"Potency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... emanate upon us from the dumb forms of nature. All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to have burned out. One recalls the notion of Herodotus that he is grown feeble, and retreats to the south because he can no longer face the cold and the storms from the north. There is a growing potency about his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them in fall. One is the kindling fire, the other ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... revolutionary, perhaps more so, than those that have sprung from steam and electricity. "Canst thou send lightnings to say 'Lo, here I am'?" silenced man. It was so obviously beyond his power until last century. Now he smiles as he reads the question. Is Tyndal's prophecy to be verified that "the potency of all things is yet ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... I endeavor to dig in, and thus render all assistance in my power, yet I feel little to encourage me here in good works. Would it not be wise to test the potency of prayer? Verily the prayer ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of to-day, with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long as there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge from ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should have such potency! But, let us walk on, or my father will take us for some of the standing stones of the moor. How have you found your aunt? If you only knew the cares that have sat on her dear shoulders for the last week past, in order that your high mightyness might have a sufficiency ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... grades. This differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the consequent inheritance of gentility. With the inheritance of gentility goes the inheritance of obligatory leisure; and gentility of a sufficient potency to entail a life of leisure may be inherited without the complement of wealth required to maintain a dignified leisure. Gentle blood may be transmitted without goods enough to afford a reputably free consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of impecunious ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... practice; and hence one advantage, at least, of Hahnemann's methods. Stated briefly, his theory was that if a tincture be reduced to one-fiftieth in strength, and this again reduced to one-fiftieth, and this process repeated up to thirty such dilutions, the potency of such a medicine will be increased by each dilution, Hahnemann himself preferring the weakest, or, as he would call it, the strongest dilution. The absurdity of such a theory is apparent when it is understood that long before any drug has been raised to its thirtieth ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... The crisis is interesting because it set sharply against one another the principles of monarchy and nationality; and the sequel proved that the national idea, though still far from mature even in France, had more potency than royalism. A keen-sighted observer had very forcibly warned the Marseillais against delivering their city into the hands of the Spaniards, a crime which must ruin their efforts. Such was ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... far from improbable that the ready coincidence of Jervis's views with those of Nelson, as to future possibilities, arose, partly indeed from professional bias and prepossession as to the potency of navies, but still more from the false reports, of which Bonaparte was an apt promoter, and which a commission of the allies in Genoa greedily swallowed and transmitted. The deterrent effect of their own fleet, "in being," seems not to have prevented either of them from believing ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... seemed to fill all that bright room with, as it were, a richer, subtler light. There could be no doubt of her potency. Older and wiser heads than young Arthur Benham's might well forget the world for her. Ste. Marie watched, and the heartsickness within him was like a physical pain, keen and bitter. He thought of that first and only previous meeting—the single minute in the Champs-Elysees, when her ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the conquests of modern industrialism, the secondary passions have been almost wholly dominant, since those who directed them had no need to fear hunger or thirst. It is the potency of vanity and love of power that gives hope for the industrial future of Soviet Russia, since it enables the Communist State to enlist in its service men whose abilities might give them vast wealth ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... about an inch in diameter, which are themselves much more ornamental than edible, for even the small boy will not investigate a second time the bitter flesh. I have heard that a cider of peculiar "hardness" and potency, guaranteed to unsettle the firmest head, is made from these acid fruits—but I have not found it necessary to extend my ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... unheeded. The seed he planted fell upon barren soil; but though so hardened by the withering frosts of ignorance, of that ignorance which is indeed "the curse of God," as to seem but as a dead stone, the vivifying sun of knowledge may yet stir its dormant potency, recalling it to life, to spring up and to develop into a stately tree, yielding its life-giving fruits, offering the welcome protection of its branches to all seeking rest and shelter beneath its shade. To-day the thought that inspired Winstanley has again been proclaimed by one ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... the bedeviling thing had begun, so it had continued, losing none of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted. The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means to an end, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... comparing his work with that of other poets—with Virgil's for instance—Racine wrote for the stage. Virgil's poetry is intended to be read, Racine's to be declaimed; and it is only in the theatre that one can experience to the full the potency of his art. In a sense we can know him in our library, just as we can hear the music of Mozart with silent eyes. But, when the strings begin, when the whole volume of that divine harmony engulfs us, how differently then we understand ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... look at Regnault. He was lying on his back, with closed eyes, and his keen aquiline face upturned to the pallor of the "light" in the roof. The white hair tumbled on the pillow, and the long, beautiful hands that lay on the coverlet were oddly pathetic in contrast to the potency of the unconscious face. Even in sleep it preserved its cast of high assurance, its note of ideals outworn and discounted. It was the face of a man who had found a bitter answer for most of life's questions. By the bed sat Truelove, his servant, ex-corporal of dragoons. He rose ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies into his brother's mind, that he was drawn ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... dominant part in suggesting the ritual of libations. Just as water, when applied to the apparently dead seed, makes it germinate and come to life, so libations can reanimate the corpse. These general biological theories of the potency of water were current at the time, and, as I shall explain later (see p. 28), had possibly received specific application to man long before the idea of libations developed. For, in the development of the cult of Osiris[43] the general fertilizing power ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of the physician is ineffectual even to mitigate them; a certain assistance and means of safety has been devised, in the rule that no one should go to see a friend in such a condition, and to a few precautionary measures a further remedy of sufficient potency has been added, that men should not readmit into their houses servants who have been sent to inquire how a man's friends who may have been seized with an illness of this kind are, until they have cleansed and purified their persons in the bath. So that a taint is ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... sensation of being compelled to sleep in spite of racking bodily pains by the administration of a strong opiate, and of having been again startled by noise and violence out of the unnatural state of insensibility in which he had been plunged by the potency of the medicine, may be able to imagine the confused and alarmed state of Sir John Ramorny's mind, and the agony of his body, which acted and reacted upon each other. If we add to these feelings the consciousness ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... five, Justice Frankfurter declared: "It is not for us to question a belief by the President that enemy aliens who were justifiably deemed fit subjects for internment during active hostilites [sic] do not lose their potency for mischief during the period of confusion and conflict which is characteristic of a state of war even when the guns are silent but the peace of Peace has ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the best, which reduces within the narrowest limits the patronage to be exercised by the Executive authority. Every party out of power has discovered that in the patronage of the President there is a voice of greater potency than is heard elsewhere in the Government. This amendment places a limitation upon the power of the President. It confers upon a majority of the Senators from each section the power to recommend appointments to office, and this will ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... traditional beliefs and to deal with objective procedures as far as possible. No one has ventured to correlate specific beliefs and ceremonial procedures, but it is through this approach that the motivating power of beliefs will be revealed, if such potency exists." ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... superintend the costly sacrifice that was being offered in his behalf. She found him exulting in a partial improvement in his patient, whose senses had again returned with a brief and deceitful brilliance, and attributing what he called the aged Pince's recovery to the potency ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln, in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile. Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the whole nation, were ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... comparative potency of snake poisons, there are apparent contradictions. In the order of recorded fatalities, the rattlesnake ranks easily first, with the water moccasin a rather distant second, and the copperhead a very poor third. Yet experiments upon animals indicate that ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Crosbie's behaviour on that Sunday evening, and had made the countess understand that there should be no unnecessary delay. "He doesn't scruple at that kind of thing," Lady Amelia had said in one of her letters, showing perhaps less trust in the potency of her own rank than might have been expected from her. The countess, however, had agreed with her, and when Crosbie received from his mother-in-law a very affectionate epistle, setting forth all the reasons ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... electric light upon his table was softly shaded. The steward who waited upon him was swift-footed and obsequious, and seemed entirely oblivious of Philip's shabby, half-soaked clothes. He ordered champagne a little vaguely, and the wine ran through his veins with a curious potency. He ate and drank now and then mechanically, now and then with the keenest appetite. Afterwards he smoked a cigar, drank coffee, and sipped a liqueur with the appreciation of a connoisseur. A fellow passenger passed him an evening ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but a very little way. Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency of the laws depend upon them. Without them your commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper, and not a living, ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... sufficient to show that, with health and time, such a nature would certainly leave a mark wide and deep on the world in which it was placed. His characteristics were such that achievement was the very essence of life, and, with the promise and potency as revealed in this first twenty-three years of his life, we may be well prepared for the brilliant ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... their faces to that "fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined battalions of Great Britain recked little of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those doors there did stand the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... intellectual capabilities, for the paltry pleasure of using one of the most poisonous, loathsome, and destructive weeds found in the whole vegetable kingdom? Let us rather shake off this abominable practice, and rise, as individuals and as a nation, in all our intellectual potency,—and let us go forth from day to day, to the noble purposes of our destiny, untrammelled by the quid, or the pipe, or the snuff-box; and before another generation shall lie down in the grave, our efforts and our example may cause the light of human science, and ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... father, while the youngest had the pentadactyle limbs of the mother and grandmother; so that here, notwithstanding a double pentadactyle dilution of the blood, the hexadactyle variety had the best of it. The same pre-potency of the variety was still more markedly exemplified in the progeny of two of the other children, Marie and George. Marie (whose thumbs only were deformed) gave birth to a boy with six toes, and three other normally formed children; but George, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the old woman, "and those of wondrous potency. We are a favored race, Myra. Descended from the old Egyptians, we inherit their mysterious learning. To a few among us, the queens and magi of our tribes, there has come down a knowledge of charms and medicine, and some of the secrets of astrology. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... all his creations. He transports us into a holier and higher world than our own; everything around us breathes of force and solemn beauty. The looks of his heroes may be more staid than those of men, the movements of their minds may be slower and more calculated; but we yield to the potency of their endowments, and the loveliness of the scene which they animate. The enchantments of the poet are strong enough to silence our scepticism; we forbear to inquire whether it is ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... mirror into which every man, when he looks, sees himself. It speaks to his conscience, not as a man speaks, yet with a potency unknown to any other book. It is preeminently the book of the conscience. Other books appeal to men's consciences, but not with the appeal of this book. Other books mirror men, but not like the Bible. ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... but truth prevails over all else." When the king awoke, and he perused the document, he summoned the grandees of his realm and the three youths as well. Each of the three was called upon to justify his saying. In eloquent words the first described the potency of wine. When it takes possession of the senses of a man, he forgets grief and sorrow. Still more beautiful and convincing were the words of the second speaker, when his turn came to establish the truth of his saying, that the king was ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... subordinate acts of worship, so to call them, have their character and vitality as Christian acts of the worship of God because of the relation of the worshipper to God as a member of the Body of His Son. They are offered through the Son and derive their potency from their association with Him and His sacrifice. They reach God through the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... his thirst at his own veins. Then imagination, the magician, lovely in weal but terrible in woe, began to weave his spell, and visions arose of dear loved ones agonising beyond the prison walls, to whom my heart yearned through the dividing space with an intense passion that seemed as though its potency might almost annihilate our barriers. Alas! hearts yearn in vain. Nothing avails but strength, and what we cannot achieve the Fates never bestow. My cell walls stood cold and impassable around me, like sentinels of destiny, too vigilant ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... denied him in the great factory and here he can meet men of similar condition, on terms of equality, to discuss freely and without fear the topics that interest him most. There is an immense psychic potency in this intimate association of fellow workers, especially in some of the older unions ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... me a vial of little red pills about the size of beet seeds, with explicit directions as to how to take them. If I exceeded the dosage prescribed I endangered my life, for these pellets were of a high potency. They were little two-edged swords which might cut ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... previous years. The inquiry developed, however, that a few are unwilling to employ competition even in this mild form as a means to increased efficiency. Most of the firms made conscious use of this principle and were convinced of its potency. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Directly evil becomes personal it ceases to be evil, because personality is the supreme achievement of life. And directly evil is expressed in a living, objective, historic, mythological image it ceases to be evil, because such an image instantaneously gathers to itself some potency of creative energy. Evil is a positive thing, a spiritual thing, an eternal thing; but it is positive only in its opposition to creation, in its corruption of the soul, and in its subtle undermining of the divine moments of the soul by the power of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... murmur that in his loftiest moments the promise and potency of matter give no response to the deepest cry of the soul. And along the centuries stand the princes of thought, Paul, Augustine, Bacon, Luther, Milton, Pascal, Kepler, Newton, Coleridge, Faraday, Herschel, testifying to the impregnability ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that they may secure it, they assume indifference. They assume indifference, but are hard at work with their usual weapons. The men can do very well by themselves. For them there is drinking, smoking, cards, and various games; but the potency of female spells soon works upon them, and all who are worth anything are more or less in love by the end of the first week. Of course it must all come to an end when the port is reached. That is understood, though there may sometimes ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage. Our measures shall be such only, as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption—the destruction of error by the potency of truth—the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love—and the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance." As to our characters they are before the world. You would probably look in vain through ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... arguments which Stibbs could bring forward, failed to produce the desired effect upon his alarmed crew. He, however, suddenly bethought himself, that he had an argument in his possession, of greater potency, than any that could be afforded by the most persuasive arguments, and taking a bottle of brandy from his chest, he gave to each man a glass of the spirit, when, on a sudden, a very extraordinary change appeared to take place in their opinions and sentiments. They might have been ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... naming last the Significance of the Master-Card, until your Parallelogram is all interpreted to the Querist. And note that the Master-Card even as an Influence is not more potent than another, (as far as is known), and that its Dignity and Potency arise only in its being uninfluenced; and, so speaking, from its Significance with a certain Individuality not belonging to its two Fellows. Nor are there; any Influences cast Upward or Downward by the Cards, out of the ...
— The Square of Sevens - An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note • E. Irenaeus Stevenson
... can hardly be deemed suitable in a serious poem. "When the Sea Calls", a poem by Winifred Virginia Jordan, is possibly the most striking feature of the magazine. Mrs. Jordan's style in dealing with the wilder aspects of Nature has a grim potency all its own, and we can endorse without qualification the judgment of Mr. Moe when he calls this poem "positively magnificent in dynamic effect". To Mrs. Jordan is granted a natural poetic genius which few other ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... its appearance, than the South was thrown into convulsions, as if it had suddenly been invaded by an army with banners! Notwithstanding, the whole country was on the side of the slave power—the Church, the State, all parties, all denominations, ready to do its bidding! O the potency of truth, and the inherent weakness and conscious insecurity of great wrong! Immediately a reward of five thousand dollars was offered for my apprehension, by the State of Georgia. When General Sherman was ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... drank, as did we all, for our thirst was great and the odor of the golden liquid was most alluring. It tasted hotter than the fires of Jelbuz. It was also of great potency and gave a fine exhilaration to the senses. We became ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... resort of proprietors,—the overwhelming argument whose invincible potency reassures them,—is that, in their opinion, equality of conditions is impossible. "Equality of conditions is a chimera," they cry with a knowing air; "distribute wealth equally to-day—to-morrow ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... which she had held them? And why had its potency failed utterly when directed to him? But they were men of physical action, not thought—men of deeds which called only for brave hearts and stout bodies. It is true, there had been thinkers in those days, when the valiant sons of Rincon hurled the enemy from Cartagena's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the instrument may be practically employed in correspondence and literary composition. The problem has been to stereotype, so to speak, the tin-foil record of what has been uttered in the mouth-piece, and thus to preserve in a permanent form the potency of vanished sounds. Nor does it require a great stretch of the imagination to see in the invention of the phonograph one of the greatest achievements of the age—a discovery, indeed, which may possibly revolutionize the ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... say, as showing the marvellous potency of primeval instincts, bells placed in church towers were supposed to have much of the supernatural power that the savage in his wilderness ascribed to the drum. We all know something of the bell legends of the Middle Ages, how the tolling of a ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertise the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims that a vast deal of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... stone of famine," because it is supposed capable of causing either dearth or abundance, but is oftener used by the sorcerer to create, or at least to threaten, dearth, in order thereby to extort presents from his alarmed fellow tribesmen. This stone is kept in a burial-ground and derives its potency from the dead. The worshipper or the sorcerer (for he combines the two characters) who desires to cause a famine repairs to the burial-ground, uncovers the stone, rubs it with certain plants, and smears ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... that electrolysis could render to the isolator of elements; and the adoption of this method by Sir Humphry Davy for the analysis of the hydrates of the metals of the alkalis and alkaline earths, and the results which he thus achieved, established its potency. In 1808 Davy isolated sodium and potassium; he then turned his attention to the preparation of metallic calcium, barium, strontium and magnesium. Here he met with greater difficulty, and it is to be questioned whether he obtained any of these metals even ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... of regenerate Rishi, I like not to behold the slaughter of kinsmen. I shall, however, through thy potency hear of this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... deprived her of courage, and probably roused her conscience. Robert followed the pair, saw them enter The Great Labourer—what could the name mean? could it mean The Good Shepherd?—and turned away helpless, objectless indeed, for he had done all that he could, and that all was of no potency. A world of innocence and beauty was about to be hurled from its orbit of light into the blackness of outer chaos; he knew it, and was unable to speak word or do deed that should frustrate the power of a devil who so loved ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... house both clean and sanitary. Dr. Redfield knew that, and he swore at Duck Town for a vile and filthy hole. So did the people swear at Duck Town, and many of them suddenly stopped living there. For, despite the strength and courage of their champion; despite the potency of drugs; despite the sleepless nights and days spent in fighting disease, the deadly contagion ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... tide Wrecked Rome's potency and pride, Something wonderful has vanished, something exquisite has died; And in spite of modern fame And the lustre of its name, Even beautiful Lake Como can be never quite ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... ill humour he had, and which he did not choose to throw off. In her eagerness to please him she practised a hundred of those arts which had formerly charmed him, but which seemed now to have lost their potency. Her songs did not amuse him; and she hushed them and the children when in his presence. My lord sat silent at his dinner, drinking greatly, his lady opposite to him, looking furtively at his face, though also speechless. Her silence annoyed ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... character, fearing God and zealous for public liberty. With such men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants of fearful potency. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... imagination constructs may always possibly be the truth. According to the balance in it of apparent probability, with edifying power it will beget conviction. Such a conviction may be doomed to be superseded sooner or later; its value lies in its potency while it lasts. The temper in which we look at our historical heritage is of more importance to us now than the exactitude of our vision; for this latter can never be proved, while the former approves itself by the fruit it bears within us. It is better, more fruitful, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... decks, and rending the air with their acclamations. All the laws of quarantine were disregarded. The people, weary of anarchy, and trembling in view of the approaching Austrian invasion, were almost delirious with delight in receiving thus as it were from the clouds, a deliverer, in whose potency they could implicitly trust. When warned that the ships had recently sailed from Alexandria, and that there was imminent danger that the plague, might be communicated, they replied, "We had rather have the plague than the Austrians," Breaking over all the municipal regulations ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... them nearer heaven? Should I have urged the beauty of forgiveness, the duty of devout submission? He had no religion, for he was no saintly "Uncle Tom," and Slavery's black shadow seemed to darken all the world to him and shut out God. Should I have warned him of penalties, of judgments, and the potency of law? What did he know of justice, or the mercy that should temper that stern virtue, when every law, human and divine, had been broken on his hearthstone? Should I have tried to touch him by appeals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. "The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever," he remarked. I distinctly remember the illustration, for it ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... vapors rise. Even, it seemed to me, I could note a faint, clear odor of innocent potency. I saw the table laid, not with gleam of snow and silver, but with plain vessels which, nevertheless, seemed now to have a radiance of their own. I knew all this. It was as though there actually lay at hand these pleasant scenes, as though ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... we are met again, Where many souls there are, that breathe and die, Scarce knowing more of nature's potency, Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain; The sad vicissitude of weary pain;— For busy man is lord of ear and eye, And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky, And the thronged river toiling to the main? Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part In every smile, in every tear that ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique pannels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... style took their note from it; it did so much to introduce the last phase of Italian art, the phase of efflorescence, the phase deplored by critics steeped in mediaeval feeling. To recapture something of its potency from the description of contemporaries is therefore our plain duty, and for this we must have recourse to Vasari's text. He says: "Michelangelo filled his canvas with nude men, who, bathing at the time of summer ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... individuals of the latter classes should resist the magnetic charm, the apostles of the science declare that there are times when even they cannot be acted upon; the presence of one scorner or unbeliever may weaken the potency of the fluid and destroy its efficacy. In M. Deleuze's instructions to a magnetiser, he expressly says, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... our psychic—the peace of exhaustion; as if, her struggles being over, her flesh-free spirit were at large in the room. The silence was profound, yet somehow thrilling with potency. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... partly turned. In a moment he was at her side, his hand upon her arm. His glance had in it all the compelling strength of unadulterated, pristine manhood. She seemed to feel its potency, and without remonstrance suffered him to lead ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... expressions, coming from any woman, must have been rapturous and soothing in the extreme; but, when they flowed from a voice whose very sound was melody, they acted on the heart of Captain de Haldimar with a potency that was as irresistible as the love itself ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... how far to connect the disuse of opium with the lancinating pains which have troubled me since the time to which I refer. These pains began long before I had recourse to opium, they did not cease their frequent attacks while opium was used, nor have they failed to make their potency felt since opium was abandoned. While it is not improbable that the neuralgic difficulties of my childhood might have remained to the present time, even if I had never made use of opium, I think that the experience of all who have undergone the trial shows that similar pains are invariably ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... mud and refuse for playthings, live and thrive, and grow into manhood, and, in contrast to the pale face and flabby flesh of the aristocratic child, exhibit strength, vigour, and well-developed frames, and our belief in the potency of the life-giving elements of air, light, and cleanliness receives a shock that, at first sight, would appear fatal to the implied benefits of these, in reality, all-sufficient ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Sir John; not an empire's worth, Nor wealth of Ind could buy The like, for never was jewel seen Of such wondrous potency. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... shooting-coat up round his chin. Harry had recommended to him a great-coat, in order that he might the better conceal his face; but Frank had found that the great-coat was an encumbrance to his arm. He put it on, and when thus clothed he had tried the whip, he found that he cut the air with much less potency than in the lighter garment. He contented himself, therefore, with looking down on the pavement as he walked along, letting the long point of the whip stick up from his pocket, and flattering himself that even Mr Moffat would not ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... heathen, rites among the first discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin, and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young oaks and pines ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... Christianity, the nunneries and monasteries, and the celibate lives of Catholic priests, have had vast social effects, how far for good and how far for evil need not be discussed here. The point I wish to enforce is the potency, not only of the religious sense in aiding or deterring marriage, but more especially the influence and authority of ministers of religion in enforcing celibacy. They have notoriously used it when aid has been invoked by members of the family ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... pumping the feed water. It is always well, however, particularly when providing engine power, to err on the right side, and make provision for more than is absolutely needed for actual battery requirements. This rule applies with equal potency to ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... planted in every human heart this knowledge, namely, that there is a power beyond our reach, a mysterious potency shaping the forces of life, which if we would win we must have in our favor. There come to us all, events over which we have no control by physical or mental power. Is there any hope of guiding those mysterious forces? ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... daughters of men of this stamp—and not half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here—the news brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... thing as Schopenhauer's metaphysics. The stars are to love and hate one another, feel pleasure and displeasure, and to try to move in a way corresponding to these feelings.' The latest phase of this peculiar non-science tells us that all matter is alive; or at least that it contains the 'promise and potency' (whatever these may be) 'of all terrestrial life.' All this probably originated in the very simple manner already hinted at; viz., in the confusion of terms constructed for application to thinking beings only, with others applicable only to brute matter, and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... to see is a hungry man going where he will be fed and get strength. I trust it does not seem flippant to say that I look on all church organizations in the same way, and that the tradition of a long past suggests to me the inefficiency of a dotage, quite as much as the stimulating aroma of potency which, as in the case of some wines, can only be acquired by the lapse of time. Some will say that this Modernism has no sense of obligation, no sense of veneration, makes no allowance for the idiosyncrasies ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... incantation. If this was so, the mythological portion was recited for a magical purpose, with the object of invoking the aid of the chief deities whose actions in the past are there described, and of increasing by that means the potency of the spell.(1) In the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the employment and significance of myth in magic, and we shall have occasion to refer to other instances, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian, in which a myth has reached us ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... spontaneity of his mind, his reactions, his style; and it was in virtue of this undulled spontaneity that he was fitted to be for Shakspere, as he has since been for so many other great writers, an intellectual stimulus unique in kind and in potency. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Longfellow and others as the hunter par excellence; but, to apply this to his present condition, and look there for its truth, would be idle. The incitements to indulge his taste for hunting are now so few, and of such slight potency, and the opportunities for giving it play so narrowed down, and so rare, that the pursuit of the chase has become well-nigh obsolete, and something to him redolent only, as it were, with the breath of the past. As the Indian is at present circumstanced ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... answer has been formulated. Already educators have recognized the potency of the saying: "The schools were made for the children, not the children for the schools." Hence it follows that no school system is so sacred, no method of teaching so venerable, no textbook so infallible, no machinery of administration so permanent, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... railway-sidings and branch-lines running down to it, and on the hill above the cottages stands a cluster of blast-furnaces. In daylight they are merely ugly, but at night, with tongues of flame, they speak of the potency of labour. I can still see that strange silhouette of steel cylinders and connecting girders against a blue-black sky, with silent masses of ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Conflicting Theories of Progress; Tremaux; Lamarck; the Climatal; Darwin's; Huxley's; Parson's; Mivart's; Hyatt's; Cope's; Wallace's; the Gods; Denounced by the Princes of Science. Agassiz's Deliverance Against it. Imperfection of the Theory Eked out. Huxley's Protoplasm. Tyndall's Potency of Life in Matter. Buchner's Matter and Force. Lubbock's Origin of Civilization. Consequences of the Brutal Origin ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the magnitude of the grandest traits that, in them, can have freedom to thrive and bear fruit? Who can estimate the length and breadth, the height and depth of the loftiest inspirations or the noblest joys that, in them, can be experienced? To give a full expression to the utmost intelligence, potency, amiability, purity, meritoriousness and majesty that can reside in the capability—rooms of a human soul—would be equivalent to picturing the imaginable or to portraying the infinite, and to do either the one or the other ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... runner; while the quick and feeble breathing of the girl told how she was fast losing in the race with the all-omnipotent hours. On a small table stood two phials, in which were imprisoned dull-coloured liquids, powerless, despite their supposed potency, to stay the hunger of the disease so rapidly consuming the patient; and by their side was a plate of shrivelled fruit, the departing lusciousness of which had failed to tempt an appetite in her whose mouth was baked with the fever that fed on its own flame. There, gathered into a few cubic ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... abortive ambitions, over which a hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and jubilations and processions—dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's street. Often have I debated the potency of satire, again and again have I suggested to learned friends a scientific and historical investigation of the popular belief that satire moves mountains or even molehills. But they agree only in shrinking from the task. To take only the last half-century: we have ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... break the glass of the King's coach and make the eight piebald ponies rise up on end in horror—was a power which raised them greatly in the eyes of all law-abiding people; it suggested an unknown potency for mischief far more ominous than had discovery and conviction followed. And so, while squibs and crackers were being thrown at them and sham bombs hurled into their meetings to show how greatly the law-abiding people of ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... following pages would think it needful to affirm that he alone regenerated his country. Many forces were at work; the energising impulse of moral enthusiasm, the spell of heroism, the ancient and still unextinguished potency of kingly headship. But Cavour's hand controlled the working of these forces, and compelled them ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... with a scathing homily, Poet-Laureate David to the "Atlantic" with a burning lyric, and Major-General Joab to the privacy of his tent, there to calm his perturbed spirit with Drake's Plantation Bitters. In humble imitation of another, I would state that this indorsement of the potency of a specific is entirely gratuitous, and that I am stimulated thereto by no remuneration, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... more than the potency of a drug, lulling him into a splendid waking-sleep, every word being a supreme incantation. And it was not only his mind that was charmed by such passages, for he felt at the same time a strange and delicious bodily languor that held ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... youthful lovers were happy—happy in themselves, and the joys of the new existence opened up to them by the magic wand of LOVE. But love has its trials, as all can testify who have tasted its potency in the heart; and so these two learned. Their engagement was a family secret, not yet to be developed. Hence, many of her admirers still offered their attentions, in the vain hope of ultimate success. Particularly was this the case with those who had an eye to the fortune rather than the ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... eyes, was puffed unbecomingly. Casey, squinting an angry eye at Hank and the cup of coffee, spared a thought from his own misery to acknowledge surprise that anything on earth could make Hank more unpleasant to look upon. Joe had a sickly pallor to prove the potency of the brew. ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... potency of his art, that the amorous spectator is cured of his infirmity by perceiving the evil effects of passion, and he who enters the theatre under a load of sorrow departs from it with a serene countenance, as though he had drunk of that draught ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... had ample time since to get accustomed to the strain of the meal-hours. He would never have believed it. But then use is everything; only the very potency of his success prevented anything resembling elation. He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a loaded gun to help him on his way through the world, chances to come upon a torpedo—upon a live torpedo with a shattering charge in its head and a pressure ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... smitten with sharp desire, Apollo gladly offered his own arts and gifts, augury and the lyre and swift arrows: he, to lengthen out the destiny of a parent given over to die, chose rather to know the potency of herbs and the practice of healing, and deal in a silent art unrenowned. Aeneas stood chafing bitterly, propped on his vast spear, mourning [399-435]Iuelus and a great crowd of men around, unstirred by their tears. The aged man, with garment ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... consciousness a truly fearful and alarming plan. In this gentleman's somewhat feeble intellect there floats a sort of hazy reverence for a mysterious force denominated by him "kimustry." And to this occult power he appears to ascribe a magical potency, that recalls memories of ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... very little moral power, in the creed he professed, to arrest young men, of glowing passions, and exposed to the most difficult temptations, in their downward career. No voice of Franklin was heard with potency calling upon those who were thronging the broad road. In a lecture upon Providence, to his companions of the Junto, which was subsequently published, and which reflects some considerable honor upon the earnestness of his thoughts, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... type of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, [93] soul or spirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and as it were in the happy ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency. Once more, good-night: And when you are desirous to be bles'd, I'll blessing beg of you.—For this same lord [Pointing to Polonius.] I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister. ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... through her restless dreams. It was the man who was beside the Princess, who had fought desperately for her whether he loved her cause or not, who was hourly under the spell of her enchantment. The potency of that spell seemed to grow the more she thought of it, and all the charm which some had professed to find in herself seemed to sink into insignificance. It was not sufficient to win the love of this man. And those waiting hours, too, ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... protection of Chitrangada, and after the death of Chitrangada, his protection of his younger brother, Vichitravirya, and his placing the latter on the throne: the birth of Dharma among men in consequence of the curse of Animondavya; the births of Dhritarashtra and Pandu through the potency of Vyasa's blessings (?) and also the birth of the Pandavas; the plottings of Duryodhana to send the sons of Pandu to Varanavata, and the other dark counsels of the sons of Dhritarashtra in regard to the Pandavas; then the advice administered to Yudhishthira ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... are impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... under the pentacle I held the little boy, my workman. Now the necromancer began to utter those awful invocations, calling by name on multitudes of demons who are captains of their legions, and these he summoned by the virtue and potency of God, the Uncreated, Living, and Eternal, in phrases of the Hebrew, and also of the Greek and Latin tongues; insomuch that in a short space of time the whole Coliseum was full of a hundredfold as many as had appeared upon the first occasion. Vincenzio ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... superstition. The anthropologist calls it "fetichism" when he finds it among primitive peoples. When the same notion is propounded by advanced thinkers, we call it "advanced thought." We attribute to the Thing a malignant purpose and an irresistible potency, and we crouch before it as if it were our master. When the Thing is set going, we observe its direction with awe-struck resignation, just as people once drew omens from the flight of birds. What are we that we should interfere with the ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... formal aspects of Beethoven's work, as far as verbal analysis can help, it may be asserted that he is the acknowledged master of the Sonata Form as Bach was of the Fugue, and in his hands this form, and also the Air with Variations, were raised to a potency the influence of which is felt even to-day. From beginning to end every portion of the Sonata Form was made over and vitalized. Instead of the perfunctory "flourish of trumpets" which served previous composers for an introduction, this portion with ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... again added to himself another tower of strength chosen from among the people. What might he not hope, now that he possessed the services of Lord Brittleback and Mr. Harold Smith! Renovated in a Medea's cauldron of such potency, all his effete limbs—and it must be acknowledged that some of them had become very effete—would come forth young and round and robust. A new energy would diffuse itself through every department; India would be saved and quieted; the ambition of France would be tamed; even-handed reform ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Metals also may be said to have a body, a soul, and a spirit; there is a specific bodily, or material, form belonging to each metal; there is a metalline soul characteristic of this or that class of metals; there is a spirit, or inner immaterial potency, which is the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... are much more resistant to heat; thus the intracellular toxins of the tubercle bacillus retain certain of their effects even after exposure to 100deg C. Like the extracellular toxins they may be of remarkable potency; for example, fever is produced in the human subject by the injection into the blood of an extremely minute quantity of dead ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... invite him to render himself useful to those beings for whom his own necessities have a continual occasion; thus, to endear himself to his, fellow mortals, to become respectable in his own esteem. These motives will unquestionably be admitted to possess more solidity, to embrace greater, potency, to involve more truth, than those which are borrowed from systems that want stability; that assume more shapes than there are languages; that are not tangible to the tact of humanity; that must of necessity present a different perspective to all who shall view them through the medium ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... was upon her; his arm was extended across the table, and she knew the potency of that arm, as well as something about the strength and fund of resource of ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... considered a cause of sterility. It evidently does diminish the sexual potency in the male, and for this the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the patriotic resolutions of Mecklenburg, and they became concealed from view in the blaze of the National Declaration bursting forth on the 4th of July, 1776, which only re-echoed and reaffirmed the truth and potency of sentiments proclaimed in Charlotte on the ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Christianity in America were, first, the purifying and quickening of the miserably decayed and corrupted mendicant orders,—ever the most effective arm in the missionary service of the Latin Church,—and, a little later, the founding of the Society of Jesus, with its immense potency for good and for evil. At the same time the court of Rome, sobered in some measure, by the perilous crisis that confronted it, from its long orgy of simony, nepotism, and sensuality, began to find time and thought for spiritual duties. The ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... rather simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, she had gone to bed the night before in a ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris |
