"Potent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... formidable, is related by the Prince of authors, the deified Julius [Caesar]; and hence it is probable that they too have passed into Germany. For what a small obstacle must be a river, to restrain any nation, as each grew more potent, from seizing or changing habitations; when as yet all habitations were common, and not parted or appropriated by the founding and terror of Monarchies? The region therefore between the Hercynian Forest and the rivers ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... compass-needle shows sympathy with some disturbing element, the cause of which he believes to exist in the mountains which rise along the shore. He repeats the stories of ancient skippers, of vessels having been lured out of their course by the deviation of the guiding-needle, which succumbed to the potent influence exerted in those hills of iron ore; heeding not the fact that the disturbing agent is the iron on board of his own ship, and not the magnetic oxide of ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... crimes, and so reduce them, in her knowledge, if not in theirs, to the condition of being, more or less, her slaves. Hence she pounced upon a secret as one would on a diamond in the dust, any fact even was precious, for it might be allied to some secret—might, in combination with other facts, become potent. How far this vice may have had its origin in the fact that she had secrets of her own, might be ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... hostile invasions of the Saxons, when the ancient and christian inhabitants of the island retired to those natural intrenchments, for protection from their pagan visitants. But when these invaders themselves were converted to christianity, and settled into regular and potent governments, this retreat of the antient Britons grew every day narrower; they were overrun by little and little, gradually driven from one fastness to another, and by repeated losses abridged of their ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... which existed between us. My elegant and delicate nature (as the newspapers then styled it: they now call it my weak and morbid nature) seemed in absolute contradiction to that robust frame, that oaken solidity, which revealed beneath its rugged bark its virile juices. His masculine and potent ugliness reminded me of Mirabeau, of a plebeian Mirabeau with straight black hair, of a Mirabeau who had found at the foot of the altar calmness for his tempest-tossed soul. His conversation delighted and fascinated me. One felt (despite some ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
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