"Mainspring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she love it all!" said Norah, her eyes tender at the thought of the old woman who had been nurse and mother, and mainspring of the Billabong house, since Norah's own mother had laid her baby in her kind arms and closed tired eyes so many years ago. "Wouldn't she love fixing the house! And how she'd hate cooking with coal instead of wood! Only nothing would ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... now about 28,000 strong, horse and foot. A Rearguard of Ten or Twelve Thousand will march from Berlin in two days, pause hereabouts, and follow according to circumstances: Prussian Army will then be some 40,000 in all. Schwerin has been Commander, manager and mainspring of the business hitherto: henceforth it is to be the King; but Schwerin under him will still have a Division of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... place, they live in the life of the streets; and the busy men and women who pass within their range of vision, sometimes every day at the same hour, do not suspect that they serve as the mainspring of other lives, that interested eyes watch for their coming and miss them if they happen to go to their destination ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his indifferent fortune could carry him. Besides, he had grown hungry for familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been the mainspring of his return. Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot always be denied. At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him almost a willing captive. There was something about the flame burning in that almost frail body that had lighted even the ugliness of Fairview with a strange beauty. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... to admit, as later he sat in the cloistered silences of his club library and blew contemplative smoke-rings into the air, that a certain idle curiosity had been the mainspring of his concern for her. He had been like a boy who captured a strange butterfly and clapped it under a glass tumbler where he could watch how easily it would adapt itself to its new surroundings. But, having caught ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... are deprived of the force called heat, which is motion, they do not readily combine with new matter. But perfect combination of oxygen and carbon in the blood is essential to every act of life. In the constant clash of molecule of oxygen with molecule of carbon in the blood lies the mainspring of all animal motion; the motion of the heart itself is secondary to that. Destroy that union, however slightly, and the balance is lost, and the animal body is, in a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... at our last meeting, after most solemn vows of faith and secrecy, they took me into the secret. This was, however, only to the extent of teaching me the code and method; they still withheld from me rigidly the fact or political secret, or whatever it was that was the mainspring of ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... acting as watch-dog is a disagreeable job, as it most undoubtedly is, it has its compensations. Journalism of which the mainspring is the gaining of pleasure may easily degenerate into something akin to the comic actor's function. Stevenson in a famous passage compared the writers of belles-lettres to "filles de joie." That was not, I think, appropriate to the artists ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. "That I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. "Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... You cannot always see the magician who pulls the strings, and moves the political machine obedient to his will. And of no man in the House of Commons is this more true than of Mr. Dalglish. Unless one is under his magic spell, it is impossible to understand its mainspring, although it is easy to feel its effects. Ask the influential citizens of Glasgow to reveal the secret of Mr. Dalglish's power, and they will mention two qualities, both very good in their way but neither of them, one would think, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... it. I should put it more harshly. I hate more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our mainspring. Odd, isn't it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it's the truth. We're full of hate towards everything that doesn't square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves. Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that they've no time or inclination to detest ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... muzzle of the gun with the intention of wrecking the railway station in Dar-es-Salaam became, by evil chance, deflected in its path and struck the brewery instead. Not the office or the non-essential part of the building, but the very heart, the mainspring of the whole, the precious vats and machinery for making beer. And there will be no more "lager" in German East Africa ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... of the Sons of Usnech,"[19] woman plays the principal part. The mainspring of the story is love, and by it the heroes are led to death, a thing not to be found elsewhere in the European literature of the period. Still, those same heroes are not slight, fragile dreamers; if we set aside their love, and only consider their ferocity, they are worthy of the Walhalla ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... "Society of Jesus," as outlined by members of this Order, see a work entitled "Concerning Jesuits," edited by the Rev. John Gerard, S. J., and published in London, 1902, by the Catholic Truth Society. In this work it is said that "the mainspring of the whole organization of the Society is a spirit of entire obedience: 'Let each one,' writes St. Ignatius, 'persuade himself that those who live under obedience ought to allow themselves to be moved and directed by divine Providence through their superiors, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... saintliness has gained force from the systems to which they have given their allegiance. To Frederica the practice of her cult both inwardly in her heart, and outwardly in the work of St. Matthew's Parish, was the mainspring of her existence. It was also her pastime. She would analyse a sermon, as Dick Lowry would discuss a run, and with the same eager enjoyment. She assented with enthusiasm to the Doctrine of Eternal Damnation, and a gentler-hearted ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... living, as in an armed encampment, has violently turned the whole moral and social organization in one unique direction. At all events, the mechanism of human history is like this. We always find the primitive mainspring consisting of some widespread tendency of soul and intellect, either innate and natural to the race or acquired by it and due to some circumstance forced upon it. These great given mainsprings gradually produce ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild conjectures. Something—let us call it matter—must always have existed, and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... to him again, was, in all probability, the mainspring of the Rogan mechanical power. If only he could get in there and look around! He might do some important damage; he might be able to harass the enemy materially before the time ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... had so thinned the mainspring of her time-watch, that it soon broke. She did not live many weeks. From the first she sank into great dejection, and her mind wandered. She said her father never came to see her now; that he was displeased ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... not likely to forget that, seeing that Dick's love for him was his safeguard from all evil, and his love for Dick was the mainspring of his life. But—though his development was stunted and imperfect—there were certain facts of existence which he was beginning slowly but surely to grasp. And one of these—before but dimly suspected—he had realized fully to-night, a fact beyond all questioning ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... day, to be applied to the church encumbrance, he sought to allay his surprise by attributing the gift to his own special pleading that evening, of course backed up by Providence. If anybody had stated that the mainspring of the gift had been the wicked horse-racing poem of their denunciation he would have been scandalized and full of righteous disbelief. It is quite likely that even Crane would have denied that Allis's poem had inspired him to the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... is all the better, because he is a loyal follower of Mr. Tylor. And Mr. Tylor says: 'Savage Animism is almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion.'[31] 'Yet it keeps the Indians very strictly within their own rights and from offending the rights of others.' Our own religion is ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... simple words of truth, Sire. That death warrant, signed by the King's own hand, was the mainspring of my action. Was I not justified in doing anything to ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... right of impeachment and of trial by the Legislature is the mainspring of the great machine of government. It is the pivot on which it turns. If preserved in full vigor, and exercised with perfect integrity, every branch will ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... character. Not a muscle of Hafner's face quivered. It was a question, perhaps, of rendering a service to a woman in danger, whom he loved with all the feeling of which he was capable. That woman was the mainspring of his social position in Rome. She was still more. A plan for Fanny's marriage, as yet secret, but on the point of being consummated, depended upon Madame Steno. But he felt it impossible to attempt to render her any service before having spent half an hour in the rooms of the Palais Castagna, and ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... high-shouldered French cornices. It began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection, how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it all, I remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me. Light and warmth and comfort and safety—they were all to come from the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an empty-headed ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... demands close observation. The will, you see, is the mainspring of the mind, and if it is affected the whole mind ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... sincerity of her greeting to Clifford was not an assumed emotion. It was inner-real. And yet it might not last for long. The effect of her drug-taking was to make every momentary feeling seem an eternal, ineradicable mainspring of action. Her many moods were each at the moment vitally important to her. They obsessed her. The morphia had not only undermined her physical health, but had made her mind the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... without adequate results; rent and taxes will accumulate, the stock will lie dead or become deteriorated, and loss and ruin must follow. For the last absorption acting upon a small capital will soon dry up its source; and we need not picture the trouble that will arise when the mainspring of a tradesman's success ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... vengeance will rise, until the soul has learnt to transform imprecation into prayer, and the desire for justice into supplication for the guilty. But if, in the presence of crime, we were forced to believe that there will never be either vengeance or pardon, the mainspring of the moral life would be broken, and humanity would at length exclaim, like Brutus in the plains of Philippi:—"Virtue! thou art ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the usurpation of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by proxy." Woman is the mainspring and the chief support of Ritualism. Things were at a dead lock and stand still, until the so-called devotion gave an impetus to the movement. The medieval church have glorified the devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... had begun very cheerfully at Riverdale ended sadly enough. In August, at York Harbor, Maine, Mrs. Clemens's health failed and she was brought home an invalid, confined almost entirely to her room. She had been always the life, the center, the mainspring of the household. Now she must not even be consulted—hardly visited. On her bad days—and they were many—Clemens, sad and anxious, spent most of his time lingering about her door, waiting for news, or until he was permitted to see ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... golden crown to add to its dignity. Any nation with pride might have numbered amongst its heroes a man possessing the military talents of a Miltiades, with the purity of an Aristides; one whose character was without reproach, whose fame was unstained with a blot. Simple, earnest faith was the mainspring of the actions of Maccabeus. The clear, piercing gaze of the eagle, energy like that with which the strong wing of the royal bird cleaves the air, marked the noble Asmonean; for the soul's gaze was upward toward its Sun, and the soul's pinion soared high above the petty interests, ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... should say that it was ever the custom of rats to desert a sinking ship. So that was your mainspring, was it?" ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and amazing substance was this, which could not be bent or broken, or even bitten into? The more Black Bruin pushed at the iron bars of his cage, the fainter grew that spark of hope which is the mainspring of all life, until at last he ceased to hope altogether, and bowing to the inevitable, no longer sought to be free. Sullenly he glared at the gaping crowds that passed his cage daily, and the only thing to which he looked forward was his food. This he received ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... sympathies and antipathies between the various animals are regulated. For every individual has not only its specific but also its individual scent. The selection between the sexes, or what, in the case of the human race, is called love, has its mainspring in the odorous harmony subsisting in the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... his habitual mental attitude was, "What is there in this for me?" He did not indeed use just those words or give such crude expression to his self-centeredness; but she had come to know that personal advantage was the usual mainspring of his actions. Presently deciding that Isabella's enlivening effect upon his mood had inspired his desire for their company, her mind went on to busy itself with speculation over the cause ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... ardent enterprising man, King's other self, is thought to be the mainspring of affairs here (small thanks to him privately from Bevern, add some): and is stationed in the extreme van, as we see; Winterfeld is engaged in many things besides the care of this post; and indeed where a critical ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... paper," he said in a firm voice: "the clock is yours, and the principle of the movement is to be found engraved on a small plate under the mainspring." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... hath got "never-dying honour against renowned Douglas." The Douglas, too, can find no other word with which to praise Hotspur—"thou art the king of honour": even Vernon, a mere secondary character, has the same mainspring: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... among historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the right motive of useful research. Acton ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... problems of exchange, or the fluctuations of market-price, could not be made to solve the more fundamental problem of distribution. We must look beneath the superficial phenomena and ask what is the nature of the structure itself: what is the driving force or the mainspring which works the whole mechanism. We seem, indeed, to be inquiring into the very origin of industrial organisation. The foundation of a sound doctrine comes from Adam Smith. Smith had said that in a primitive society the only rule would be that things should exchange ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... commander as expressed through his subordinates down the line from the second in command to the squad leaders, must be carried out by everyone. Hence the vital importance of prompt, instinctive obedience on the part of everybody, and of discipline, which is the mainspring of obedience and also the foundation rock of law ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... of men, 'tis scarce wonderful that he takes vanity to be the mainspring that moves the human species," said De Malfort, when some one had found fault with the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... were fixed before him in apparent vacancy, while the same grim smile still hovered round his thin lips. Something of that irresponsible spirit of adventure which was the mainspring of all Sir Percy Blakeney's actions, must for the moment have pervaded the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Connecticut, as well as in all those of New England, we find the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of American liberty at the present day. The political existence of the majority of the nations of Europe commenced in the superior ranks of society, and was gradually and imperfectly communicated to the different members ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Derby (formerly Lord Stanley) from the Protectionist Party, but no definite statement could be elicited as to their intention, or the reverse, to re-impose a duty on foreign corn. Mr Disraeli, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was the mainspring of the Government policy, showed great dexterity in his management of the House of Commons without a majority, and carried a Militia Bill in the teeth of Lord John Russell; but a plan of partial redistribution failed. The elections held in the summer did not materially improve the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... up in his quiet home, but death came there as well as to Brackenhill, and seemed to take the mainspring of the household in taking Sarah Thorne. Her father pined for her, and had no pleasure in life except in her child. Even when the old man was growing feeble, and it was manifest to all but the boy that he would not long be parted from his daughter, it was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... I will not say the atoms merely, but even fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born poet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he clothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the aroma of sentiment rises like a sort of pungent incense between them ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... in which I have lived, by the Divine help and mercy, from my youth upward. I ask you earnestly, I ask you confidently, to make it your faith, too. It is the mainspring of all the good I have ever done, of all the happiness I have ever known; it lightens my darkness, it sustains my hope; it comforts and quiets me, lying here, to live or die, I know not which. ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the Congo, which is five hours steaming down river from Matadi. We remained here for a day and a half because the Minister of the Colonies was to go back on "The Anversville." I was glad of the opportunity for it enabled me to see this town, which is the mainspring of the colonial administration. The palace of the Governor-General stands on a commanding hill and is a pretentious establishment. The original capital of the Congo was Vivi, established by Stanley at a point not far from Matadi. It was abandoned ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... special economic concessions in return; these economic concessions to benefit us as well as her. There are few brighter pages in American history than the page which tells of our dealings with Cuba during the past four years. On her behalf we waged a war of which the mainspring was generous indignation against oppression; and we have kept faith absolutely. It is earnestly to be hoped that we will complete in the same spirit the record so well begun, and show in our dealings with Cuba that steady continuity of policy which it is ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... mainspring of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element in conscience, becomes a cruel misanthrope, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... daughter. He succeeded in attracting her attention; she blushed and withdrew. But next day she came again at the same hour. On the third day, however, a heavy wooden shutter was clapped upon the window. Nothing daunted, Fabrice proceeded patiently to cut a peep-hole in the shutter by aid of the mainspring of his watch. When he had succeeded in removing a square piece of the wood, he looked with delight upon Clelia gazing at his window with eyes of profound pity, unconscious that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... all; and the fact that, as Mr. Homer Smith informs us, out of some thousand lines less than half are devoted to strictly pastoral interests, is but evidence of the felicity of construction, by which Jonson, while keeping the pastoral plot as the mainspring of the piece, nevertheless avoided the tediousness almost inseparable from pastoral action and atmosphere, and threw the burden of stage business upon the more congenial personages of Maid Marian, Robin Hood and his merry men, the Witch of Paplewich, and Robin Goodfellow. It remains for ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fierce as she had planned to make it, in her first indignation at his "even you." She did not pat him on the back for making concessions about the play. She merely said she was glad he was acting so sensibly about it, and that if she was the mainspring of that action she was proud. As for letting him off, he was the only living person who could keep him on, or let him off. If he was the sort of softling who could not stand up under life's discipline because it was uncomfortable or unpleasant, then ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... without a house, a nation and an army to protect him? No, it is not at all practical. Even Christ could not defend Himself. He was crucified without any resistance, any struggle. To hate is to struggle and that is the mainspring of action. So one must prepare himself to struggle successfully. To hate, to cause to be feared, are the proper motives for life. They are life. Fear is a stronger and far more universal human motive than love. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... success in love regularly lies through some sort of pecuniary fraud; and the crafty servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary distresses, is the real mainspring of the piece. There is no want of the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love, of tearful parting scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous intrigue ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the royal authority is the mainspring which controls all movements and all actions in every part of the State. Let this source of energy grow weak, and decline at once shows itself throughout the entire body politic. It is as when a fatal malady ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic, its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge. In his prose essay called "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads," appended to the final edition of his poems, Whitman has not so much sought to expound himself as to put his reader ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... possesses such curative resources as those latent in a single ray of hope? The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a kind of asthma ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... infernal and external enemies of the republic or perish with it. Now, in such a situation, the first maxim of your policy should be, to lead the people by reason, and the enemies of the people by terror. If, during peace, virtue be the mainspring of a popular government, its mainspring in the times of revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror becomes fatal, terror, without which virtue is powerless. Subdue, then, the enemies of liberty by terror; and, as the founders of the republic, ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... the many centuries of cold weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however, that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage to exist through the long cold spells which killed many ferocious animals, but ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... be styled remonstrance, for he is perpetually checking our levity, as he calls it; always keeping us in order and snubbing us, nevertheless we couldn't do without him. In fact, we may be likened to a social clock, of which Jim is the mainspring, Bob the weight, I the striking part of the works, and Dobson the pendulum. But we are not particular, ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... Elias M. worked hard for his first dollar, and for his millionth. He's still working hard. He still finds the fear of God useful: he puts it into everybody that goes up against his game. The fear of the Poor-House is with him yet, though he doesn't realize it. It's the mainspring of his religion. There's nothing so mean as fear; and Elias M.'s fear is back of all his meanness, his despotism in business, his tyranny as an employer. I tell you, Boss, if you ever saw a hellion in a cutaway coat, Elias M. Pierce is ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... peoples has, in fact and inevitably, led to their leadership in government also, and given them the predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out, its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in those busy regions of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... longer: all men know you, all men are your friends; this it is to possess the friendship of the venerable Solon. Conversing with him, you will forget Scythia and all that is in it. Your toils are rewarded, your desire is fulfilled. In him you have the mainspring of Greek civilization, in him the ideals of Athenian philosophers are realized. Happy man—if you know your happiness—to be the friend and intimate ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... it, as if he were there himself, the Arch-Enemy of honest neighbors in a time of stress!")—but it does appear they had got it into their sagacious heads that the bad neighbor at Berlin was, in effect, the Arch-Enemy, probably mainspring of the whole matter; and that it would be in the highest degree interesting to see clearly what Lee and he had on hand. Order thereupon to Elliot: "Do it, at any price;" and finally, as mere price will not answer, "Do it by any method,—STEAL ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... thread of lineal descent. To insist upon its importance is to obscure, as has been obscured, the epic range of Mr. Cabell's creative genius. It is to fail to observe that he has treated in his many books every mainspring of human action and that his themes have been the cardinal dreams and impulses which have in them heroic qualities. Each separate volume has a unity and harmony of a complete and separate life, for the excellent reason that with the consummate skill ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... liege," said De Vaux, "take it less violently—you will be heard without doors, where such speeches are but too current already among the common soldiery, and engender discord and contention in the Christian host. Bethink you that your illness mars the mainspring of their enterprise; a mangonel will work without screw and lever better than the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Lucien never returned home till morning, and rose in the middle of the day; Coralie was always at his side, he could not forego a single pleasure. Sometimes he saw his real position, and made good resolutions, but they came to nothing in his idle, easy life; and the mainspring of will grew slack, and only responded to the heaviest pressure ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... youth!" he cried, "the same impetuous youth that is at this very moment hacking out for Germany a world empire amidst the nations in arms. A wonderful race, a race of giants, our German youth, Herr Doktor ... the mainspring of our great German machine—as they find who resist it. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... in England and her great dependencies, for there is no office in this vast Empire which is not open to Canadian talent. (Loud applause.) It is on this ground that I believe we can confidently appeal to the generosity of the wealthy, that generosity which is the mainspring of every institution in a free country. (Cheers.) It was in 1836 that it was said by those who founded the college, that "a deep and wide foundation had been laid, a foundation capable of extension," and I rejoice that now in the lifetime of the generation which ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... wears out life in effete regions such as Europe and the Eastern states. In this feeling there is just enough of truth to keep the notion alive, but never enough to save from disaster those who make it a working hypothesis. The hope of great or sudden wealth has been the mainspring of enterprise in California, but it has also been the excuse for shiftlessness and recklessness, the cause of social disintegration and moral decay. The "Argonauts of '49" were a strong, self-reliant, generous body of men. They came for gold, and gold in abundance. Most of them found ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... never to return; the insect would not retreat under shelter in the rain; the dormouse would not hibernate, the ant collect its stores, the bee its honey. There could be no life without expectation; and a life without hope in man or woman is that of a machine—not even that of an animal. Hope is the mainspring of every activity; it is the spur to all undertakings; it is the buttress to every building; it runs in all youthful blood; it gives buoyancy to every young heart and vivacity to every brain. Mehetabel ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... God forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... open, thus affording me a glimpse of its contents. Among these was my silent watch with its chain of gold, its pencil and seal attached. I wore it usually (though useless now in its silent condition—the mainspring was broken) from habit and for safe keeping, but had laid it there when I staggered to my bed, ill and weak after my terrible ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... have been indicated by various writers; but only one of them seems to me at all worthy of serious attention. It has been asserted that this segregation has impeded advancement, that it has prevented the Indians learning as much from us as they otherwise might, and that it has impeded the mainspring of all advancement—education. Here, I apprehend, the argument against caste, as far as rural populations are concerned, utterly fails, and, in a province contiguous to my own, a most signal instance ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... for some time, he went to Europe and travelled. When he returned, he resolved to study law, but presently relinquished it. Then he collected materials for a history, but suffered them to lie unused. Somehow the mainspring was gone. He used to come and pass weeks with Prue and me. His coming made the children happy, for he sat with them, and talked and played with them all day long, as one of themselves. They had no quarrels when our cousin the curate was their playmate, and ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... admitted the recruit generously, "let us be frugal. Frugality is the mainspring of efficiency. One way of turning about is ample for me. But why ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... It may, however, be mentioned that he invented a method by which the chronometer might be kept going without losing any portion of time. This was during the process of winding up, which was done once in a day. While the mainspring was being wound up, a secondary one preserved the motion of the wheels and kept the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... mainspring in the whole Of endless Nature's calm rotation; Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll In the great Timepiece of Creation; Joy breathes on buds, and flowers they are; Joy beckons—suns come forth from heaven; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... replaced with a new one, which I fortunately had with me. No one who has not experienced the loss can imagine the disgust occasioned by an accident to a favourite rifle in a wild country. A spare nipple and mainspring for each barrel and lock should always be taken ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... though vaguely, in the portions preserved. In the opening lines of the epic there is a reference to the time 'when fates were not yet decided.' The decision of fates is in the Babylonian theology one of the chief functions of the gods. It constitutes the mainspring of their power. To decide fates is practically to control the arrangement of the universe—to establish order. It is this function which arouses the natural opposition of Tiamat and her brood, for Tiamat feels ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... The mainspring of all progress, individual and social, is the desire to fulfill in character all one has planned in thought. Man's life is one long pursuit of the visions of possible excellence which disquiet, rebuke and tempt him upward. "As to other points," said John Milton, "what God may ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and her physical forces commands the highest functions of the mind, but the relation of man to his fellows not only enlists the highest intellectual effort, but requires that it be tempered by impulses of human kindness. Those who have as the mainspring of their actions the elevation of their fellows live and move upon a higher plane and are better members of society than those who subordinate sentiment and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Montalembert,[*] written in August, 1831, which shows Balzac's extreme anxiety not to dissociate his writings from the cause of religion. In it he explains, with much insistence, that, in site of the apparent scepticism of "La Peau de Chagrin," the idea of God is really the mainspring of the whole book, and on these grounds he begs for a review in L'Avenir. The letter also contains an announcement which is interesting as a proof that two years before the date given by his sister, the idea of his great systematic work ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... yet not altogether unpleasant flavour of ether filled eyes, mouth, and nostrils, till it permeated to his very lungs. Then with every pulsation of the blood Big Ben seemed to be striking inside his brain till something gave way with a great whizz! like the mainspring of a watch, and Tom Ryfe was perfectly quiet ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... must accept. Now, if we examine a collection of typical plays of every kind, tragedies and melodramas, comedies and farces, we shall find that the starting point of everyone of them is the same. Some one central character wants something; and this exercise of volition is the mainspring of the action. . . . In every successful play, modern or ancient, we shall find this clash of contending desires, this assertion of the human will against strenuous opposition of one ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... of crimes of which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age; most of them students and teachers; all of ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... is the mainspring, the heart of our common life. If ignorance and semi-barbarous dominance be fatal to civilized communities, no less so is constant and deliberate defiance ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... servants in every country," he said; "the rich are always my friends—the poor often come to me because they are not rich. Few who know me can do without me; indeed, I may say that but for such men as I am the world would not go on. I am the mainspring of its endeavour." ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the power, at the disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, the psychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find him here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an unsuspected force of affection in himself. His correspondent, unknown but for ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... on earth! The highest bliss which crowns us from our birth, Our joy! the mainspring of our life and aims, Our great incentive when sweet love inflames Our hearts to glorious deeds and ever wreathes Around our brows, the happy smile that breathes Sweet fragrance from the home of holy love, And arms us ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... observe, that if I have in no case made her allude to the Virgin Mary, and exhibited the sense of infinite duty and loyalty to Christ alone, as the mainspring of all her noblest deeds, it is merely in accordance with Dietrich's biography. The omission of all Mariolatry is remarkable. My business is to copy that omission, as I should in the opposite case have copied the introduction ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... is the animals. Cows and pigs, horses, goats, sheep and rabbits abandoned by the husbandman, startled, puzzled; the clock with the broken mainspring running backward. The small game: deer, antlered, striped, and spotted; wildsheep, ovis poli, TeddyRooseveltshot and Audubonprinted, mountaingoats leaping in terror to hazardous safety on babel's top, upward to the pinpoint where no angels dance. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... surroundings. Virtue and vice are the result not of innate tendencies, but of external circumstances. When these are perfected, evil will necessarily disappear from the world. He had so successfully subordinated his own emotions, that in his philosophical system he calmly ignores passion as a mainspring of human activity. This is exemplified by the rule he lays down for the regulation of a man's conduct to his fellow-beings. He must always measure their respective worth, and not the strength of his affection for them, even if the individuals concerned be his near relations. Supposing, for example, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Violet had come to about her chance for social success was amply justified by the event, and it is probable that Violet had put her finger on the mainspring of it. One needn't assume that there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... I know, and every other woman knows, that women treat their hair as they treat their watches—to unpardonable abuse. Of course, one's hair isn't dropped on the sidewalk or prodded with stickpins until the mainspring breaks, but it is subjected to even deeper and more trying insults. One night, when the little woman is in a real good, amiable mood, the tresses are carefully taken down, brushed, doctored with a nice "smelly" ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... on the various problems of "The Wind Bloweth"—problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity, and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander the wide world over, a race that loves battle, and yet always falls—whilst ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of hardship and anxiety was tearing to shreds the delicate health of the two young artists, and on September 23, 1870, Valeriano breathed his last in the arms of Gustavo. His death was a blow from which Gustavo never recovered. It was as though the mainspring was broken in a watch; and, though the wheels still turned of their own momentum, the revolutions were few in number and soon ceased. "A strange illness," says Correa, "and a strange manner of death was that! Without any precise symptom, that ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... passion by reaching the point of satiety. But it was a task demanding prudence and patience. In that first interview, his ardour had availed him nothing. Obviously, she had founded her plan of impeccability on the grand phrase—'Could you endure to share me with another?' The mainspring of the great platonic business was a virtuous horror of divided possession. For the rest, it was just within the bounds of possibility that this horror was not feigned. Most women addicted to the practice of free love, if they do eventually marry, affect, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... greatest name is that of Adam Smith, whose works, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations," must be taken in conjunction. In the first he works on the assumption that sympathy is the mainspring of human conduct. In the "Wealth of Nations" the mainspring is selfishness. The two are not contradictory, but complementary. Of the second book it may be said that it is probably the most important which has ever been written, whether we consider the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... splendid gold watch and chain! I turned faint with jealousy, and when a second glance showed me that the interloper was no other than the identical gold repeater whom I had known and dreaded in my infancy, I was ready to break my mainspring with vexation. To me the surprise had brought nothing but foreboding and despair, and already I felt myself discarded for my rival; but to Charlie it brought a rapture of delight which expressed itself in a whoop which could be heard ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... its never satisfied hunger, its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... have been before, out of the hard coarse limits in which her one line of labor and association had first placed her, she would have come up into such an atmosphere as was here, ready made for her to breathe and abide in? To help make also; to stand at its practical mainspring, and keep it possible that ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... against one object, and rendered irresistible from that very multiplication, and we have the envy of the coterie transformed into the fury of revolution. Whoever will closely observe the working of that mainspring of human actions—selfishness—on the society, whether in a village, a city, a country, or a metropolis in which he resides, will have no difficulty in discerning the real but secret, and therefore unobserved spring of the greatest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... council." But I have quoted enough upon this head to give an idea of the kind and busy brain not too deeply immersed in its own projects to have a tender regard for those of others. Meanwhile his own work was continually progressing. Lowell had already made him feel that he was the mainspring of the "Atlantic," which at the time of the war attained the height of its popularity, and achieved a position where it found no peer. The care which Dr. Holmes bestowed upon the finish of his work, the endless labor over its ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... extracted from Luigi does not lie on the surface; it will have to be seen through Barto Rizzo's mind. This man regarded himself as the mainspring of the conspiracy; specially its guardian, its wakeful Argus. He had conspired sleeplessly for thirty years; so long, that having no ideal reserve in his nature, conspiracy had become his professional occupation,—the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... took the party to Crystal Brook, Shanty Brook, Mainspring Brook, Tenement Brook, and more little mountain gutters of the kind than you could count on your fingers and toes. As an aristocratic residence, this region is certainly superior to New York, for the Murray Hills are as plenty as blackberries. The next day they all went up ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... of the Aeneid are derived from Homer. As the wrath of Achilles is the mainspring of the Iliad, so the unity of the Aeneid results from the anger of Juno. The arrival of Aeneas in Italy after the destruction of Troy, the obstacles that opposed him through the intervention of Juno, and the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... I preside was an extremely well-written one from a western State, asking for a Consulate, and beginning in this wise: "I have no excuse for intruding on your busy occupations except a pardonable desire to live elsewhere." [Laughter.] Now that has been the mainspring of New Englanders ever since they were seated by Providence on its barren shores, a pardonable desire to live elsewhere. [Laughter.] If they had been planted here—if they had been seated in the luxurious climate and with the fertile soil of the South, they would have had no desire, pardonable ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... nomination, as the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him—the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, half poet and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of humor, the absurdity of the thing must have forced itself upon him and possibly helped to improve his temper. But he had no humor, and so abandoned himself to the venomous temper that was practically the mainspring of his life. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... pay the nominal rent which she was charged. He arranged to have her rent paid out of a sum of money which he always had included in the school budget for the relief of such cases. In such ways he was constantly impressing upon his associates the idea that was ever a mainspring of his own life—namely, that it was always and everywhere the duty of the more fortunate to help ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... differentiate between that reasonable discontent which is the mainspring of human progress, and that unreasonable discontent which is the destruction ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... revolt. It was intolerable for a man all of whose other surroundings moved like clockwork, obedient to his whims, to be disobeyed flatly by one whose obedience should be his first duty—to find disorder and rebellion in the very mainspring of the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... proposed to show, by an allusion to certain prominent facts occurring during the summer of '64, that the so-called Democratic party was the mainspring to the great conspiracy that has been attempted in the North with so much audacity that many men of the best judgment can scarcely believe it to be a reality. In this we do not wish to be understood that all men who have heretofore voted the "unterrified" ticket, have knowingly ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... an American product, to be exercised as a popular benefit, and having no mainspring or motive power but that. It is the co-operation and co-ordination of equal partners, and while by a figure of speech fraternalism might be used to describe it, paternalism can never be properly ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... all this swept over Christopher's mind like a wave of fire, scorching his soul, desecrating and humiliating the very mainspring of ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs; and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,—the thirst for moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but the result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Christian; and yet he accused the Brethren of teaching "that there were no duties in the New Testament." Gilbert Tennent brought the very same accusation. "The Moravian notion about the law," he said, "is a mystery of detestable iniquity; and, indeed, this seems to be the mainspring of their unreasonable, anti-evangelical, and licentious religion." But the severest critic of the Brethren was John Wesley. He attacked them in a "Letter to the Moravian Church," and had that letter printed in his Journal. He attacked them again in his "Short View of the Difference between ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton |
