dangling beside it, at the other. Jemmy Burke himself, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... though it subsequently became known that Professor Langley was still secretly at work on a machine for the United States Government. The public, discouraged by the failures and tragedies just witnessed, considered flight beyond the reach of man, and classed its adherents with the inventors of perpetual motion. ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... of the body produced in muscular action, perspiration, and various secretions, is made up for by the constant supply of nutritive matter to the blood by the absorbents, and by the action of the heart the blood is preserved in perpetual motion through every part of the body. In the lungs, or bronchia, the venous blood is exposed to the influence of air and undergoes a remarkable change, being converted into arterial blood. The obvious chemical alteration of the air is sufficiently simple in this process: a certain quantity of carbon ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... present sadly deficient. I will place Abscissa's hand in yours whenever you shall come before me and square the circle to my satisfaction. No! That is too easy a condition. I should cheat myself. Say perpetual motion. How do you like that? Do you think it lies within the range of your mental capabilities? You don't smile. Perhaps your talents don't run in the way of perpetual motion. Several people have found that theirs didn't. I'll give you another ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... things which you doubt. You are told that some one has discovered perpetual motion. You smile, and do not believe it. You doubt. Doubt is simply the opposite ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... shall conquer the world," boasts Lenine. If he needs a few more he can get them at the Patent Office in Washington, which is packed with plans and specifications of perpetual motion machines and other contraptions as unworkable ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... o'er, To dispatch in an hour some visits a score; Though, since first on the wheels, I've been every day At the 'Change, at a raffling, at church, or a play; And the fops of the town are pleased with the notion Of calling your slave the perpetual motion;— Though oft at your door I have whined [out] my love As my Knight does grin his at your Lady above; Yet, ne'er before this, though I used all my care, I e'er was so happy to meet my dear Chair; And since we're so near, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... remember a sudden and apparently unexplained change of mood in going into some room. One can learn a deal by analyzing one's own sensations. Figured wall-papers should also be chosen with the greatest care for this same reason. Papers which have perpetual motion in their design, or eyes which seem to peer, or an unstable pattern of gold running over it, must all be ignored. People who choose this kind of paper are blest, or cursed, whichever way one looks at it, by ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... found nearer home a better illustration of the work that is never done, that has no inspiration to lighten it and looks for no appreciation to glorify it, in the Woman with a Broom." "She is understudy to a perpetual motion machine," was one of her epigrams. She referred to the many successful business and professional women at the convention ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... things man is destined never to solve—perpetual motion, the square of the circle, and the heart of a woman. Yet he may go a little way into the labyrinth with the thread of love, which his Ariadne will gladly ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... philosophy culminated in the system of Hegel. There for the first time—and herein consists its merit—the whole natural, historic, and intellectual world was presented as a process, i. e., engaged in perpetual motion, change, transformation and development. Viewed from this standpoint, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild tangle of senseless deeds of violence, all equally to be rejected by a ripened philosophic judgment, and which it were best to forget as soon as possible, but as the process ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... bodies from twig to twig in the shrubbery, hanging head downward, like a nuthatch, and most industriously feeding every second upon the tiny insects and larvae hidden beneath the bark and leaves. They seem to be the feathered expression of perpetual motion. And how dainty and charming these tiny sprites are! They are not at all shy; you may approach them quite close if you will, for the birds are simply too intent on their business ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... great poverty, as always happens, and to all eternity will happen, to alchemists, the would-be creators of gold and silver, and to engineers who would have dead water stir itself into life and perpetual motion, and to those supreme fools, the necromancer and the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci |
