"Plasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a mechanism determined by the nature of each species, and ends in creations of special kinds. However, variations of instinct, its adaptation to various conditions, show that the conditions of the determinism are less simple, that the creative activity is endowed with a certain plasticity. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... poetry is full of philosophy, but is so sensuous and musical that we miss its thoughts; Browning is too subtle a thinker to be a musician. The complexity of poetry is the source of its strength, lending it something of the inwardness of music and the plasticity of the pictorial arts; but is also the source of its weakness. Seldom does it achieve the technical purity and perfection of music and painting and sculpture. Music has a clear and simple medium, painting and sculpture work with colors and forms which almost are what ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... The plasticity of the world as it appears to the mind of the poet is clearly evidenced by the swarm of images which present themselves to the poet's consciousness. In the re-presentation of these pictures to us the poet is forced, of course, to use verbal images. The precise ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of the ruling passion of self-interest, keeping men of far greater abilities to play like puppets, and despising those whom it has brought down to its own level. The petty fixed idea naturally prevails; it has the advantage of persistence over the plasticity ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief, "that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines of irrigation." If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organization which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... even feel inclined to write every day. We are reading together the Divina Commedia,—or rather, its last part. There was a time when I felt more attracted by the awful plasticity of the Inferno. Now I like to plunge into the luminous mist, peopled with still more luminous spirits, of the Dantesque heaven. At times it seems as if amid all that radiance I see the dear, familiar features, and my sorrow becomes almost sweet to me. I ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity. It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of infancy there came the first dawning of a conscious life similar in nature to the conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... things in their attitudes; He puts to-day out of himself, with plasticity and love; He places his own city, times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest never shame them afterward, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman |
