"Static" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very great difference between such words as we have just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as "white" or "round." The chief difference is that words of this latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal, called "whiteness," or whether white things are to be defined as those having a certain kind of similarity ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... slightest amount of the sun's rays to those spheres. The fields, forests, rocks, and seas, only absorb light, they do not reflect it. In this phenomenon, therefore, there is no element of specular reflection. It consists rather of the lighting up of the static vito-magnetic fluid of our atmosphere, by the great solar current. The atmosphere, thus vivified, discloses our presence to those orbs, and in like manner, their presence to the inhabitants ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... the almost static-jammed ultra-wave radio snapped through to his mind. Quickly he began to free ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... organism, speaks of transformation and of unceasing movement. This perpetuum mobile gives its peculiar colour to Nicolai's reflections. In general, we who are advocates or opponents of the war tend to pass judgment on it almost exclusively in abstracto. We conceive it as static and absolute. It may almost be said that as soon as a thinker concentrates upon a subject in order to study it, his first step is to kill it. To a great biologist all is movement, and movement is the material of his study. The social or moral question that concerns us is not whether war is good or ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... James Wimshurst.—A London Royal Institution lecture, of great value as giving a full account of the recent forms of generators of static ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... replied, "static objects mustn't be confused with dynamic ones, or we'll be open to serious error. Comparatively little effort is spent in reaching the ocean's lower regions, because all objects have a tendency to become 'sinkers.' Follow ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... an hour later, the pipal was surrounded by thousands of Mahratta sepoys, for word had gone forth,—the mysterious rumour of India that is like a weird static whispering to the four corners of the land a message,—had flashed through the tented city that the men from Karowlee were to take the oath ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows through the rhythm, permeates the words and throbs in their rise and fall. On the other hand, the mere idea of the above-quoted poem, stated in unrhythmic prose, would represent only a fact, inertly static, which would not bear repetition. But the emotional idea, incarnated in a rhythmic form, acquires the dynamic quality needed for those things which take part ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... personality is self-preservation, but personality itself is not a static but a dynamic thing. The basic factor in its development, is integration: each new situation calls forth a new adjustment which modifies or alters the personality in the process. The proper aim of personality, ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... mystics—amongst whom St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sf poet Jallu'ddn Rm are perhaps the chief—who have achieved that which we might call the synthetic vision of God. These have resolved the perpetual opposition between the personal and impersonal, the transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic aspects of the Divine Nature; between the Absolute of philosophy and the "sure true Friend" of devotional religion. They have done this, not by taking these apparently incompatible ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... source from which it came, just as water must find its own level. The present status of everything that we observe to-day is purely temporary: we are looking at one picture of a cosmic cinema film that stretches on to infinity. Just because we see only one static picture of a process which truly never stops moving, so we get a view of life that contains much of delusion. We have heard a Doctor of Music state in public his opinion that the age of the composition of musical ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... measures art in terms of skill, for there are no degrees in art. None has transcended Giotto, because technique and draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul of the matter. Art is in fact a static thing. It changes as the face of the sea changes, from hour to hour; but it does not progress. There are great and small artists and great and small movements, as there are great and small waves, brisk breezes and terrific tempests; but all are moulded ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... keyed to the highest pitch of hysterical excitement. They needed little to release the accumulated pressure of static nerve force which the terrorizing mummery of the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... structure of Michael Kramer illustrate Hauptmann's typical themes and methods well. The whole of the first act is exposition. It is not, however, the exposition of antecedent actions or events, but wholly of character. The conditions of the play are entirely static. Kramer's greatness of soul broods over the whole act. Mrs. Kramer, the narrow-minded, nagging wife, and Arnold, the homely, wretched boy with a spark of genius, quail under it. Michaline, the brave, whole-hearted girl, stands among these, pitying and comprehending ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Achilles and the tortoise, 228. Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we treat it by static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives an essentially static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellectualist view, 240. No rationalist account is possible of action, change, or immediate ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... they chase each other like the storms which arise from the Atlantic and pass in quick succession over our shores. It is this change and succession which is to us the breath of our life: we know nothing of the steady static weather of the great continents, where rain and drought have each their measured and settled space: and we know nothing, and will know nothing, of the formal and authoritative rule combining all Europe into one realm, whether political or ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... and service should have been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... boys took their turn and gave their visitors a radio concert that was wonderful in its variety and beauty. The night happened to be unusually free of the annoying static that is the bugbear of the wireless, and every note of the music was as clear and sweet as though the performers were only a few yards away. Tim and Larry listened as though they were entranced, and when the concert was finished they were as ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and Bees does not explain the problem of the Empusa; it sets up another one, no less difficult. It shows us how deficient we are in insight, when it comes to differentiating between fatigue and rest in the cogs of the animal machine. The Ammophila, with the static paradox afforded by her mandibles; the Empusa, with her claws unwearied by ten months' hanging, leave the physiologist perplexed and make him wonder what really constitutes rest. In absolute fact, there is no rest, apart from ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... A.D.) to that of Dante (1265-1321 A.D.) there was not a single writer of renown in western Europe who was not a professional churchman. All the learning of the time, then, centred in the priesthood. We know that the same condition of things pertained in Egypt, when science became static there. But, contrariwise, we have seen that in Greece and early Rome the scientific workers were largely physicians or professional teachers; there was scarcely a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... said Stefan one morning, throwing down his brush. "This picture is architectural, absolutely. What possessed me to try such a conception? I can only do movement. I can't be static. Earth! I don't understand it—everything good I've done has been made of air and fire, or water." He turned an irritable face ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... those which are more highly organised, more nearly the counterpart of the active intelligence in man himself. The personality of man had been viewed as standing over against nature, this last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... ash-can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday's boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static—so static that in the gas-lighted basement dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned sotto from the protruding husband at her right ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... not easy to place there. Like the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is not exactly bad; but he is "no good," as we say. Jesus conceives of the Kingdom of God as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition or relation, it implies work, as God himself implies work. He holds that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet but a tool in the hand; that God's earnest world is no place for nondescript, and that there is only one ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... 1 A.M., calling at short intervals and listening attentively at the receiver. In fact, notes were kept of the intensity of the signals, the presence of local atmospheric electrical discharges—"static"—or intermittent sounds due to discharges from snow particles—St. Elmo's fire—and, lastly, of interference in the signals transmitted. The latter phenomenon should lead to interesting deductions, for we had frequent evidence to show that the wireless waves were ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Invalids' Hotel, a large variety of batteries, dynamos and other electrical appliances are brought into use. These consist of cell batteries, such as is illustrated by Fig. 4, dynamos, operated by power, Franklin, or static electrical machines illustrated in Fig. 5, and other electrical apparatus, the choice of the particular machine or battery being determined by the nature ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... boy with a desire to put all things to the test of his own free conscience, you are empowering him to criticise everything you teach—even that very liberty of opinion, a belief in which you have been so anxious to create. But with reactionary propaganda it is quite otherwise. By it a static habit of mind is produced—a habit of mind which, except by way of a mercifully not uncommon revolt, is a pawn in the hands of its present teacher, and that public opinion which in time to come ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... French coast opposite Jersey, and another was more recently constructed on the English coast near Brighton. For the longer and much more important service across the Channel submarine rails may be laid down as in the cases mentioned, but in addition it will be necessary to provide for static stability by fixing a flounder-shaped pontoon just below the greatest depth of wave disturbance, and just sufficient in buoyancy to take the great bulk of the weight of the structure off the rails. In this way passengers may be conveyed ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... chair in the living room and the sound of hasty footsteps glissading on the throw-rug in the hall heralded the approach of Timmy's father. The doorway filled with flexing muscles that flexed in vain, but somewhat at a disadvantage by the strictly static tableaux. Helen sat at the table, her staring eyes fixed on the child who looked back in blank astonishment. Even the pups were motionless, having cowered in alarm at ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... though far inferior in this respect to the galvanic current; but that when employed of sufficient intensity it superadds to those mentioned a strictly mechanical action, which consists in forcing static blood from the capillary into the general circulation through ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... Rick called the airport, then held the phones to his ears to hear the reply through heavy static. When the airport answered he asked for a weather report for the area between St. Thomas and Clipper Cay. He got it, and ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of man is dynamic, not static; not a condition but a movement. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow" is its end or justification. It is a rush of forces, an evolution towards greater activities and higher adjustment, the growth of a stability which shall be ever more unstable. This onward motion is recognized in ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... each other on the ego supposed to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid make up that duration which flows. What we actually obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language, just because we have eliminated from it the element of real time. But, as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... tuned to a certain wave length, and he guessed that this was standard for all Russian military stations, and different from that of the Germans. But when he held his circuit to listen he got whisperings that sounded almost like static electricity. It was evident that a good many stations were sending, and that the air all about was full of ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... yet he had something. He had something, but how was I to get hold of it? Just what kind of turns with what around what did you make to generate a psi force? It took two thousand years for man to move from the concept that amber was a stone with a soul to the concept of static electricity. Was there any chance I could find some shortcuts in reducing the laws governing psi? The one bright spot of my morning was that Auerbach hadn't denied seeing the evidence ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... see by way of a glimpse—and even then I put forward my suspicions with extreme reserve—all that I am permitted to surmise is reduced to this: the substance of the sleeping larva as yet has no very definite static existence; it is like the raw materials collected for a building; it is waiting for the elaboration that is to make a bee of it. To mould those shapeless lumps of the future insect, the air, that prime adjuster of living things, circulates among them, passing through a network of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... bottles set on nails driven into trees and short poles. The magnet wire was wound with rags for insulation, and pieces of spring brass were used for keys. With an idea of securing current cheaply, Edison applied the little that he knew about static electricity, and actually experimented with cats, which he treated vigorously as frictional machines until the animals fled in dismay, and Edison had learned his first great lesson in the relative value of sources of electrical energy. The ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... scale (if one may still speak of a descent and a bottom) the marvellous plancton filters of the Appendiculata; the geometrical spots of the Amoebae; the cases of perfect forms of so many other Protozoa; and, finally, think of the constructive technic of the static organs, or of those of movement either in man or animals or plants; think of the complex mathematics of the mitosi, or of any cell proceeding to ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... the static character of village life leaves the boy with little inspiration in his primary interests of play and his serious ideals of the noblest manhood. Idle hours work demoralization and the ever-present ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... cut off the power to the coil. Unlike the ordinary induction coil, it isn't necessary to keep supplying power to the thing; it's a static condition. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the United States during the last fifty years wealth has increased four times as fast as the population. Malthus, of course, did not foresee the inventions and agricultural progress of the nineteenth century. Still, it is evident that his theory is a static one and cannot be made to apply to ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... a career cannot be managed without the help, the pretty constant help, of armed men; and the movement of troops in London from one point to another is one of the evidences of state which is so little static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, and makes one wish one were a child that one might fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement of a great mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a flaming squad, or a single vidette ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the airway levels, and still our receivers failed to pick up a signal of any sort—not even a whisper of static. And strangely, our radarscopes failed to record even a blip from ...
— Lost in the Future • John Victor Peterson
... place, we object to universal foreordination because it leads to Pantheism, a phase of Atheism. Pantheism as Pantheism may be viewed statically or dynamically. The static Pantheist assumes that all properties are properties of one substance. This was the feature of the vedanta system of Hindu philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but Brahma. "He is the clay, we are the forms; the eternal spider which spins from its own bosom the tissue of creation; ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... a fact, in certain writers—the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... cat. If, as has been supposed by some physiologists, the stria vasculosa is really the source of the endolymph, this state of affairs must have a marked influence on the functions of the auditory apparatus and the static apparatus, for pressure differences between the endolymph and the perilymph spaces must be present. And, as Kishi points out, should such pressure differences be proved to exist, the functional disturbance in the ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes |
