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More "Invent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the gods have laid Of time to come the event; And laugh to see the fools afraid Of what the knaves invent.—SEDLEY, from Lycophron. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they don't last long, and, even with the most frivolous, are not occupations that satisfy the whole mind and heart, in which there is generally an aspiration after something useful. It is not vanity alone that makes a man of the mode invent a new bit or give his name to a new kind of carriage; it is the influence of that mystic yearning after utility, which is one of the master-ties between ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hate them, and accuse them of all that it may please any maniac or liar to invent about them. Yet you demand of the Jews that they should help you, when you stand in need of help. You, Jew-haters, serve somebody or something, but truly it is not God, it is not the cause of goodness that you are serving. In your blindness ...
— The Shield • Various
... that he could not tell him his name and, blushing, began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for concealing it, but the Frenchman ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... to ride past them at the head of a company of artillery, or show himself at a ball in tight clothes. Sometimes a mere turn of the head, a melancholy attitude, makes them suppose a man's whole life; they'll invent a romance to match the hero—who is often a mere brute, but the marriage is made. Watch the Chevalier de Valois: study him; copy his manners; see with what ease he presents himself; he never puts on a stiff air, as you do. Talk a little more; one would really ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... behind in the race of competition, but to proceed in a different way. 'It is all very well,' thought he, 'to talk of principles and theories; but with the requisite apparatus, the human figure may be measured as accurately as a block of stone;' and accordingly he set to work, not to invent a theory, but to construct a machine. This machine, though exhibited some time ago in the School of Arts, and received with great favour, we happened not to hear of till a few days ago; but a visit to our neighbour puts it now in our power to report that his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... scenario for you. But before I could finish it I had come back to London; and now it is all up with the scenario: in England I can do nothing but talk. I therefore now send you the thing as far as I scribbled it; and I leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero, and to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again, unless you prefer to end with the millennium in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a dear little innocent baby. Of course, I can quite understand. And does she suppose I'll ruffle her pretty little feathers? No, not I. I'd rather invent a new cradle song for you, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... them, that the books, the ballads, the barber's shops, the theatres are full of, were really and truly ladies of flesh and blood, and mistresses of those that glorify and have glorified them? Nothing of the kind; they only invent them for the most part to furnish a subject for their verses, and that they may pass for lovers, or for men valiant enough to be so; and so it suffices me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is fair and virtuous; and as to her pedigree it is very little matter, for no one will ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "I shall invent some means of consolation for him," she replied. "I like dancing among the bright flowers. Why should we not have everything gay and bright and ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... wandering. Looked too long at the portrait. [Laughs] What a business! Educated people go and invent all sorts of machines and medicines, but there hasn't yet been a man wise enough to invent a medicine against the female sex.... They try to cure every sort of disease, and it never occurs to them that more people die of women than of ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... ignorance of his straitened circumstances; she was not to be distressed by knowledge of his distress, nor could he tolerate the suggestion of seeming to play for her sympathy. It was necessary, then, to invent a motive to excuse his return to 9, Frognall Street. I believe he chose to exaggerate the inquisitiveness of his nature and threw in for good measure a desire to recover a prized trinket of no particular moment, esteemed for its associations, and so forth. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... all about it," coaxed the Chief Factor, well knowing that if he were once started there would be on his part little need of urging in order to extract from the old tripper all he knew, or could invent to ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... grew outrageous in his demands upon the Devil, and put him to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous tasks; but they were all punctually performed, until Simon could invent no new ones, and the Devil sat all day with his hands in ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... long and tedious siege. Every method which love could suggest, or art invent, was adopted. I was sometimes ready to despair, under an idea that her resolution was unconquerable, her virtue impregnable. Indeed, I should have given over the pursuit long ago, but for the hopes of success I entertained from her parleying with me, and, in reliance ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... that two or three hundred years ago we did things we wouldn't do now. Times have changed in all sorts of ways. But we never set out like a Caesar or a Napoleon or a Bismarck to invent an empire. It all came about quite naturally. Anybody else could have done the same. But nobody else thought of it—at the time. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... muggy blackness that shuts down on India in the rains, Warrington walked alone, swinging a lantern and chuckling to himself as he reflected what D Squadron would be likely to invent as a reason for the smell that walked with him. For he meant to wake D Squadron and ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... ponderosity, which cannot be adequately calculated for here, where the largest machine for conveying weights does not exceed sixteen arrobes, or 400lb. This enormous plant will require twenty men at least to place it upon the vehicle, with the aid of such levers as our Indians can invent. It grows in the deep ravines of our loftiest mountains, amongst huge stones; the finest plants are inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, and even on horseback it is difficult to reach them. I shall pack ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... ignoble saying, "If there were not a God it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is that in the other life there shall be a hell for ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Persian rugs are generally floral; and in some districts, especially Fars, the women weavers invent the designs, varying them every two or three years. The Mohammedan religion does not allow any direct representation of animal forms; consequently rugs woven under its influence take floral, geometric, and vegetable forms. The Shiah sect of Moslems, ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... the Government for its new coastguard service. 'I don't deny,' he said, 'it's an improvement on anything we've seen yet under the Customs, or would be, if there was any real smuggling left to grapple with. But the "trade" has been dwindling now for these thirty years, and to invent this fire-new service to suppress what's dying of its own accord is an infernal waste of public money.' 'I doubt,' Sir John demurred, 'if smuggling be quite so near death's door as you fancy. Hey, doctor—in Polpeor now?' The doctor opined that very little smuggling ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... almost incredible the torture to which they will sometimes put their prisoners; and the adult captives will endure it without a tear or a groan. In spite of all their sufferings, which the love of cruelty and revenge can invent and inflict upon them, they continue to chaunt their death song with a firm voice; considering that to die like a man, courting pain rather than flinching from it, is the noblest triumph of the warrior. In going to war, some time ago, a Sioux chief cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... friendly spirit; that his goings out and his comings in would be watched; and that in every society, however little disposed to be censorious, there would always be found some prone, where an opening afforded, to exaggerate and even invent stories against him, and to put an uncharitable construction on the most innocent acts. He therefore, from the first, laid down strict, not to say severe rules for his guidance. He imposed a degree of restraint and self-denial upon his own ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him; he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted:—all this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that fluttered slowly and heavily to the earth, where they lay like the foundation of the superstructure that was about to follow. Faster and faster they fell—wonderful multitudes of delicate crystals, adhering in shapes of beauty which outvied all that jeweller could invent or execute of ethereal, starry forms, structures of evanescent yet prodigal loveliness—till the whole air was obscured by them, and night came on, hastened by an hour, from the gathering of their white darkness. In the morning, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... cantered on into the pass while the main body of his command moved leisurely after him towards the natural fastness. It must have been from places on the great South African tableland such as this that Rider Haggard drew his inspirations to invent the hidden kingdoms of Central Africa—charming rock-bound empires familiar to us all. How many will there be who have trekked through and through the new British colonies, and not been struck with the many mountain-locked valleys which abound! Valleys ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... because our streets and highways are lined and shaded with equally expensive kinds, although they are absolutely worthless for any other purpose than shade or shelter, yielding nothing in the way of food for either man or beast. Can any one invent a reasonable excuse for planting miles and miles of roadside trees of such kinds as elm, maple, ash, willow, cottonwood and many other similar kinds, where shellbark hickory, walnut, butternut, pecan and chestnut would thrive just as well, cost no more, and yet yield bushels of delicious ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... unwelcome intruder? I would at that moment have given a year of my life for the loan of a steel trap, or any trap that would take rats; but since the loan of a trap was out of the question, I set my brains to work to invent some contrivance that would enable me to rid myself of my unpleasant neighbour: neighbour I might call him, for I knew that his house was not far off—perhaps at that moment he had his den not three feet from my face—likely enough, ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... tourists you must have enough people to make romances and tragedies,— without loss of life, of course,—merely catastrophes of broken hearts, and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing and shooting achievements, such as men know how to invent,"—it was delightful to hear her voice soften to an amusing suggestiveness, "and broken bridges and land-slides, with many other things which you can supply, Dr. Marmion. No, I am afraid that Viking is too humdrum ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes, for he must be forced to invent ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Rome, Antioch, Carthage, Alexandria, and all the chief cities were searched for Christians. If they would not throw a handful of incense on the idol's altar or disown Christ, they were given over to all the horrid torments cruel ingenuity could invent, in the hope of subduing their constancy. Some fell, but the greater number were firm, and witnessed a glorious confession before, in 251, Decius and his son were both slain ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to free themselves and their coadjutors flout all transient weakness towards their cause and treachery towards one another; and, lastly, that these men, having, amidst all their ignorance, originality enough to invent the most pure and sublime system of morality which the world has ever listened to, had, amidst all their conscious villany, the effrontery to preach it, and, which is more extraordinary, the inconsistency to ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... said Chaffery, "who believe in Darwin and doubt Moses. Now, I hold myself better than they—analogous perhaps, but better—for I do at least invent something of the tricks ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... into the vacant lot behind it. His common sense had foretold just this result to his experiment, so he was not in the least disappointed; but he had considered it his duty to try the only expedient his ingenuity could invent. For if—by a miracle—the little gun had discharged the shot with force; Bobby might—by a miracle—be permitted to participate with it in the Shoot; and might—by a miracle—win the Flobert himself. Bobby was no fool. He marked the necessity of three miracles; and he did not in the least expect ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... writing up my journal, etc. I had managed hitherto to keep my mind employed. I had also tasked my ability to the utmost to constantly invent some occupation for the men, but my resources of this nature were now all exhausted; and on Friday night I stretched myself on the sand, not to sleep, but to brood, throughout the weary ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... evidently bewildered and annoyed by this passionate appeal which he did not understand. He demanded an explanation, and the ready-witted native was obliged to invent some plausible excuse. Yet when he raised his face to Jenks there was the look of a hunted ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... outward appearances of sentiment and affection, unloved had not in any way embittered Abigail's remarkably joyous temperament made up for it in some measure by getting all the fun and excitement out of life which she could discover therein, or invent through the medium of her ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be shlaughtered now, And I 'll invent the plan, forgetting pity; The shacrificing of a sinless cow Is cruel in the kindesht-hearted ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... them. She pledged her word on every point, and this was the second time that her liaison with Ulick had obliged her to lie, deliberately in so many words. Nor did the lying even end there. He wanted her to stay, to dine with him; she had to invent ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... "To-morrow I shall send down a clerk with a cheque for a hundred, and he'll draw out the original sum and return it to the Anglo-Patagonian, with some sort of explanation which I will try to invent for you. That will clear your feet, and as Morris can't touch a penny of it without forgery, it will do no harm to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Eckmuhl (Marshal Davoust) was appointed Governor-General of that place on the union of the Hanse Towns with the Empire. From that period I was constantly occupied in contending against the persecutions and denunciations which he racked his imagination to invent. I cannot help attributing to those persecutions the Emperor's coolness towards me on my arrival in Paris. But as Davoust's calumnies were devoid of proof, he resorted to a scheme by which a certain appearance of probability might supply the place ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... said Jarley, shortly. "Goes is sometimes a synonym for stays. When I feel stronger I may invent a new language, which will have fewer absurdities than English as ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... in the course of a brilliant career of forty years we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the powder to blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will split open one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that swim around in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a fortune. And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... feeling with which it is clothed in your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note; if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of insincerity is fatal to the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... which the princess penetrating, said: "I see you take me to be mad to order such a dish, which one may say with certainty was never made. I know this as well as you; but I am not mad, and give you these orders with the most perfect recollection. You must invent and do the best you can, and bring me back what pearls are left." The cook could make no reply, but took the box and retired; and afterward the princess gave directions to all the domestics to have everything in order, both in the house and gardens, ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... experimentally and practically by doing it! That invention hath invented and found out all the sin and misery under which the world groans. It is a poor invention to devise misery and torment to the creature. This was the height of folly and madness, for a happy creature to invent how to make itself miserable and all others. Indeed, he intended another thing—to be more happy, but pride and ambition got a deserved fall, the result of all is ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the window of the Tuscan Ambassador's great villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance have wrongly crowned as a martyr—Galileo Galilei. Tradition represents him as languishing, laden with chains, in the more or less mythical prisons of the Inquisition; history ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... not so easy to invent, as to improve the inventions of others. The alterations Thespis made in tragedy, gave room for AEschylus to make new and more considerable of his own. He was born at Athens, in the first year of the sixtieth Olympiad. He took upon him the profession of arms, at a time when ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve him instead of experience. We thus owe something to the staying and restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"—for his works, which are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... from the school, To please in method, and invent by rule; 10 His studious patience and laborious art, By regular approach essay'd the heart: Cold Approbation gave the lingering bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise; A mortal born, he ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... purposeful games rather than exercises are to be commended. There is indeed no comparison for a moment possible between Nature's method of exercise, which is obtained through play, and the ridiculous and empty parodies of it which men invent. The truth is that Nature is aiming at one thing, and man at another. Man's aim, for reasons already exploded, is the acquirement of strength; Nature's is the acquirement of skill. It is really nervous development that Nature is ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... impatient when they are waiting for the accomplishment of any event they have set their hearts upon. The prince, therefore, to make the time seem short to him, proposed as a kind of merry pastime that they should invent some artful scheme to make Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other. Claudio entered with great satisfaction into this whim of the prince, and Leonato promised them his assistance, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... be the results of an action. I did it for the best. I thought the Indians would enjoy a visit to Europe as much as did the two lads I brought over on my first voyage. They were too old, however, and seem to have been rooted to the soil. I am afraid we shall have to invent a way of explaining their absence should we return to Hochelaga. Would it not be well to marry them to noble ladies, and give them dukedoms ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... the Christians of worshipping an ass, and they did not invent this reproach, but it came from the Samaritan Jews, who, figuring the data of the Kabalah in regard to the Divinity by Egyptian symbols, also represented the Intelligence by the figure of the Magical Star adored under the name of Remphan, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... appearance of being an honest, native combination. All such primitive terms for larger numbers must, however, be received with caution. Savages are sometimes eager to display a knowledge they do not possess, and have been known to invent numeral words on the spot for the sake of carrying their scales to as high a limit as possible. The Choctaw words for million and billion are obvious attempts to incorporate the corresponding English terms into their own language.[136] ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... reform the state of religion in his native city, Mecca, and to put down the idolatry which prevailed there. [Sidenote: Flight to Medina.] The opposition which the false prophet encountered from his fellow-citizens did not hinder him from making many converts to the religion he was beginning to invent for himself and for them, until at length (A.D. 622) an insurrection, caused by the preaching and success of Mahomet, obliged him to fly for his life from Mecca, and take refuge at Yatreb ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I could not have invented you. But perhaps you have invented me: I am something new to myself since I saw you first. God bless you ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... the gendarmes are there, and if they are not, we shall be safe for the present. They will, I hope, fancying that you made your way back to the house of Madame La Roche, have gone off there. We must hope for the best, and I will try and invent some reason for wishing to purchase food. The kind lady supplied me with money, so that I shall have no difficulty on ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... proprietor's name should have been changed from Downing to "Duster" it would be difficult to say; but as long as his customers came furnished with ready money and good appetites, the probability is that the former would have been quite content to serve them under any nickname which they chose to invent. ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... Tully (De Invent. ii, 53) it belongs to religion to offer God worship and ceremonial rites. But he who takes a vow does not yet offer something to God, but only promises it. Therefore, a vow is not an ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... strange and startling, and the inevitable result was that the Record reporters endeavoured to make everything strange and startling, to play up the outre details at the expense of the rest of the story, and even, I fear, to invent such ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... "Shakespeare did not invent his plots. He was not interested in plots." So far is this from the truth that the amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction of a very good ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... sound basis for moral development. Having started with the false idea of the special creation of the soul, which brings it into the world free from personal responsibility, it became a necessity to invent a special salvation to give any semblance ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications that the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... of that other man was also subject, for reasons which will appear presently, to the gravest suspicion. James, if himself guilty of the plot, had to invent a story to excuse himself; the other man had to adopt the version of the King, to save his own life from the gibbet. On the other hand, James, if innocent, could not easily have a credible story to tell. If the Master was sane, it ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... shouldst not be employ'd. Go to my brother, he's in his chamber now, Undressing, and preparing for his rest; Find out some means to keep him up awhile: Tell him a pretty story, that may please His ear; invent a tale, no matter what: If he should ask of me, tell him I'm gone To bed, and sent you there to know his pleasure, Whether he'll hunt to-morrow. But do not leave him till he's in his bed; Or, if he chance to walk again this way, Follow, ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway
... advantageous mode of vesting the money in Law's scheme, which was just then broached, and offered his services to travel express to Paris for the purpose. But Bucklaw had so far derived wisdom from adversity, that he would listen to no proposal which Craigengelt could invent, which had the slightest tendency to risk his newly-acquired independence. He that had once eat pease-bannocks, drank sour wine, and slept in the secret chamber at Wolf's Crag, would, he said, prize good cheer and a soft bed as long as he lived, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... opinion, the exercise of the reasoning powers is absolutely sinful—l'homme qui raisonne est l'homme qui peche. Franklin, on the other hand, in a familiar tone of playful banter, vindicates its utility, alleging that it is mightily 'convenient to be a rational animal, who knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination to do.' Examples of this convenience abound. The Barbary Jews were rich and industrious, and, accordingly, their wealth provoke the cupidity of the indolent and avaricious Mussulmans. These latter, whenever a long drought had destroyed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... and the sea was at its foot, and their terrified, short gallop ended there. The last thing the demons would have done would have been to banish themselves, as the death of the swine did banish them, from their new shelter. There is no need, then, to invent justifications for Christ's destroying the herd, for He did not destroy it. No doubt, keeping swine was a breach of Jewish law; no doubt the two demoniacs and the bystanders would be more convinced of the reality of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... said the young man, thoughtfully, as he laid out his little pieces of mechanism on the table; "this is an attempt to invent a means of producing musical ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... The new buildings therefore arose with their foundations some feet above the original level of the Romano-British city. So complete was the gap between the destroyed Durovernum and the Saxon town which eventually grew up that men had had time to forget the old name, and, finding it necessary to invent one, called it Cantwarabyrig, which meant the city of the men of Kent. This title reveals the fact that the new settlers had by this time fixed their limits in Kent, and that they had found this site at the junction of all the Roman roads the most convenient ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... before, and fearing if these Englishmen got good vent for their commodities, that they would become residents and so daily increase, which would be no small loss and hindrance to them, they presently set about to invent subtle devices to hinder them. To which end, they went immediately to the captain of Ormus, who was then Don Gonzalo de Menezes[440], saying that these Englishmen were heretics come to spy the country, and that they ought to be examined and punished as enemies, for a warning to others. Being friendly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... in my previous volumes, so also in this, I have omitted a few passages which appeared to me to be either antiquated or no longer of any general interest. For convenience' sake I have divided the original chapters into sections, which I have had to name; and I have also had to invent a title which should express their real scope. The reader will find that it is not so much Ethics and Politics that are here treated, as human nature itself in ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... be completely ferae naturae and not men at all. We are unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra- corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all. Such tribes only advance pari passu with the creatures upon ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... 'old uncials' they are (as usual) hopelessly at variance on the subject. In an easy sentence of only 9 words,—which however Tischendorf exhibits in conformity with no known Codex, while Tregelles and Alford blindly follow Cod. B,—they have contrived to invent five 'various readings,' as may be seen at foot[26]. Shall we wonder more at the badness of the Codexes to which we are just now invited to pin our faith; or at the infatuation ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... responded that worthy; "a reg'lar traverse, and about the most in-and-out bit of carcumvention as the ingenuity o' man could invent. Let's set about it at once, my lad; and by the time as we've cleared up a bit, and made things comfortable, it'll be time to see about ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... all, let it be clearly understood that an "impression on the mind" does not mean a piece of manufacture. The way in which most artists proceed to "invent," as they call it, a picture, is this: they choose their subject, for the most part, well, with a sufficient quantity of towers, mountains, ruined cottages, and other materials, to be generally interesting; then they fix on some object for a principal ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... every fierce taunt which she could invent against his treachery and his crime; and asked him, how he came to dream that the wife of a Christian Spaniard would condescend to become the mistress of a heathen savage; hoping, unhappy lady, to exasperate him into killing her on the spot. But in vain; she only prolonged thereby her own misery. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... write about. Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity—so people say. It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... this marriage is such a bugbear to me! much might be if we could invent but any way ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... her father, he is rich, and will not send you empty away. Tell him that you heard her voice out in the street, and with the help of a worthy old man—that am I—rescued her from any peril you may invent. If he asks you where the heroic deed was done, name any house you please, only not this. Your best plan is to lay it all on the shoulders of Hananja, the thaumaturgist; we have owed him a grudge this many a day. However, I was not to teach you any lesson, for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Every time he batted he made a home run. He even made initiative suggestions for schemes which were more or less amalgamated with reason and insanity. It is said that he was first at the dances, and first in the hearts of the ladies. It is certain he was the first to invent the sewerage system idea; and the patents were applied for before the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... exceeded four hundred thousand. They had but few weapons of offense or defense, and knew not the use of the bow and arrow. Being a peaceful race and having no wild animals to contend with, their ingenuity had never been taxed to invent weapons of warfare against man or beast. The natives were at once subjected by the new-comers, who reduced them gradually to an actual state of slavery, and proving hard task-masters, the poor overworked creatures died ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... give the errand-boy such a written message, that he could not lose it on the way, nor mistake it when he arrived. The public, eager to thank Morse, as he deserves, thanks him for something he did not invent. For this he probably cares very little; nor do I care more. But the public does not thank him for what he did originate,—this invaluable and simple alphabet. Now, as I use it myself in every detail of life, and see every hour how the public might use it, if it chose, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... was distinguished at the time as Euphuism. One of his main peculiarities stands in using, for images and illustrations, certain imaginary products of a sort of artificial nature, which he got up especially for that purpose; as if he could invent better materials for poetic imagery than ancient Nature had furnished! Still, it is not unlikely that we owe to him somewhat of the polish and flexibility of the Shakespearian dramatic diction: that he could have helped the Poet in any thing beyond mere diction ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... just before I get asleep; but they're all lost for the want of a trap; an intellectual figgery four. I wish we could find out the way of sprinkling salt on their tails, and make 'em wait till we want to use 'em. Why can't some of the meaner souls invent an idea-catcher for the use of genius? I'm sure they'd find it profitable, for I wouldn't mind owing a man twenty ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... raised, 'Wherein does the indefinable distinction of one differ from the mysterious and peculiar communication of the other?' or 'How does it appear that there is any difference?' there is no living man, I am quite sure, who can invent ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... we shan't play any baby games like 'Snap,' or 'Hunt the Slipper,'" answered Guy loftily. "I think I'm going to invent a game specially ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... do doubt that those who invent anything noteworthy occupy the greatest share of the attention of historians, The reason for this is that original inventors are more noticed and excite more wonder, because new things always possess a greater charm than improvements subsequently ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... to allude to; but to the French judges in the time of the trial of the rehabilitation, the fact of Joan of Arc being proved to have been incontestably a virgin was of the highest interest. It was reserved for a countryman of Joan of Arc's (Du Bellay) to invent a legend to disprove the fact; and to the everlasting shame of French literature, Voltaire adopted the lying calumny in his licentious ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... to a thin fanaticism. There followed, in the train of the nobler thinkers and orators, the "Fool Reformers,''—sundry long-haired men and short-haired women, who thought it their duty to stir good Christian people with blasphemy, to deluge the founders of the Republic with blackguardism, and to invent ever more and more ingenious ways for driving every sober-minded man and woman out of the anti-slavery fold. More than once in those days I hung my head in disgust as I listened to these people, and wondered, for the moment, whether, after all, even ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Louis Napoleon, of France, from an operation for the removal of a stone, at the hands of surgeons renowned for their skill, gave new impetus to the efforts of surgeons to invent some method that would be less dangerous than that which has been heretofore commonly employed. The cutting operations have been the rule. Of these the operation by median-section is the safest, and is most commonly employed for the removal of stones that are not ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... that the other would not venture to do as he demanded. He may have expected him to invent some handy excuse for not complying; but then the other had already laid the foundation for a reasonable sense of disappointment in case no watch was forthcoming when the locker was opened; since he said he hoped he might have forgotten it when dressing, and not lost it on the way home ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... time, and I cannot invent the experiments," replied the professor, impatiently. "I have a great mind to advise Carvel to put her into an asylum, and have done with all this sort ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... my whole principle of life! Yours! I tell you that I think at moments I would rather have your hate than the lukewarm sentiment you bear to me, and honour by the name of affection.' Pretty phrase! I have no affection for you! Give me not that sickly word; but try with me, Julia, to invent some expression that has never filtered a paltry meaning through the lips of another! Affection! why, that is a sister's word, a girl's word to her pet squirrel! Never was it made for that ruby and most ripe mouth! Shall I come to your house this evening? Your mother has asked ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could find some scheme, invent some plot, to get me out of the trouble I am in, I should think myself indebted to you for more ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere
... martyrs despised death, having peace with God by Jesus Christ, scorning the most cruel torments that men and hell could devise and invent! but Jesus Christ could not do so, as he was a sacrifice for sin; he died for us, he was made a curse for us. O, my brethren, Christ died many deaths at once; he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness, and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own mistrust of himself. He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances. Sir John Coleridge touches this in the following extract, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... then be consentaneous with the interests of the majority, and so they ought to be. The probability is much greater, that the larger states will disagree, than that they will combine. I defy the wit of man to invent a possible case, or to suggest any one thing on earth, which shall be for the interests of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and which will not also be for the interest of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from agoraphobia cannot bring himself to cross alone an open field or square. The sufferer from claustrophobia will invent any excuse to avoid an elevator or the theatre. When a certain lady was asked if she disliked to go to the theatre or church, she answered, "Not at all, but of course I like to have one foot in the aisle; I suppose ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with innovations. Moliere merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... it, and I am sure that at the galleys you will invent some refined elegance in the manner of carrying your chain, that will become the fashion in the yard, and will be called a la Saint Remy," said the old man, with bitter irony; then he added, "and Saint Remy is ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... taken into the German language lately, but Germans use it when we should use "hobby." "It is my sport," says an artist when he shows you furniture of his own design. He means that his business in life is to paint pictures, but his pleasure is to invent beautiful chairs and tables. When the talk turns on the absurd extreme to which the Marthas of Germany carry their housekeeping zeal, a German friend will turn to you in defence of his countrywomen. "It is their 'sport,'" says he, and you understand his ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... assistance, and I have promised to both the influence of my art. But the presents of Prince Iphicrates, and the promises which he has made, by far exceed all that the other could do. Therefore, it is Iphicrates who will profit by all I can invent, and as his ambition will owe everything to me, our future is sure. I will go and take my time to confirm the princess in her error, and, the better to prepossess her mind, skilfully show her the agreement of the words of Venus with the predictions of the celestial signs which I told her ...
— The Magnificent Lovers (Les Amants magnifiques) • Moliere
... from the running expenses. In case anything did happen they had the one hundred dollars for immediate use. Now that was gone, and Mrs. Hampton had no idea how it was to be replaced. She must raise the amount some way, or else invent some plausible excuse as to what she had done with it. And the sum of sixty dollars was needed the next day, in the morning, too, so it could go to the city by the afternoon mail. After she had racked her brain in vain for some method of ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... between Lisbellaw and Tempo. It was removed thence when peace was restored, and again placed in some one of the neighboring chapels, when, as before in Aughalurcher, the oaths were administered with all the superstition that a depraved imagination could, invent, as "that their thighs might rot off," "that they ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... and well. He did not think there would be any great difficulty in getting away and bringing us horses. The lleranos were still allowed to come and go pretty much as they liked, and if awkward questions were asked it would be easy to invent excuses. The best time to get away would be immediately after nightfall, when most of the foraging parties would have returned to camp and the men be ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... and her eyes were bright with happiness—the happiness of loving and being loved. It made her cousins so angry they could have killed her in their jealous spite, for it lacked but two weeks to the wedding now, and it seemed as if nothing that spite or malice could invent had any power to break off the ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... transitions—because, if anything could finally break away from its origin and environment, that would be a real thing—something not merging away indistinguishably with the surrounding. So all attempt to be original; all attempt to invent something that is more than mere extension or modification of the preceding, is positivism—or that if one could conceive of a device to catch flies, positively different from, or unrelated to, all other devices—up he'd shoot to heaven, or the Positive ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Impersonal, nameless—I only do know one of your names. I'd like to christen you myself—let me see, what ought you to be called? I've got it. Eve! (With a gesture towards the wings.) Trumpets! (The funeral march is heard again.) There it is again! Now I must invent your age, for I don't know how old you are. From now on you are thirty-four—so you were born in sixty-four. (Pause.) Now your character, for I don't know that either. I shall give you a good character, your voice reminds me of my ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... your escort, if you have no objection to accompany us, and it is not too far for you," said Mrs. Coleman (who evidently considered me in the last stage of a decline), trotting into the breakfast-room where I was lounging, book in hand, over the fire, wondering what possible pretext I could invent ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... more letters from bark, and, covering the smooth surface with ink, pressed them upon parchment, thus getting a better impression, though still blurred and imperfect. He then cut letters from wood instead of bark, and managed to invent himself a better and thicker ink, which did not blur the page. Next, he cut letters from lead, and then from pewter. Every hour was absorbed in the work of making possible the art of printing. His simple-minded neighbors thought he had lost his mind, and some of the more superstitious ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... not a flattering idea:—to know she was in Paris, where, in all probability, she had come to seek him, and to have the intelligence of it from herself, had all the effect on him that the most raptured fancy can invent. ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... that the mere content of language is intimately related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need have no name for it; aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made his acquaintance. In the sense that the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture whose purposes it serves it is perfectly true that the history ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... from the Building this new mechanism contrived with such hopeful care, and at a cost of two dollars and twenty-five cents taken from the Oriole's treasury. What he wished Henry to believe was that for some good reason, which Herbert had not yet been able to invent, it would be better to show Florence a little politeness. He had a desperate hope that he might find some diplomatic way to prevail on Henry to be as subservient to Florence as she had seemed to demand, and he was determined to touch any extremity of unveracity, rather than permit the details ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... showing, he adapted into his narrative, very subtly, circumstances which were entirely false. If, as Mr. Pollock holds, Prance was astute enough to make a consistent patchwork of fact and lie, how can it be argued that, with the information at his command, he could not invent a ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... pluck that rose, and carry it up the mountain-side into the temple where the King sat, and would give it to Him; and then He would touch me with his sceptre, and let me through into a garden full of flowers. There was no garden in the hymn; I suppose the "rose" made me invent one. But ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Being begotten in adultery, they stand in connection with the prophet only through the mother; as soon as he has rejected the mother, he has nothing further to do with them.—The supposition that Gomer had died, is evidently the result of an embarrassment which finds itself compelled to invent such fictions.—Finally,—Several interpreters, after the example of Augustine, suppose that no marriage at all is here spoken of, but only a certain kindness which the prophet should manifest to some woman, in ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... tell a story that way," said Bryan simply. "I could never invent a story, though all the characters, heroes and princess, were to come and sit beside me so that I could describe them as they really were. My stories come like living creatures into my mind; and I can ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... their questions, I was compelled to say that children are not born in the Earth as with them. Upon this I was assailed with a whole battery of inquiries, which at first I tried to avoid; but, at last, I was compelled, in the vaguest manner I could invent, to make some approach to the subject in question. Immediately a dim notion of what I meant, seemed to dawn in the minds of most of the women. Some of them folded their great wings all around them, as they generally do when in the least offended, and stood erect and motionless. One spread out ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... as he often concluded these talks. "I must invent something,—that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience. Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you could turn out retail under ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... I were you. After all, it is a hospitable invitation, and you cannot invent any reasonable excuse for refusing to stay at least one night. The horses are worn out, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... success attained by Lycurgus we do not know; but of the success of the moderns we do know, by some one hundred and fifty years of recurring disaster. There are some steeds that cannot be ridden; they are so fractious and intractable, that, put whom you will upon their back, he is thrown, and invent what snaffle or breaking-bit you may, they will not be held to an equable or moderate pace. And of this sort, judging by the past attempts, is Paper Money. All the ingenuity and efforts of the most skillful trainers of the Old World, and of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... promised not to write to him. But Dorothy's father had kept his word, so she could but do the same. Behind, in the sweltering city, in full charge for six weeks was Tom Brainard. His authority included permission to invent and use any new labels or trade-marks he ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... rather disagreeable but for Gowing (who seems to have taken to Lupin) suggesting they should invent games. Lupin said: "Let's play 'monkeys.'" He then led Gowing all round the room, and brought him in front of the looking-glass. I must confess I laughed heartily at this. I was a little vexed at everybody ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... man I had come to see; and here was a chance of getting speech with him and without the awkwardness of asking it through a servant, perhaps of having to invent an excuse for my visit. Without more ado, therefore, I made bold to lift the latch of the gate ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... beaten; the deepened sense of moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance, and the loss of ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... out.'' After she has told a lie she never thinks about it again one way or another. Her conscience does not trouble her in the matter. She does not tell lies for what she gets out of it, nor does it give her any particular pleasure to fool people. She does not invent her stories, but at the time of talking to people she simply says untrue things without any thought beforehand and without any consideration afterward. To one officer she flung the challenge, "Oh, I'm clever, you'll find that out.'' After ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... deluded by a glittering sophistry, which will soon attempt to persuade you, that: 'A presumption which necessarily arises from circumstances,—is very often more convincing and more satisfactory than any other kind of evidence; it is not within the reach and compass of human abilities to invent a train of circumstances, which shall be so connected together as to amount to a proof of guilt, without affording opportunities of contradicting a great part, if not all, of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... same characters so often! "Here," said one, "is that archdeacon whom we have had in every novel he has ever written." "And here," said the other, "is the old duke whom he has talked about till everybody is tired of him. If I could not invent new characters, I would not write novels at all." Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was impossible for me not to hear their words, and almost impossible to hear them and be quiet. I got up, and standing between them, I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... point in Pestalozzi's career. He was soon chosen assistant teacher at Burgdorf. His experience at Stanz, without books and without appliances, had compelled him to invent methods of interesting the children. He was thus brought to the use of objects, and here we have the beginning of practical object teaching. It was not long, however, before the head master of the school became jealous of ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... was one important object which even his foresight does not appear to have contemplated. Lord Bacon did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover, or poetry can invent; that his country would at length possess a national literature of its own, and that it would exult in classical compositions, which might be appreciated with the finest models of antiquity. His taste ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... a phenomenon. But I believe that morality is a real thing, for all that; and that our conceptions of it get clearer, as the world goes on. It is something outside of us—a law of nature if you like—which we are learning; not merely a thing which we invent for our convenience. But that is too big a business to ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the most excellent musicians, vocal and instrumental, with variety of scenes painted and contrived with no lesse art of perspective, and machines for flying in the aire, and other wonderful motions; taken together it is one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent. The history was Hercules in Lydia. The sceanes changed thirteen times. The famous voices, Anna Rencia, a Roman and reputed the best treble of women; but there was a Eunuch who in my opinion surpassed her; also a Genoise that in my judgment sung an incomparable base. They held us ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... about the genius of the family—the fourth brother—who wanted to invent something new and original? He tried to build a lofty storey himself, but it fell to pieces, and he fell with it and broke his neck. However, he had a splendid funeral, with the city flags and music in the procession; flowers were strewn on the pavement, and three orations ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... we could do something for that capital old Professor. Couldn't we invent a rich relation, who shall obligingly die out there in Germany, and leave him a tidy little fortune?" said Laurie, when they began to pace up and down the long drawing room, arm in arm, as they were fond of doing, in memory of ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... represents was the ruling force in the hour of its production; and to the spirit of a household, a community, a kingdom, or an age, that individuality is the key. There is, too, in a genuine portrait an internal evidence of its authenticity. No artist ever was great enough to invent the combination of lines, curves, and planes which composes the face of a man. There is the accumulated significance of a lifetime,—subtile traces of failures or of victories wrought years ago. How these will manifest themselves, no experience can point out, no intuition can foresee or imagine. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... in order to take them off again! Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this could be devised—if symbolism is to be indulged in at all! Can you devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion? Can you invent a symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree? Perhaps you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce! Perhaps you would abolish the doggerel ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... come and they make ready to raid the flocks. You'd think folks would be bright enough to catch 'em, but there ain't wit enough in the world to get ahead of them. They're the cutest! The tricks a coyote will invent, sir, pass belief. In spite of the fact this pasture is fenced with coyote-proof wire the creatures manage to get in—goodness ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... seeming malignity of the children would tax belief, were it not so familiar a fact in children; and notable also was their histrionic ability. They were excited by the sensation they aroused, and vain of it; they were willing to do what they could to prolong it. But they hardly needed to invent anything; more than was necessary was suggested to them by questions and comments. They were quick to take hints, and improve upon them. Sarah Good, Martha Cory, Rebecca Nourse, and all the rest, must be their victims; but God will forgive the children, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... think and think till I can invent some way. Only imagine how fine it will be when you are a famous painter and have nothing to do but to paint and draw all the time. Won't that be just the very best thing you can think ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... with two "whoppers," as Mr. Jo Gargery might call them, Surtees goes on to invent a perfectly incredible heraldic bearing. He found it in a MS. note in the "Gwillim's Heraldry" of Mr. Gyll or Gill—the name is written both ways. "He beareth per pale or and arg., over all a spectre passant, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... as they Invent to pass their time away? Their thoughts revolve round sport and dress, Their reading is the daily press, Their ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... to bestow it." Beauty has also its epochs. It does not belong to all men and to all ages to enjoy it in its exquisite perfection. As there are fashions which spoil it, so there are periods which affect its sentiment. For instance, it belonged to the eighteenth century to invent pretty women—charming dolls—all powder, patches, and perfume, affecting the attractions which they did not possess under their vast hoops and great furbelows. Let us venture to say that the foundation of true beauty, as ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... is, somebody should invent a mill to do amusements for you, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugo, "as the Tartars get their praying done. But I agree with you; I never cared for play. It's monotonous—knits the brain up into meshes. And it knocks me up to watch it now. I suppose one gets poisoned with the bad air. I ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... seen. She was the centre of attraction. From being dreaded, she was adored. Who but she could climb to the very highest branch of the tallest tree? Who but she could swing so high that she seemed almost to turn a somersault in the air before she came down again? Who but she could invent the most daring games? And then, when all other things failed, who but she could tell such weird stories? Her eyes shone; her lips were wreathed in smiles. She looked the very essence of beauty and happiness. Was this the ogre of The Follies, the terrible girl who kept every one away from ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing with it. We can invent a trifle more than can be got at by mere combination ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Dona Victorina in mild reproach, as she fanned herself. "How could the poor man invent gunpowder if, as is said, the Chinese invented ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... classification, is not a puffin but a barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and I found one reference to its Irish name as 'ge ghiurain.' As these birds nest in remote areas of the arctic, people were quite free to invent stories of their origins. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... schoolchildren are coming to tea on the lawn, and games. Mr. Amarinth says that charity always begins abroad, but one couldn't have a school treat in Belgrave Square, could one? It would be quite sacrilege, or bad form, which is worse. We must try and invent some new games. You and Lord Reggie must ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Hilary of this, he at once pronounced it impossible, and nothing but one of Aaron's lies. On reflection, however, I am not so sure that it is impossible, nor can I see any reason why the old poacher should invent a falsehood of the kind. It was just a time of the year when hares are beginning to go 'mad,' and, as they were not feeding but playing together, they might have strayed up the line just as they do along roads. Most persons must have observed how quietly a train sometimes steals ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... of his client and the other the mental characteristics, circumstances, position and life of the house-owner and his family. This is the true mission of the decorator, although it is not always so understood. What is called business talent may lead him to invent schemes of costliness which relate far more to his own profit than to the wishes ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... I do not know its fundamental mechanism, since we did not invent it and since I have had little time to study it. The apparatus, practically as you see it here, was discovered but a short time ago, in a small, rocket-propelled space-ship which we found some distance outside of the orbit of Jupiter. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... was now decried as savage and heathenish, and as tending to keep up the memory of the pagan brood that originally possessed it. Many were the consultations held upon the subject without coming to a conclusion, for, though everybody condemned the old name, nobody could invent a new one. At length, when the council was almost in despair, a burgher, remarkable for the size and squareness of his head, proposed that they should call it New Amsterdam. The proposition took everybody by surprise; it was so striking, so apposite, so ingenious. The name was adopted ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer's party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went in one direction, and ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his Constitution, Sieyes had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice; in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain. He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great Elector; the Elector, like ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... games rather than exercises are to be commended. There is indeed no comparison for a moment possible between Nature's method of exercise, which is obtained through play, and the ridiculous and empty parodies of it which men invent. The truth is that Nature is aiming at one thing, and man at another. Man's aim, for reasons already exploded, is the acquirement of strength; Nature's is the acquirement of skill. It is really nervous development that Nature is interested in when ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... behold the bird! Just twenty years of age, slender and delicate as the sirens which English designers invent for their "Books of Beauty," Modeste was, like her mother before her, the captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France, where we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German women ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... they had hardly established themselves on the porch of the little house before the boy's cheery whistle was heard, and the three children, after faithfully fulfilling the promise to Bubbles to relieve her of some of her tasks, determined to invent a new play. ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... the following facts: 1. A theophany or appearance of a god seems to have been in the essence of the original conception of Greek Drama; a study of the fragments of Aeschylus will illustrate this. What Euripides did, apparently, was to invent, or use when invented, an improved kind of stage machinery for introducing the god in the air. 2. The theophany seems to have been effective with the Greek audience, and I believe it would usually be so with any audience that ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... final detection and suppression of a series of hitherto utterly unaccountable transactions of a most nefarious character. At all events we can do no harm by keeping a wary eye upon this alleged Vestale for the future, and I will make it my business to invent some plausible pretext for boarding her on the first opportunity which presents itself. And now I think you have been on deck quite as long as is good for you, so away you go below again and get back to your hammock. Such a wound as yours is ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... happens by accident; and, the premises once granted, nothing happens but what was quite sure to happen, following those premises. We novelists do not "make up" our stories; they make themselves. Nor do human beings invent their own lives; they do but use up the materials given to them—some well, some ill; some wisely, some foolishly; but, in the main, the dictum of the Preacher is not far from the truth, "All things come alike ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... wears his clothes in the new fashion, without regard to heat or cold. A nation that never surrenders to the fire of an enemy cannot be expected to give in to the fire of the sun, but if some ingenious mortal would only invent some light and airy costume, after the fashion of the Greek dress, and Australians would consent to adopt the same, life in Melbourne and her sister cities would be much cooler than ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Roman religion, after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong—and all are later than Ennius, the first to make mischief by ridiculing the gods—nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence of religious ideas, apart ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... torture to which they will sometimes put their prisoners; and the adult captives will endure it without a tear or a groan. In spite of all their sufferings, which the love of cruelty and revenge can invent and inflict upon them, they continue to chaunt their death song with a firm voice; considering that to die like a man, courting pain rather than flinching from it, is the noblest triumph of the warrior. In going to ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... a rage against me before my flight, what treatment will they inflict on me, seeing me fallen back into their power? I shall not die a common death; the fire, their rage, and the cruelties which they invent, will tear away my life. God be blessed forever. We are incessantly in the bosom of His divine and always adorable providence. Vestri capilli capitis numerati sunt; nolite timere; nultis passeribus meliores estis vos quorum unus non cadet ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... a scandal-loving woman, but her evidence is valuable, especially as showing that Lydia was not at Bath on Christmas Eve. We will tell her nothing, so she can suspect as much as she likes; if we do speak freely she will spread the gossip, and if we don't, she will invent worse facts; so in either case it doesn't matter. What is it you have ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... provide for my own departure. To this point I had persuaded the host, but now found him by no means inclined to advance me the additional funds needed for carrying off a young singer. To cloak the bad behaviour of my directors I was compelled to invent some tale of misfortune, and to leave the astonished and indignant young lady behind. Heartily ashamed of this adventure, I travelled through rain and storm via Leipzig, where I picked up my brown poodle, and reaching Magdeburg, there ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Margy were too little always to accompany the older children on their rambles; but the two smallest Bunkers could be trusted to invent plays of their own when they might be left out of the older one's parties. They had long since learned not to feel slighted if Mother Bunker decided that they were to stay ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... invent a romance upon the spot. I was madly enamoured of an Atuona belle, I said. She waited for me upon my own paepae; she was a mighty woman and swift to anger. She would wreak vengeance upon me, and upon Vanquished Often. I would adopt Vanquished Often ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... got by himself. He worked himself up to be a great literal man. He was also able to invent electricity. Franklin's father was ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... might well retire and give some rest to their minds. The five days that were past had been filled with such brave stories, that she had great fear lest the sixth should not be equal to them; for, even if they were to invent their tales, it was not possible to tell any better than those true ones which had already been related in ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... fools delay. Only get those to whom your master sends you to delay, and you will not need to envy me my laurels; you will soon have a shining crown of your own. Get the father to delay teaching his little boy how to pray. Get him on any pretext you can invent to put off speaking in private to his son about his soul. Get him to delegate all that to the minister. And then by hook or by crook get that son as he grows up to put off the Lord's Supper. And after that you will easily get him to put off purity and prayer till he is ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... at his wit's end, which was easily reached, to invent a suitable excuse for his absence. To-day it had been to see if Mrs. Amidon did not want to buy some apples. Some of their last winter's store had been miraculously preserved, and Minna saw the way to a few pennies thereby. He could quite openly say that he had been to the barber-shop to-day, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of Punch, as of many another great and original writer, to invent and import into the language words and expressions which are surely destined to remain. It has already been recorded how it was he who christened the great conservatory now at Sydenham "The Crystal Palace"—though he was not so complimentary until he had cultivated ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... means is resorted to which Yankee ingenuity can devise to make our soldier-homes as comfortable and convenient as possible. Punch says, "that a Yankee baby will creep out of his cradle, take a survey of it, invent an improved style and apply for a patent, before he is six months old," and this he said some time ago; what he would say now, we cannot tell. If a house has been abandoned by its inmates anywhere within our lines, it is taken as prima facie evidence that the ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... complacently, "You must formulate something out of a chaos of opinion. As for superstition, you will never get rid of that weakness out of the human composition. If the Church gives nothing for this particular mood of man to feed on, man will invent something else OUTSIDE the Church. My dear sir, we have thought of all these difficulties for ages! In religion one cannot appeal solely to the intellect. One must touch the heart—the emotions. Music, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the circumstance, that the name I gave to the society I had planned was the Utilitarian Society. It was the first time that anyone had taken the title of Utilitarian; and the term made its way into the language, from this humble source. I did not invent the word, but found it in one of Galt's novels, the Annals of the Parish, in which the Scotch clergyman, of whom the book is a supposed autobiography, is represented as warning his parishioners not to leave ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... have brought him here,' retorted Mary. 'You had better invent some plan for sending him away. If he stay it will be ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... a beautiful peach with its delicate tint of rose, with its flavour so sweet that no human skill could invent such nectar. Tell me, Celine, is it for the peach's own sake that God created that colour so fair to the eye, that velvety covering so soft to the touch? Is it for itself that He made it so sweet? Nay, it is for us; the only thing that is all its ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... said. 'They won up to a point, but they struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't be bought, the old elemental fighting instincts of man. If you're going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers have found something they care for, and that has upset the pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven't played their last ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... Book, the "Miserarum est," and I have devised a stanza for it, taking much more pains with the apportionment of the ictus than in the case of the trochaic quatrain, which is better able to modulate itself. I have also ventured to invent a metre for that technically known as the Fourth Archilochian, the "Solvitur acris hiems," by combining the fourteen-syllable with the ten-syllable iambic in an alternately rhyming stanza. [Footnote: I may be permitted to mention that Lord Derby, in a volume of Translations printed privately before ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... ensign. They made a most hideous and incessant noise, and in a short time many large canoes came down the lake to join them. Our boats were still out, and the people on board them made all the signs of friendship that they could invent, upon which some of the canoes came through the inlet and drew near them. We now began to hope that a friendly intercourse might be established; but we soon discovered that the Indians had no other design than to haul the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... astray; But I guess you as might one Pausing when young March is grey, In a violet-peopled day; All his thoughts go out to places that he knew, To his child-home in the sun, To the fields of his regret, To one place i' the innocent March air, By one olive, and invent The familiar form and scent Safely; a white violet Certainly ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... observations of the places of these wandering stars. How great were the advances which Hipparchus accomplished may be appreciated if we reflect that, as a preliminary task to his more purely astronomical labours, he had to invent that branch of mathematical science by which alone the problems he proposed could be solved. It was for this purpose that he devised the indispensable method of calculation which we now know so well as trigonometry. Without the aid rendered by this beautiful art it would have been impossible ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... former proprietor, was the real owner of the circus. 'We needn't say no more about the leopards—for a bit. But I'll tell you what. 'Ee can do tricks with little Mike, the new pony, and the monkeys. We'll make up a sort of little performance a-purpose for 'im and them. I must invent a little somethink that would ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... not let the cruelties of the siege outweigh. The galleys of Ptolemy, though unable to keep at sea against the larger fleet of Demetrius, often forced their way into the harbour with the welcome supplies of grain. Month after month every stratagem and machine which the ingenuity of Demetrius could invent were tried and failed; and, after the siege had lasted more than a year, he was glad to find an excuse for withdrawing his troops; and the Rhodians in their joy hailed Ptolemy with the title of Soter or saviour. This name he ever afterwards kept, though by the Greek writers he is more often ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Marjorie, looking at the Heroic, 'if only they would go away. Couldn't we invent some excuse for getting them out of the way while we get Neil ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... Sensible folk settle their own problems, then look for more. Terra? One half of the globe is against the other half of the globe. Fighting one another tooth and nail, they still find time to invent and cross space to other planets and continue their fight ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... evenings, when the old folk sit opposite one another in the dark—more often than not hand in hand—each trying who will give in first and find his store of riddles soonest exhausted. In fact, from childhood the Finn is taught to think and invent by means of riddles; in his solitude he ponders over them, and any man who evolves a good one is a hero in his village. They meet together for "riddle evenings," and most amusing are the punishments given to those who cannot ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... set her wits to work, and was ingenious enough to invent an arrangement of small straps about the saddle, by which a great deal could be safely carried thereon, in a small compass. Here she now spread out and fastened a plain dark walking-dress and a few other trifles of apparel. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... written are worthy of a word or two. Among the friends of Madame d'Epinay, Grimm, and Diderot was a certain Marquis de Croismare. He had deserted the circle, and retired to his estates in Normandy. It occurred to one of them that it would be a pleasant stratagem for recalling him to Paris, to invent a personage who should be shut up in a convent against her will, and then to make this personage appeal to the well-known courage and generosity of the Marquis de Croismare to rescue her. A previous adventure of the Marquis suggested the fiction, and made its success the more probable. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... count as soon as he saw me; "a woman is led by the devil; the most virtuous of them would invent evil if it did not ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... see that; and gradually you'll get them more and more beautiful machines, till their work is just pleasure and nothing else. And do invent something to prevent Sabina and Nancy and Alice hurting their hands. They have to stop the spindles so often, and it wounds them, and Nancy gets chilblains in the winter, so it's simply ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... added thoughtfully. "But who knows what may happen? The age of mediocrity is not eternal. You see this thing offered, and I saw an opening. It has come already. You saw the big-wigs all talking to me? I shall go to Paris now with some eclat. I shall invent a new profession; the literary diplomatist. The bore is, I know nothing about foreign politics. My line has been the other way. Never mind; I will read the 'Debats' and the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' and make out something. Foreign affairs are all the future, and my views may be ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... of violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... "I admit the practicability of it. But what astonishes me is, that the Emperor did not invent this affair in 1810; for he had a genius for transportation, a genius for administration, a genius for office details, a genius for everything. But (to resume your story) the Austrians are fortified at last, and you cannot ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... magnificent stud, of sufficient wealth to gratify every fancy; he would splash mud upon all the passers-by, and especially upon his former acquaintances, as he dashed past them in his superb equipage; the best tailor should invent astonishing garments for him; he would make himself conspicuous at all the first performances in a stage-box, with the most notorious women in Paris; his fetes would be described in the papers; he would be the continual subject of comment; he ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... do I call the point at which I was now arrived at a resting-place? Alas, it was diametrically the reverse! It was my first and immediate business to review all the projects of disguise I had hitherto conceived, to derive every improvement I could invent from the practice to which I had been subjected, and to manufacture a veil of concealment more impenetrable than ever. This was an effort to which I could see no end. In ordinary cases the hue and cry after a supposed offender is a matter of temporary operation; but ordinary ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... sight—he would emulate them in function. Orpheus and Musaeus are the poets he would fain have as the companions of his midnight meditation (Penseroso). And the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is God's truth which passes His lips—lips hallowed by the touch of sacred fire. He is the passive instrument through whom flows the emanation from on high; His words are not his own, but a suggestion. Even ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... and "Gay-Wings," and "Fringe-Cup" and "Squirrel-Cup," and "Cool-Wort" and "Bead-Ruby"; there is no conceivable reason why these should not be the familiar appellations, except the irresistible fact that they are not. It is impossible to create a popular name: one might as well attempt to invent a legend or compose a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... make to Mr. Trevanion?" said I, feebly; "what story can I invent? So careless as he is while he trusts, so penetrating if he once suspects, he will see through all ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... married, and her second match was a happy one. But her first husband caused her much trouble, and ran away from her at last, in company with some worthless woman. Nothing was ever heard of him afterward—so that Jin thought it quite safe to invent a nightmare- story to account for his disappearance. She said that he abandoned Koto because, on awaking one night, he saw his young wife's head rise from the pillow, and her neck lengthen like a great white serpent, while the rest of her body remained motionless. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... People who have appetites of this kind are in need of having them perennially gratified, and accordingly it naturally comes about that the conductors of journals such as I have referred to, if they cannot provide a sufficient quantity of sensationalism true or partly true, have either to invent it or exaggerate some perhaps innocent or innocuous incident. I am sorry to say that yellow journalism is not only not unknown in Japan, but is apparently in a very flourishing condition there. I regret the fact all the more because the people of Japan are not yet sufficiently educated or ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... than words confess, Or the minstrel's powers invent, Thrilled here once at the light caress Of the fairy hands that lent This excuse for the kiss I press On the dear ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... billeted on us, by particular desire, until the coast is declared free from pirates! yes, that is the musical name they give you—and when their own people land, and plunder, and rob, and murder the men and insult the women, they are called heroes! It's a fine thing to be able to invent names and make dictionaries—and it must be your fault, if mine has been framed for no purpose. I declare, when I recollect all the insulting and cruel things I hear in this country of my own and her people, it makes me ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... upon the road of experience; who is anxious that they should actively employ their reason. He is a thinker, who, having meditated upon matter, its energies, its properties, its modes of acting, hath no occasion to invent ideal powers, to recur to imaginary systems, in order to explain the phenomena of the universe—to develope the operations of nature; who needs not creatures of the imagination, which far from making him better understand nature, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... not fully understand, but everything Gerald said seemed to her funny. "What does he call you?" she asked. "Or do you invent new names every day? Last night I heard you calling him—what was ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... proportion as they increase and improve, invent methods by which they facilitate their reasonings; and, employing general theorems, are enabled to comprehend, in a few propositions, a great number of inferences and conclusions. History also, being a collection of facts which are multiplying ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... was thinking," declared Andy. "I wish a fellow didn't have to study. Why can't some of our great inventors invent some kind of knowledge pill so a fellow can just go and buy a few boxes and ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... "They invent themselves," the ambassador told him. "My point is that the Diplomatic Service cherishes individuals and causes which battle stuffiness and complacency and Golden Ages and monstrous things like that. Not thieves, of course. They're degradation, ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... Maxentius, embracing a period of about two hundred and eighty years, the Church underwent a series of ten persecutions unparalleled for atrocity in the annals of history. Every torture that malice could invent was resorted to, that every vestige of Christianity might be eradicated. "Christianos ad leones," the Christians to the lions, was the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... people brought up to labor from necessity, but devoting to the problem of labor the acuteness of a disciplined brain. The mistress, outdone in sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her superiority by skill and contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary,—if she could not take a hundred steps without weariness, she could make twenty answer the purpose of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... me see. Our lives are perfectly insignificant, aren't they? We know it for a fact. But we don't like it. We don't like being of no account. We want some thing to make us feel more valuable than we are. Consequently we invent a fiction to explain away that insignificance—the fiction of a personality overhead everlastingly occupied in watching every single one of us, and keenly engrossed in our welfare. If this were the case, we would cease to be insignificant, and we might try to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Greeks have not the same reverence for truth as you have," answered Nitetis, "but they do not call the men who invent these beautiful stories ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity. Of Mr B.'s book I have not the least suspicion, because I am sure he could invent nothing of the kind. The title of this part of his work is a dialogue between a Green Goose and a Hero.' But Gray was fastidious, in this case blindly so. The merits of Goldsmith he could when dying perceive, but the rollicking humour of Bozzy in ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... are various; the children themselves invent them. Some love to spread out a number of the figures of the geometric insets before their eyes, and then, taking a handful of the cards and mixing them like playing cards, deal them out as quickly as ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... assault upon character and repute that comes within the scope of law; the slander is uttered, the libel written, printed, or pictured. To backbite is to speak something secretly to one's injury; to calumniate is to invent as well as utter the injurious charge. One may "abuse," "assail," or vilify another to his face; he asperses, calumniates, slanders, or traduces him ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... unperformed.. To Hocus for dedimus protestatem.. To ditto for a capias ad computandum.. To Frog's new tenants per account to Hocus, for audita querelas.. On the said account for writs of ejectment and distringas.. To Esquire South's quota for a return of a non est invent and nulla habet bona.. To —— for a pardon in forma pauperis.. To Jack for a melius inquirendum upon a felo-de-se.. To coach-hire.. For treats to ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't matter ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... interesting church is its choir, larger in superficial area than the entire cathedrals of Noyon or Soissons. Both from inside and out, it is all that one's imagination could possibly invent. Its great proportions are as harmonious and graceful as the lines of a willow-tree; in fact, as to general effect, it may be set down as a thing of extraordinary grandeur, worthy to rank with Beauvais or Amiens, and yet different from either, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... cases like this present one. Of the facts that are known to us we invent certain explanations. From each of those explanations we deduce consequences; and if those consequences agree with new facts, they confirm the explanation, whereas if they disagree they tend to disprove it. But here we are at ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,—charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... thing," said the young fellow, interrupting him, "if some person would invent a burner that should heat the gas before its discharge. We could then get a perfect combustion of the carbon, and so greater ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his little nephews and nieces, subjected to the discipline of their mother, he would fly into a frenzy of passion, and then he was called, "Crazy Carl." He was an inveterate enemy to corporeal punishment, and he could invent no better method of explaining his doctrine, than by administering to those, who differed with him, a practical illustration of the cruelty of personal castigation. Therefore he would fly around among the parents and the straggling ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent significant conflict. As Amos says, with ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... "there is one thing much more likely than any of these—a thing fairly certain. Reedy Jenkins will fight you in every way he can invent. First he'll fight to get your money; and then he'll ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... When he was but a Child, he was so addicted to Lying, {21c} that his Parents scarce knew when to believe he spake true; yea, he would invent, tell, and stand to the Lyes that he invented and told, and that with such an audacious face, that one might even read in his very countenance the symptoms of an hard and ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... all too small reward, a trifle totally inadequate to compensate, mere nominal recognition of the man who shall invent and realise a scheme to save this earthly paradise from this its damning ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... faith alone, when in our hearts we conclude that God desires to be gracious to us, not on account of our works and fulfilment of the Law, but from pure grace, for Christ's sake. What can our opponents bring forward against this argument? What can they invent and devise against the plain truth? For this is quite certain, and experience teaches forcibly enough, that when we truly feel the judgment and wrath of God, or become afflicted, our works and worship cannot set the heart at rest. Scripture indicates this often enough ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... to this our obligations to Italy for painting and sculpture, to France for mathematical science, popular comedy, and the culture of the salon, to the Jews for finance, and to other nations for those town amusements which we are so slow to invent for ourselves, we shall still not have exhausted or even adequately illustrated the multifarious influences shed on every department of Roman life by the newly transplanted genius of Hellas. It was not that she merely lent an impulse or gave ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... into his narrative, very subtly, circumstances which were entirely false. If, as Mr. Pollock holds, Prance was astute enough to make a consistent patchwork of fact and lie, how can it be argued that, with the information at his command, he could not invent a complete fiction? ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... You want but leisure to invent fresh falsehood, and soothe me to a fond belief of all your fictions: but I will stab the lie that's forming in your heart, and save a sin, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... out to ride, made no reply except a meaning head-shake. And Billy certainly rode, that day; for the blue roan did his worst and his best. To describe the performance, however, would be to invent many words to supply a dearth in the language. Billy rode the blue roan back to the corral, and he had broken none of the stringent rules of the contest—which is ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... greasy plates is the one thing that gets on my nerves. And it is a little Waterloo that must be faced three times every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. And I was never properly "broke" for domesticity and the dish-pan! Why can't some genius invent a self-washing fry-pan? My hair is growing so long that I can now do it up in a sort of half-hearted French roll. It has been quite cold, with a wonderful fall of snow. The ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... individuals is Socialism, as the average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences for heroes, to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless to do right because it would be impossible to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... will go with you at once. If you restore her to her father, he is rich, and will not send you empty away. Tell him that you heard her voice out in the street, and with the help of a worthy old man—that am I—rescued her from any peril you may invent. If he asks you where the heroic deed was done, name any house you please, only not this. Your best plan is to lay it all on the shoulders of Hananja, the thaumaturgist; we have owed him a grudge this many a day. However, I was not to teach you any lesson, for your ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it, for boys are much sharper than men about such things; and that name after fifty years fits as well as ever. You may smile, if you like; I shall not tell you what it was, but leave you to re-invent it, if you can. Now look at this first-rate miniature. Do you see an unusual but not uncomely formation ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Gutling: When this is all Malice it self can say, You for the good Old Cause devoutly eat and pray. Though this one Text were able to convert ye, Ye needy Tribe of Scriblers to the Party; Yet there are more advantages than these, For write, invent, and make what Plots you please, The wicked Party keep your Witnesses; Like frugal Cuckold-makers you beget Brats that secur'd by others fires shall sit. Your Conventicling Miracles out-do All that the Whore of Babylon e'er knew: By wondrous art you ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... inclined, I have always entertained a desire to invent something worth while. I set out to perfect a cracker that would be fool-proof, easy to work, fast, simple, and strong enough to last a lifetime. This I accomplished in the Model 6. Before reaching this point, I had designed and tested five different models, made five ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... the same, thank you, Mrs. Mosby." She wanted to ask about Joe, something in the rapprochement giving rise to thoughts of him, but she realized that Mrs. Mosby was doubtless entirely out of touch with her graceless nephew and would invent some mere plausibility. So she inquired ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... overwhelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged my success, for I knew what it meant—they thought that Rendle was in love with me! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too? Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn't go through. You can't imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man's not telling her that he loves her—pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he had never cared. I should have ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the loose reports and told the lies about her. When she first denied him, she told Lord Bathurst of it, who assured her she had done quite right, and that she had better never let him in, for if she did he would surely invent some lies about her. Last Sunday week the Chancellor went down to Windsor, and laid the whole correspondence before the King, who received him very well, and approved of what he had done; but of course when he saw the Duke of Cumberland and heard his story, he ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... piety, and experience, and practical common sense of many generations of God's saints. Men must have forms and ceremonies to put them in mind of the spiritual truths which they cannot see or handle. Men cannot get on without them; and those who throw away the Church forms have to invent fresh ones, and less ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... She was actually in company with an author, and with one who could invent scenes, descriptions, and characters like those in the novels of which she was now so fond. Mr. Montgomery was a marvel to her. He, too, was somewhat struck with Miriam; with her beauty, and with a certain freshness in her observations; but a man who had lived as he had lived in London is not ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... is a hard task to invent A Hundred Droll Tales, since not only have ruffians and envious men opened fire upon him, but his friends have imitated their example, and come to him saying "Are you mad? Do you think it is possible? No man ever had ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Assiniboins took a different view of Wijunjon. Any person who had such stories in his brain was certainly great medicine. No common liar could invent these stories ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... Mrs. Graham!" said my neighbour Mrs. Jones to me one day, "what shall I do for good help? I am almost worried out of my senses. I wish somebody would invent a machine to cook, wash, scrub, and do housework in general. What a blessing it would be! As for the whole tribe of flesh and blood domestics, they ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad names. "Davitt is quite right," he said, "the thing must be getting to be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take them to be. One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had to invent a special sign for the phrase 'bloody and brutal Balfour,' it is used so often in the speeches." About the prosecution of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it had been ordered. This he showed me. If the first duty of a government is to govern, which ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... romantic, and crumbles at a touch. For if, as it is claimed, the Icelanders had no mistletoe, why should they introduce it into a story to which it did not belong? They might preserve it by tradition, but they would hardly invent it. Granting this, the mistletoe becomes the central point of the legend. The older mythologists, who only saw in it a sun-myth, overlooked the fact that since any weapon would have done to kill the God with, the mistletoe must ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... end—already up and away? I thought so, too. But no matter how early the sun goes down, still we aren't let lie quiet. I'm hoping for winter. Perhaps then my (coughing) —my—my asthma will invent some opportunity to ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... to lead the state ticket, since the result in New York would probably decide, as it did decide, the fate of the Democratic party in the nation. Still the Senator refused. His decision, more critical than he seemed to be aware, compelled his Radical friends to invent new compromises, until the refusal was modified into a conditional consent. In other words, he would accept the nomination provided he was not placed in the position of opposing "any Republican who is, or who ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of the great impostors of learning. His Island of Formosa was an illusion eminently bold,[44] and maintained with as much felicity as erudition; and great must have been that erudition which could form a pretended language and its grammar, and fertile the genius which could invent the history of an unknown people: it is said that the deception was only satisfactorily ascertained by his own penitential confession; he had defied and baffled the most learned.[45] The literary impostor Lauder had much ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... set him to thinking. Why couldn't he too invent something, and become famous? Long after everybody else slept Wilbert lay in bed with his eyes wide open, until he had thought out a plan for hitching horses to carriages in such a manner that they couldn't ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... never heard of young Pongo, but I felt that I must not appear too ignorant. It were better to invent a little. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... it may seem that the whole military vertue therein be quite extinguisht; for this arises from that the ancient orders thereof were not good; and there hath since been none that hath known how to invent new ones. Nothing can so much honor a man rising anew, as new laws and new ordinances devised by him: these things when they have a good foundation given them, and contain in them their due greatness, gain him reverence and admiration; and in Italy their wants not the matter wherein to introduce ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... no invention of mine. I could not invent anything half so lovely and pathetic as seems to me the incident which has come ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... with tin or lead soldiers the number of games one can invent with these tiny settlements is innumerable. One favorite with some children is the attack and capture of the Filipino village by American troops. Sometimes it is burned, and this is always a stirring spectacle. Indeed with tin soldiers (which are just now unjustly ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... before yesterday I was at L. N. Tolstoy's; he praised you very highly and said that you were "a remarkable writer." He likes your "The Fair" and "In the Steppe" and does not like "Malva." He said: "You can invent anything you like, but you can't invent psychology, and in Gorky one comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never felt." So much for you! I said that when you were next in Moscow we would go together to ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... would kill Uncle Peter if he knew. But Uncle Melchior gets puzzled whenever it comes to writing; and I am afraid of making mistakes. We've put him down in the South Pacific station at present—that will last for two years more. But we have to invent the gossip, you know. And I thought that ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... here given makes no profession of absolute, verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily, head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by which the Australian called it. The Frenchman, struggling with the English language, told a lady he was gangrened, he meant he was mortified. The cry for literalism is the cry for an impossibility; to put the chicken ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... silence, during which Aramis never removed his eyes from Baisemeaux for a moment. The latter seemed only half decided to disturb himself thus in the middle of supper, and it was clear he was trying to invent some pretext, whether good or bad, for delay, at any rate till after dessert. And it appeared also that he had hit upon an excuse ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to put forth her fists like stones from a catapult. Most of their voices are terrific and threatening, as well when they are quiet as when they are angry. All ages are thought fit for war. They are a nation very fond of wine, and invent many drinks resembling it, and some of the poorer sort wander about with their senses quite blunted by ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... self-expression—to the exaltation of the great god Whim. They had no training, they recognized no traditions, they spoke to no public. Each was to express, as he thought best, whatever he happened to feel or to think, and to invent, as he went along, the language in which he should express it. I think some of these men had the elements of genius in them and might have done good work; but their task was a heart-breaking and a hopeless one. An art cannot be improvised, and an artist must have some other guide than unregulated ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... anger me, Zorzi! Do not try your specious logic with me! Invent no absurd arguments, man! Against her will, indeed? How should she know any will but mine in the matter? I shall certainly not marry her against her will! She shall will what I ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... Ollomand, "are the arms of Europe, a part of the earth filled with industrious robbers, whose minds are hourly on the stretch to invent new plagues to torment each other. Of these mortals many are settled on the sea-coasts of our southern provinces, whom I shall persuade through the instigation of that god whom they worship, to join ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... historians, and antiquarians deeply read in the Public Records. And what do these names prove? The vulgar passion for bestowing them is notorious and universal. We Americans are too young to be well provided with heroes that might serve this purpose. We have no imaginative peasantry to invent legends, no ignorant peasantry to believe them. But we have the good fortune to possess the Devil in common with the rest of the world; and we take it upon us to say, that there is not a mountain district in the land, which has been opened to summer travellers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... had been obliged to invent a story in the beginning to account for her absence from home, and the poor woman's heart had been too full of gratitude to permit ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... down an hour, before the mirror yonder,— We'll have our private joy thereon. And then a chance will come, a holiday, When, piece by piece, can one the things abroad display, A chain at first, then other ornament: Thy mother will not see, and stories we'll invent. ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and more appropriated the tales of the Greek mythology, linking them to their own deities. Of the early worship peculiar to the Romans, we know but little. But certain traits always belonged to the Roman religion. Their mood was too prosaic to invent a theogony, to originate stories of the births, loves, and romantic adventures of the gods, such as the Greek fancy devised. The Roman myths were heroic, not religious: they related to the deeds of valiant ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... The Ship. Mrs. Peck—Adam's wife was never known by any other title, just as the man's own surname had dropped into such disuse that few so much as knew what it was—had made an especial point of this, and Rufus had never managed to invent any suitable excuse for refusing. He never remained long after the meal was eaten. When all the other fisher-lads were walking the cliffs with their own particular lasses, Rufus was wont to trudge back to his hermitage and draw his mantle of solitude about him once more. He had ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... a tiny girl she had shown an unusual preference for soldiers. She had owned enough wooden soldiers to make a regiment and was never at a loss to invent war games in which they figured. Sometimes, when she tired of her stiff, silent armies, which could only move as she willed, she inveigled her father or mother into being the hero, the enemy, the traitor or whatever her active imagination chose to suggest. Her parents, ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... the prior cause of our knowing God, The conception of a rational and moral world leads us to the conception of a rational and moral origin, i.e., to theism. Further, it is plain that this same order and regularity is recognized by many who refuse to see design in it, and who invent other hypotheses to account for it; and of one of these hypotheses we shall presently speak ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... she was clear of blame, and, though all was dark at the present, that the explanation of the mystery would show her part in these events to be both right and needful. It was true, let me cudgel my imagination as I pleased, that I could invent no theory of her relations to Northmour; but I felt none the less sure of my conclusion because it was founded on instinct in place of reason, and, as I may say, went to sleep that night with the thought ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... maintained a continued intercourse of kindness and good offices. Nay, even death was the slightest punishment inflicted by these monsters in human form; all the tortures which wanton cruelty could invent, all the lingering pains of body, the anguish of mind, the agonies of despair, could not satiate revenge excited without injury, and cruelly derived from no just cause whatever. Depraved nature, even perverted ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm, such unwilling humour, such close-fisted-generosity. This new Graeculus esuriens will make a living out of any thing. He will invent new trades as well as tools. His brain is his capital, and he will get education at all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, and he would make a spelling-book first, and a salt-pan afterwards. In c[oe]lum, jusseris, ibit,—or ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... least forgiven him, by those who recollect, that of Congreve's four comedies, two are concluded by a marriage in a mask, by a deception, which perhaps never happened, and which, whether likely or not, he did not invent. ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... afraid of that. I tell you, Clarissa, it is not in her cold proud nature to care much for any man. We can invent some story to account for the rupture, which will save her womanly pride. The world can be told that it is she who has broken the engagement: all that will be easily settled. Poor Lord Calderwood! Don't imagine that ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... comprehension, nor the friend at all the less entertained, because he laughs at what was not intended for his capacity. A writer of children's tales—(If they are any thing better than what every nursery-maid can invent for herself)—is precisely in this position: he will, he must have in view the adult listener. While speaking to the child, he will endeavour to interest the parent who is overhearing him; and thus there may result a very amusing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... a clever ruse. No need to invent details: he had them all ready to his hand. The question is, what next? The game is up, and he knows it. What will be his ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his jest. "But," said Mr. Evarts, "I met a mere journalist just afterwards who said, 'Oh, Mr. Evarts, you should have said that it was a small matter to throw a dollar across the Potomac for a man who had chucked a sovereign across the Atlantic.'" Mr. Evarts, weary of making many jokes, would invent a journalist or other man and tell a story as his. It was he who, on a kindly busybody expressing surprise at his daring to drink so many different wines at dinner, said that it was only the indifferent wines of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... riding and dancing with him, and sometimes this had been almost blissful. But there were times too, when she felt—though always with a certain contempt of herself, as when she sat on that sunwarmed stone below the tor—a queer dissatisfaction, a longing for something outside a world where she had to invent her own starvations and simplicities, to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... set her detective-husband to discover the link between Endicott and Dillon. I helped him, because I was curious to see how Arthur Dillon would stand the test of direct pursuit. They could discover nothing. As fast as a trace of me showed it vanished into thin air. There was nothing to do but invent a suit which would bring my mother, Monsignor, and myself into court, and have us declare under oath who is Arthur Dillon. I blocked that game perfectly. Messalina has her divorce from Horace Endicott, and is married to her lover. There will be no ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
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