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More "Perpetual motion" Quotes from Famous Books



... commence with setting the teeth, by which means the tongue is frequently wounded; and with rolling the eyeballs in every kind of direction; for the muscles which suspend the jaw, as well as those which move the eyes, are in perpetual motion during our waking hours; and yet continue subservient to volition; hence their more facile and forcible actions for the purpose of relieving pain by the exhaustion of sensorial power. See Section XXXIV. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... to make it known—and an executive to carry it into effect—Where are they? We repeat it—if the consent of the people of the District be necessary, the consent of every one is necessary—and universal consent will come only with the Greek Kalends and a "perpetual motion." A single individual might thus perpetuate slavery in defiance of the expressed will of a whole people. The most common form of this fallacy is given by Mr. Wise, of Virginia, in his speech, February 16, 1835, in which he denied the power of Congress ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology. "It is proper, however," Fontenelle remarks, "to apply one's self to these inquiries; because we find, as we proceed, many valuable discoveries of which we were before ignorant." The same thought Cowley has applied, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... achieve this feat, the green plant may be said to be the only living worker whose labour directly results in the production of that vital capital which is the necessary antecedent of human labour.* Nor is this statement a paradox involving perpetual motion, because the energy by which the plant does its work is supplied by the sun—the primordial capitalist so far as we are concerned. But [156] it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the mind that sunshine, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... dubbed Wriggly Beer by the older boys in his street, because of a slight nervous affection that kept him in a state of perpetual motion. He was not uncomely; indeed, when I was telling a story it was a pleasure to watch his face all twitching with interest; first nose, then eyes, then mouth, till the delight spread to his fat hands, which clasped and unclasped as the tale proceeded. He had a perfect sense of time and tunes ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... inclined to be handsome; the features regular, a pleasant smile upon his lips, and a deep dimple in his chin. But his most remarkable feature was his eye; it was small, but piercing, and seemed to possess that long-sought desideratum of the perpetual motion, since it was utterly impossible to fix it for one moment on any object: and there was in it a lurking expression, which, though something of a physiognomist, I ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... takes its journey back again to the heart by a different road: it does not return through these tubes, but through softer ones, called veins. Thus far he could go, and the story of the "circulation" of the blood is very interesting; but the cause of the heart's perpetual motion, and the blood's continuous flow, this he ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... in that noble branch of abstract science in which, you cannot but acknowledge, you are at present sadly deficient. I will place Abscissa's hand in yours whenever you shall come before me and square the circle to my satisfaction. No! That is too easy a condition. I should cheat myself. Say perpetual motion. How do you like that? Do you think it lies within the range of your mental capabilities? You don't smile. Perhaps your talents don't run in the way of perpetual motion. Several people have found that theirs didn't. I'll give you another ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... joke!... You must know that Servance is one of those fellows like one would wish to have when one has time to amuse oneself, and so self-possessed that he would be capable of ruining all the older ones in a girls' school, and given to trifling as much as most men, so that Josine calls him 'perpetual motion.' He would have liked to have gone on with his fun until the Day of Judgment, and seemed to fancy that beds were not made to sleep in at all, but she could not get used to being deprived of nearly all her rest, and it really made her ill. But as she wished to be as conciliatory as possible, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... solemn and emphatic declaration, "On the evidence hereafter to be presented, we have with much deliberation concluded to denounce Bernal Diaz as a myth." For the evidence here promised we have searched with a patience of investigation which, if applied to the problem of perpetual motion or squaring the circle, could not, we humbly think, have been wholly unproductive; and these are the results. "The author of 'Bernal Diaz' says the march to Jalapa was accomplished in one day;—a proof ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... is more easy to imagine than the Improvements which may be made from thence; there's a great deal of Reason to believe, that if a future Age produces a Successor to Sir Isaac, (at present I take it, there's none in the World) that not only the Longitude at Sea will be discover'd, but the perpetual Motion, so many Ages sought ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe

... demonstrated, that all Body must necessarily be finite; and consequently, that Power which is in Body is finite too. If therefore we can find any Power, which produces an Infinite Effect, 'tis plain that it is not in Body. Now we find, that the Heav'n is mov'd about with a Perpetual Motion, without any Cessation. Therefore if we affirm the Eternity of the World, it necessarily follows that the Power which moves it, is not in its own Body, nor in the other Exterior Body; but proceeds from something altogether ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail

... alphabet. These little ones were brought to school because the older children—in whose care their parents leave them while at work—could not come without them. We were therefore willing to have them come, although they seemed to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion, and tried one's patience sadly. But after some days of positive, though not severe treatment, order was brought out of chaos, and I found but little difficulty in managing and quieting the tiniest and most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... pantacles and characters were invented, that summed up a whole doctrine in a sign, a whole series of tendencies and revelations in a word. What was the object of the aspirants to knowledge? They sought for the secret of the great work, or the Philosophal Stone, or the perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle, or the universal medicine; formulas which often saved them from persecution and general ill-will, by exposing them to the charge of folly; and each of which expressed one of the forces of the grand magical secret. This lasted until the time of the Roman de ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... vouchsafed the Doctor. "You ought to submit your tongue to some scientific student of dynamics. I am inclined to think, from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of perpetual motion." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... shall no longer waste our time over the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory state of things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature, only one course is open to us. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... pronounced taste for repose indicated by either side of the alternative. But my propensities were more active, and in the days before I entered my teens I used always to reply to similar demands, that I would be a "king's messenger"! I knew no other life which approached so nearly to perpetual motion. "The road" was my paradise, and it is a true saying that the child is father to the man. The Shakespearian passage which earliest impressed my childish mind and carried with it my heartiest sympathies was ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... USE OF LEVER.—This lack of knowledge of first principles, has bred and is now breeding, so-called perpetual motion inventors (?) all over the civilized world. It is surprising how many men, to say nothing of boys, actually believe that power can be made without the expenditure of something which ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... way whatever—a certain equivalent quantity of energy must have been expended. When, therefore, we see any work being performed, we may always look for the source of energy to which the machine owes its efficiency. In fact, it is the old story illustrated, that perpetual motion is impossible. A mechanical device, however ingenious may be the construction, or however accurate the workmanship, can never possess what is called perpetual motion. It is needless to enter into details ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... of light. Before us, Saint Paul said, 'In Deo vivimus movemur et sumus.' In our day, less believing and more learned, or better instructed and more sceptical, we should ask the Apostle, 'To what end this perpetual motion? Whither leads this life divided into zones? Wherefore an intelligence that begins with the obscure perfection of marble and proceeds from sphere to sphere up to man, up to the angel, up to God? Where is the Fount, where is the ocean, if life, attaining to God across worlds ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac

... of Lilias and Jane afforded unusual facility. There was, however, but a limited supply of heads willing to be fingered, and Maurice returned to the most abiding of his tastes, and in an empty room at the Old Court laboured assiduously to find the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge

... disappointed bachelors and ye complaisant husbands!) in what is she more fickle than in dress? We might waste a life in finding a suitable simile for her volatility in this matter: rainbows with changing colours, water on a windy day, the wind itself in the month of March, the much-desiderated perpetual motion; all are feeble similes to describe a woman's fickleness in dress. Shall we liken it to her tongue's untiring play? or shall we not rather say that it is a psychological fact standing per se? the concomitant effect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... per cent. The whole nation was intoxicated. Around about this scheme, as might have been expected, others just as wild arose. A company was formed with ten million dollars of capital for importing walnut trees from Virginia. A company for developing a wheel to go by perpetual motion, with a capital of four million dollars. A company for developing a new kind of soap. A company for insuring against losses by servants, with fifteen million dollars capital. One scheme was entitled: "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... a trick of dropping his eyes to his boots. When he raised them, the effect was to alter his whole expression. His eyes, well-open, keenly observant, in perpetual motion, lent an air of alertness, of shrewdness, to ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine

... showed me quickly dispelled the angry feeling excited by my doubts of 'Massa Davy,' and opened her heart and her mouth at the same moment. She was terribly garrulous; her tongue, as soon as it got under way, ran on as if propelled by machinery and acquainted with the secret of perpetual motion; but she was an interesting study. The single-hearted attachment she showed for her master and his family gave me a new insight into the practical working of 'the peculiar institution,' and convinced me that even slavery, in some of its ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... a little new life in it by writing something else. The secret of perpetual motion hasn't yet been discovered, you know, and it's one of the laws of literature that books which start with a rush are apt to slow down sooner than the crawlers. We've kept 'The Vital Thing' going for eighteen months—but, hang it, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... is handed down by Berthold that the moon is Mary Magdalene, and the spots her tears of repentance. [63] Fontenelle, the French poet and philosopher, saw a woman in the moon's changes. "Everything," he says, "is in perpetual motion; even including a certain young lady in the moon, who was seen with a telescope about forty years ago, everything has considerably aged. She had a pretty good face, but her cheeks are now sunken, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... Woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished, though we do sometimes pause for a few moments in our long forced march to watch the labours of some pale mechanician seeking after perpetual motion and indulge in a little dry, cackling ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... understand very well what a "Theoretical Discoverer" is. If anyone got up and declared in a public meeting that he was the theoretical discoverer of the philosopher's stone, or of perpetual motion for watches, should we not mark him as a little wrong in the head? So of the Nile sources. The Portuguese crossed the Chambeze some seventy years before I did, but to them it was a branch of the Zambezi and nothing more. Cooley put it down as the New Zambesi, and made ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... are to act; a selection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change, and that perpetual motion may ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... rigs From the ears of Lady Circe's Piggy-wigs. And weazels at their slumbers They'll trepan; To get sunbeams from cucumbers They've a plan. They've a firmly rooted notion They can cross the Polar Ocean, And they'll find Perpetual Motion If ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert

... postulate that the doctor, being omniscient, cannot make mistakes) is as unjust as to blame the nearest apothecary for not being prepared to supply you with sixpenny-worth of the elixir of life, or the nearest motor garage for not having perpetual motion on sale in gallon tins. But if apothecaries and motor car makers habitually advertized elixir of life and perpetual motion, and succeeded in creating a strong general belief that they could supply it, they would find themselves ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw

... you have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour note. He claimed that this power was all around, but that it was ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)

... thought; it proceeds often from the consciousness of uncommon powers, from the confidence of those, who having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more. When Rowley had completed the orrery, he attempted the perpetual motion; when Boyle had exhausted the secrets of vulgar chymistry, he turned his thoughts to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... on the whole a general tendency for the denser matter to settle towards the centre. The conditions are much like those which obtain in a bucket of water which contains in suspension a number of kinds of matter of different degrees of density. Since the water is kept in perpetual motion, the different kinds of matter are diffused through it; but in spite of that, the densest matter is found in greatest quantity nearest to the bottom. So that though we must not at all think of the various subdivisions ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... the various grouping and grace of their innumerable poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the "leaves of the tall poplar"; and it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very legs seemed drunk beneath him; his attempt to set down the keg would stagger the disbelievers of perpetual motion. Again, who did not relish the richness of his voice, and the arch crispness which he gave to some words, while others came not trippingly off his tongue, but lingered and jarred with an effect which accounts for so many imitators. His mouth had a peculiar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various

... usual number of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,— stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the happy hit and to explain it to the ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... beating about the bush there! The other evening Miss Hosmer—female rival of Mr. Story in the sculpturing line—was the lion of the occasion, and was three-quarters of an hour late, her excuse being that she was studying the problem of perpetual motion. Mr. Story, who is a wit, said he wished the motion had been perpetuated in a botta (which is ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... one be began his antics on the shore. He frisked and danced around along the sand playing all sorts of antics. He walked on his hind feet, turned somersaults in quick succession, and acted as though possessed with perpetual motion, but not one yelp or bark or any sound ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young

... where did you get this teetotum? We might sell her for a mechanical top—warranted perpetual motion. When the legs give out, ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... Northampton to London I can again hardly call a journey, but rather a perpetual motion, or removal from one place to another, in a close box; during your conveyance you may, perhaps, if you are in luck, converse with two or three people shut up along ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... evident," 2 Tim. iii. 9. [760]Fabatus, an Italian, holds seafaring men all mad; "the ship is mad, for it never stands still; the mariners are mad, to expose themselves to such imminent dangers: the waters are raging mad, in perpetual motion: the winds are as mad as the rest, they know not whence they come, whither they would go: and those men are maddest of all that go to sea; for one fool at home, they find forty abroad." He was a madman that said it, and thou peradventure as mad ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... resolved to have nothing to do with him. He thereupon determined to shame them by printing his book, which he did at Leyden the same year. It was entitled "The Book of the most Hidden Secrets of Nature," and was divided into three parts; the first treating of "perpetual motion," the second of the "transmutation of metals," and the third of the "universal medicine." He also published some German works upon the Rosicrucian philosophy, at Frankfort, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... rafters, but gained the door before anyone else, and relaxing his sphincter in advance, he hummed a tune on his way to the retreat; arrived there he was compelled, like La Balue, to murmur words of excuse to this student of perpetual motion, shutting the door with as promptitude as he opened it; and he came back burdened with an accumulation which seriously impeded his private channels. And in the same way went to guests one after the other, without being able to unburden ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... to quiet them down. He took Bohea with his facts, and Hyson with his fancy, and mixed them to secure the necessary afflatus to write his books of science and travel. Upon Hyson he would have attempted the Iliad, upon Bohea he would undertake to square the circle, discover perpetual motion, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period. It possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected with the experiments—the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown by Professor Wise ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... yearning with a nameless discontent and apprehension to get home I was marched to and fro along the river-bank, from one scene to another—he, meanwhile, utterly heedless of time, and as actively bent on perpetual motion as if his sinews were of steel and his flesh iron. Meanwhile, the guitar ceased, and the song in the cottage of Miss Davison; the lights went out in that and all the other dwellings in sight; the moon waned; and it was not ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... take my first, reverse its spell, 'Twill make my fourth; and he, note well, Could solve the problems mighty— To square the circle, change to gold, Perpetual motion to unfold, And ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... store, and sometimes spent an evening with him at his dwelling. The more Wiseacre saw of him, and the more he heard him converse, the higher did he rise in his opinion. At length Redding, in a moment of confidence, imparted his secret. He had discovered perpetual motion! This announcement was made after a long and learned disquisition on mechanical laws, in which the balancing of and the reproduction of forces, and all that, was opened to the wondering ears of Wiseacre, who, although he pretended to comprehend every ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... fifteen years ago by Professor and Mme. Curie. It possesses the wonderful property of giving out inexhaustible stores of energy. It virtually possesses the property of perpetual motion. Professor Becquerel was the first one to suggest that it might possess therapeutic or healing powers. The suggestion came to him in a curious way. He carried a tube of radium in his vest pocket and was severely burnt as a consequence. The incident suggested to him that, if radium could attack ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... Saturday and Monday) beside the enisled Marble Arch, I spent half an hour in listening to the astonishing oratory that was going on there. Although I had not done this for many, many years, there was so little change in the proceedings that I gained a new impression of perpetual motion. The same—or to all intents and purposes the same—leather lungs were still at it, either arraigning the Deity or commending His blessed benefactions. As invariably of old, a Hindu was present; but whether he was ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... plans. Not at all. It was all about Johnnie Dundee, for whom personally he seems to have an affectionate friendship and for whose work a rueful and decidedly humorous appreciation. He analyzed with great sapience the psychological effect on the audience of Mr. Dundee's ring-system of perpetual motion. He described with great delight a punch that Mr. Dundee had landed on the very top of his head. In fact Mr. Dundee's publicity manager could do no better than to use parts of this ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... sinking pits and smelting lead ore in Derbyshire. For making glass bottles and other glass. For a wheel for perpetual motion. Capital L1,000,000. For improving of gardens. For insuring and increasing children's fortunes. For entering and loading goods at the Custom House; and for negotiating business for merchants. For carrying on a woollen manufacture in the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... insane has been one consequence of its reception. The husbanding of mental power, through a bodily regime, is a no less important application. Instead of supposing that mind is something indefinite, elastic, inexhaustible,—a sort of perpetual motion, or magician's bottle, all expenditure, and no supply,—we now find that every single throb of pleasure, every smart of pain, every purpose, thought, argument, imagination, must have its fixed quota of oxygen, carbon, and other materials, combined and transformed in certain physical organs. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in jumping down his own throat. ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... in and out snakewise, and only his fierce eyes burning bright with gleaming flashes between the gloom of the jungle. Once I had seen him, I could follow with ease his sinuous path among the tangled bamboos, a waving line of beauty in perpetual motion. The Maharajah followed him too, with his keen eyes, and pointed his rifle hastily. But, quick as he was, Lord Southminster was before him. I had half expected to find the pea-green young man turn coward at the last moment; but in that I was mistaken: I will do him ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... Rochester. Nay, let me not forget the children, Papillon and Cupid, who are truly very pretty creatures, though consummate plagues. The girl, Papillon, has a tongue which Wilmot says is the nearest approach to perpetual motion that he has yet discovered; and the boy, who was but seven last birthday, is full of mischief, in which my admirer counsels and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... system is a bubble, the iridescent hues of which attract, but which vanish into thin air on the slightest contact with reality; it is the perpetual motion of sociology; the fourth dimension of economies; the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... must be torn asunder, and swept along in the current of events, to see each other seldom, and perchance no more. For ever and ever in the eddies of time and accident we whirl away. Besides which, some of us have a perpetual motion in our wooden heads, as Wodenblock had in his wooden leg; and like him we travel on, without rest or sleep, and have hardly time to take a friend by the hand in passing; and at length are seen hurrying through some distant land, worn to a ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... leads us to the doctrine of the universal flux, about which a battle-royal is always going on in the cities of Ionia. 'Yes; the Ephesians are downright mad about the flux; they cannot stop to argue with you, but are in perpetual motion, obedient to their text-books. Their restlessness is beyond expression, and if you ask any of them a question, they will not answer, but dart at you some unintelligible saying, and another and another, making no way either with ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... grows is not separable from the force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things, though ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... the finger was about to descend upon the chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify perpetual motion. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the cherry-buds were swelling, almost ready to burst. From the open windows of the house, down the street, sounds from a patient piano, flattered by distance, betokened that Kitty Allen was struggling with "Perpetual Motion"; Missy, who had finished her struggles with that abomination-to-beginners a month previously felt ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... hours before him, to be employed in whatever mode his will shall decide. I bar the case of travelling, or any of those schemes for passing the day, which by their very nature take the election out of his hands, and fill up his time with a perpetual motion, the nature of which is ascertained ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... they heard Sin Saxon say, "and then let go. That was his idea. Well! Only it seems to me there's been especial pains taken to show us it can't be done. Or else, why don't they find out perpetual motion? Everything stops after a while, unless—I can't talk theologically, but I mean ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... man confided to me that he had invented a machine for perpetual motion, the chief difficulty of which was that it accumulated energy so fast that it could not be controlled. He asked me to invest in some of his schemes, which ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... Argus in the fly with them, sitting up, with his mouth open, and his tail flapping against the bottom of the vehicle in perpetual motion. He kept giving his paw first to Vixen and then to Rorie, and exacted a great deal of attention, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... or late arrival among flowers and fruit cannot be hailed or chidden where there is but trifling seasonable variation. Without beginning and without end, the perpetual motion of tropical vegetation is but slightly influenced by the weather. Who is to say that this plant is early or that late, when early or late, like Kipling's east and west, are one? It is not that all flowering trees and plants are of continuous growth. Many do have their appointed seasons, producing ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... a hack, one of Screwman's, Perpetual Motion they call him, because he never gets any rest. That's him, I believe, with the lofty-actioned hind-legs,' added he, pointing to a weedy string-halty bay passing below, high in bone and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... after truth is like the search after perpetual motion or the attempt to square the circle. All we should aim at is the most convenient way of looking at a thing—the way that most sensible people are likely to find give them least trouble for some time ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... it subsequently became known that Professor Langley was still secretly at work on a machine for the United States Government. The public, discouraged by the failures and tragedies just witnessed, considered flight beyond the reach of man, and classed its adherents with the inventors of perpetual motion. ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright

... a certain ancestor—or was he only a great-uncle?—I forget—had a taste for mechanics, even to the craze of the perpetual motion, and could work well in brass and iron. The creature was probably some invention of his. It was a real marvel how, after so many years of idleness, it could now go as it did. I confess, as I contemplate the thing, I am in a puzzle, and almost fancy the whole a dream. But let ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... her head, suddenly flung herself into the coon dance which, in its way, was as wild and erratic as the minuet had been stately and methodical. Wilder and wilder grew her gyrations—head, feet, legs, shoulders, hair, hands, arms, were in seemingly perpetual motion. The audience grew wildly excited. They jumped up, shouting "On-ko—on-ko!" and accompanied their shouts with the stamping of feet. A dexterous somersault on the dancer's part ended the performance; her cheeks were flushed ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... puzzled by this behavior; for everything used to be so plain among them. She would even have tried for some comfort from Willie, whose mind was very large upon all social questions. But Willie had solved at last the problem of perpetual motion, according to his own conviction, and locked himself up with his model all day; and the world might stand still, so long as that went on. "Oh, what would I give for dear Jack!" ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... are laved by the sea of the divine judgments, unfathomable and shoreless. The mountains and the sea are the two grandest things in nature, and in their combination sublime; the one the home of calm and silence, the other in perpetual motion. But the mountain's roots are deeper than the depths of the sea, and though the judgments are a mighty deep, the righteousness is deeper, and is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... three different keys. It kept in play for thirty-two days, without the smallest interruption; but the air, the heat, and the wood of the machine, having undoubtedly diminished the water, it no longer ascended into the basin. Till the thirty-second day, many persons imagined that the perpetual motion had been discovered. However, this machine was extremely light, well combined, and very simple in its construction. I ought to observe that it neither acted by springs nor counterpoise; all its powers proceeding from ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... There was not the slightest necessity for the greater portion of the labour performed by the old lady: but she seemed to work from some irresistible impulse; her limbs continually swaying to and fro, as if there were some indefatigable engine concealed within her body which kept her in perpetual motion. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... "philosopher's stone," the "elixir of youth," and "perpetual motion," the telegraph was long a dream of the imagination. In the sixteenth century, if not before, it was believed that two magnetic needles could be made sympathetic, so that when one was moved the other would likewise ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... sometimes, if old tradition is to be credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons. Then the workmen laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to play mad pranks up and down the country. Perpetual motion was required to alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times. In this desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan tarantella; while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks, they were not unlike the northern Berserker. In Bearn especially, ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell

... Another poor sufferer shows his first symptom by having his wife's relations come and live with him. One ends in the asylum and t'other in the poorhouse; that's the main difference in them cases. Jim Jones fiddles with perpetual motion and Sam Smith develops a sure plan for busting Wall Street and getting rich sudden. I take summer boarders maybe, and you collect postage stamps. Oh, we're all looney, more or less, every ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln

... to the side of the boat and overboard went its contents, including three silver spoons. The spoons had no sooner left the bucket than I felt something of great force come in contact with the seat of my trousers. For a moment I thought surely perpetual motion had been discovered. Turning I was face to face with that infernal steward. Nor did that end my troubles for during the entire trip that particular locality of my person was the target for that fellow's boot. With a terrible oath, he informed me that my landing would be reached about midnight ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young

... think you will allow that he may go to bed at night with little fear of the nightmare of a starving labourer disturbing his slumbers. Not that he troubles sleep much, for he is the nearest thing to perpetual motion I ever saw, not excepting even the armadillo at the Zoological Gardens, and he has more "irons in the fire" than ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... he-goat, whilst another doctor, equally learned, holds the milk-pail below. [Footnote: Kant applied this illustration to the case where one worshipful scholar proposes some impossible problem, (as the squaring of the circle, or the perpetual motion,) which another worshipful scholar sits down to solve. The reference was of course to Virgil's line,—'Atque idem jungat vulpes, et mulgeat hircos.'] And there is apparently this two- edged embarrassment pressing upon the case—that, if our dear excellent ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... uniformity of my sentiments. It will indeed be replied, that I am not a competent judge; that pleasure is incompatible with pain; that joy is excluded from sickness; and that the felicity of a schoolboy consists in the perpetual motion of thoughtless and playful agility, in which I was never qualified to excel. My name, it is most true, could never be enrolled among the sprightly race, the idle progeny ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and incessantly on perpetual motion—to all of this he paid not the slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in the bottom of the sea. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... ball out over the heads of the waiting centres. A tall sophomore reached up confidently to grab it, but she found her hands empty. T. Reed had jumped at it and batted it off sidewise. Then she had slipped under Cornelia Thompson's famous "perpetual motion" elbow, and was on hand to capture the ball again when it bounced out from under a confused mass of homes and centres who were struggling over it on the freshman line. The freshmen clapped riotously. The ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton

... softens stubbornness into tractability. I believed the sober-looking animal devoid of tricks peculiar to his kind, such as attempting to run up dead walls in cities, and climb trees in the country, mistaking himself for a perpetual motion, and trying to kick Time through the front window of Eternity. I was deceived in the docile-looking brute. He secured me as his rider by false pretenses. He won my confidence, and betrayed it shamefully. That he was a good mule, in some respects, I'll willingly ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett

... one of the lecturers on the curios called it—they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' caps and gowns—there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... a bicycle can coast forever along level ground. Ships at sea can shut off steam and coast clear across the ocean. No machinery needs oiling. The clothes on your body feel smoother and softer than the finest silk. Perpetual motion is an established fact instead of an absolute impossibility; everything that is not going against gravity will keep right on moving forever or until it bumps into ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... enlarged and confirmed by them in 1824. It was carried nearly as much by Southern influence, as was the war itself; and if the votes were placed side by side, there could not be a doubt of the identity of the interests and passions, which lay concealed under both. But enterprise, that moral perpetual motion, overcomes all obstacles. Neat and flourishing villages rose in every valley of New-England. The busy hum of machinery made music with her neglected waterfalls. All her streams, like the famous Pactolus, flowed with gold. From her discouraged and embarrassed commerce arose a greater blessing, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes, hardly a whit more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... ignobly failed. He had contrived and patented a machine for milking cows, which might have done all that was claimed for it if anybody—cows included—could have been induced to give it a trial, and he had fiddled around with perpetual motion until the place was a litter of broken ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... his head slowly and reached down and stroked one of Eli's ears. "Eli was telling me that Jones thought he had invented perpetual motion when he tied a piece of liver to a pup's tail and set the pup to revolving; but the pup ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... gives, perhaps, the best possible explanation of his own heart in this perpetual motion towards the Cross. Who that saw him in some grand demonstration could imagine that he had been feeling just before it as ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... fresh-faced youngster, and the latter's words cut their communion short, much as the sudden rasp of curtain-rings scatters the rear of slumber. It was providential that the world was moving again. The suspension of perpetual motion would have been bound to excite remark. As it was, the new-comer was upon the very edge of ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... chess-player directing his pieces upon the squares of the political and ecclesiastical chessboard; under another, to a spider spinning his web so as to net the greatest number of profitable partisans. The fathers were kept in perpetual motion. To shift them from place to place, to exclude them from their native soil, to render them cosmopolitan and pliant was the first care of the founder. He forbade the follies of ascetic piety, inculcated the study of languages and exact knowledge, and above all things recommended ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... implied in and necessitated by the very fact of progress. Progress means a better adjustment, and the discomfort of maladjustment is the spur to improvement. A perfect equilibrium is as impossible as perpetual motion, and it is only with a perfect equilibrium that change, which is the condition of progress, would cease. The ceaseless desire for something better is, therefore, in itself an impeachment of things as they are. It is an indication of there being something wanting, ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... an hour some visits a score; Though, since first on the wheels, I've been every day At the 'Change, at a raffling, at church, or a play; And the fops of the town are pleased with the notion Of calling your slave the perpetual motion;— Though oft at your door I have whined [out] my love As my Knight does grin his at your Lady above; Yet, ne'er before this, though I used all my care, I e'er was so happy to meet my dear Chair; And since we're ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... who were not called were grossly insulted and wondered what disqualified them. They danced the "tango," and the "bango," and the "flango," and all the "light fantastics" until their feet went on strike, and their ear drums had become phonographic and reproduced the music with a perpetual motion which could not be stopped. Every lady was eager to reveal the dancing secrets to mine host, and before the evening was over he could waltz, tango, and do many of the up-to-date ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... himself, or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all the secrets of Nature. He ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a strolling female acrobat! Good heavens I That was something possible only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's body. He was simply fascinated by her marvellous grace and elan, and the magnetic recklessness of ...
— Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... they could incorporate these industrial groups in the mechanism of production and political society, were guilty of the most stupefying of errors. They were ignorant both of the nature of the State and of the essence of unionism; they were attempting the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; they had not analyzed the process of disintegration which humanity is undergoing, which, accelerated by the stream of industrialism, has given origin to hostile classes subordinated to one another, incapable of ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... presentiment that something was about to happen. He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his. He coughed slightly, and two streams of blood issued from the corners of his mouth and flowed upon his night robe; his hands ceased their perpetual motion; he had breathed his last. His wife, perceiving it, uttered a cry and fell upon her knees by the bedside. Georges, in surprise and affright, mechanically made the ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... appeals to their love of mastery offers enough of a problem. Sometimes children are vitally interested in working geometrical problems, translating difficult passages in Latin, striving to invent the perpetual motion machine, even though there is no evident and useful result. It is not the particular type of situation that is the thing to be considered, but the attitude that it arouses in the individual concerned. Educators in ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... dangerous clement it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... gaze in another direction and we find in the tiniest grain of sand countless millions of molecules whose atoms (or electrons), it is said, are in perpetual motion, revolving like the stars. Are then (we ask) the stars themselves nothing but molecules? Is the whole material universe nothing but some grain of sand on the shore of the ocean ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... playing Weber was no less epoch-marking than in that of opera. In 1812 his sonata in C, Opus 24, was produced, a work which is distinctly in advance of those of Clementi or any other writer before that time. The finale of this work is the well known rondo "Perpetual Motion," which, indeed, contains no new principle of piano playing, but is an elegant example of melodiousness and real musicianly qualities displayed at the highest possible speed. His next sonata, Opus 39, in A flat (1816), is still more remarkable. The piano playing ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer tortures unimagined even by the High Gods. Compared with it our degrading experience on the sands seven years ago was a ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... to Arlington Street meant a return to the ceaseless whirl of gaiety. Even at Rood Hall life had been as near an approach to perpetual motion as one could hope for in this world; but the excitement and the hurrying and scampering in Berkshire had a rustic flavour; there were moments that were almost repose, a breathing space between the blue river and the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... take our word for it, they are all helps in fitting the mind to grasp the idea of the Oneness of All. Each step is important, and renders the next higher one more easily attained. In this mental drill, it will be well to mentally picture the Universe in perpetual motion—everything is in motion—all matter is moving and changing its forms, and manifesting the Energy within it. Suns and worlds rush through space, their particles constantly changing and moving. Chemical composition and decomposition is constant and unceasing, everywhere the work of building up ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... but nearly everyone will remember a sudden and apparently unexplained change of mood in going into some room. One can learn a deal by analyzing one's own sensations. Figured wall-papers should also be chosen with the greatest care for this same reason. Papers which have perpetual motion in their design, or eyes which seem to peer, or an unstable pattern of gold running over it, must all be ignored. People who choose this kind of paper are blest, or cursed, whichever way one looks at it, by an ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... negroes all contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn't get the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled. And there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... closed his house to the world, and lived in his home. But here he found another reef. The poor soldier had one of those eccentric souls which need perpetual motion. Diard was one of the men who are instinctively compelled to start again the moment they arrive, and whose vital object seems to be to come and go incessantly, like the wheels mentioned in Holy Writ. Perhaps ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... desire, to fear, to be pleased or displeased—these, and others like them, exist, he thinks, in none of those first four kinds: on such account he adds a fifth kind, which has no name, and so by a new name he calls the soul [Greek: endelecheia], as if it were a certain continued and perpetual motion. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... feel his own light jamdani shirt or dabwain loin-cloth, until his eyes casually resting upon a novelty, his body would lean forward, and his arm was stretched out with the willing fingers. His jaws also were in perpetual motion, caused by vile habits he had acquired of chewing betel-nut and lime, and sometimes tobacco and lime. They gave out a sound similar to that of a young shoat, in the act of sucking. He was a pious Mohammedan, and observed the external courtesies and ceremonies ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... convening. Oh, didn't you know he was here again? Yes, he arrived last week, and, as usual, is up to his neck in affairs already, and Constance with him. I verily believe that child has discovered the secret of perpetual motion." ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... in his own language. Some might be unable to trace the cause, the moving power, thro all the curiously arranged means, to the agent who acted as prime mover to the whole affair. Others, less cautious in their conclusions, might think it a perpetual motion. Such would find a first cause short of the Creator, the great original of all things and actions; and thus violate the soundest principles of philosophy. Heaven has never left a vacuum where a new and self sustaining power may be set in operation independent of his ever-present ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... to see how little space is enough for thought to spread its wings in, but this perpetual motion within the four walls of a cell ends none the less by becoming wearisome to minds which are accustomed to embrace more objects in their field of vision. Instead of a garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of literature; instead of three or four ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... its Composite Nature. Disproved by its Motion. Evolution only a big Perpetual Motion Humbug. Work of a Designer in the structure of the Eye. The Eye-Maker sees over a wide Field and far. The ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... confirmed opinions of the world, voiced by those generally acknowledged to be the best exponents of the art—experiments carried on amid a storm of jeers and derision, almost as contemptuous as if the search were for the discovery of perpetual motion. In this we see the man foreshadowed by the boy who, when he obtained his books on chemistry or physics, did not accept any statement of fact or experiment therein, but worked out every one of them himself to ascertain whether ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing better than common men's best, his parentheses ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... their proper shelves. These mechanical book-carriers run all day, by electric power, supplied by a dynamo in the basement, and, with their endless chain and attached boxes constantly revolving, they furnish a near approach to perpetual motion. Thus I have seen a set of Macaulay's England, called for by ticket from the reading-room, arrive in three minutes from the outlying book-repository or iron stack, several hundreds of feet distant on an upper floor, placed on the reader's ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... then will not bring the fruit to maturity. Stand beneath the branches of a forest tree on a day that is at once bright and breezy: you may observe on the ground at your feet a curious network of flickering light trembling and dancing about in perpetual motion. The sunbeams that penetrate at intervals through openings among the agitated branches are barren though beautiful. The grass that gets no other light grows slim and pithless, bearing no seed-knot on its slender top. Sunlight ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... contrary: I consider myself as having made my report, and being discharged from further attendance on the subject. I will not, from henceforward, talk to any squarer of the circle, trisector of the angle, duplicator of the cube, constructor of perpetual motion, subverter of gravitation, stagnator of the earth, builder of the universe, etc. I will receive any writings or books which require no answer, and read them when I please: I will certainly preserve them—this list may be enlarged at some ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... Storm Warning Treasure Trove The Red Cross in the Window Enter M. le Docteur Perpetual Motion Ursa Major Meal Considerations The Two Colonels The Young and Brave Malcontent The Aristocrat Papa, Mama, et Bebe Juvenile Progress Automoblesse oblige Sable Garb A Football Team Mistress and Maid Sage and Onions Marketing Private Boxes ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... third law, which is extremely simple, though it has extraordinarily far-reaching consequences, and when combined with a denial of "action at a distance," is precisely the principle of the Conservation of Energy. Attempts at perpetual motion may all be regarded as attempts to ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... vocation is taught to be suspicious of easy solutions. He stands aloof from men who claim to have found the panacea and regards men of such abounding enthusiasm as belonging to the same group of the pathetically deluded as the believers in the machine of perpetual motion. The farmer keeps the greatest distance from day dreaming and can never have charged against him as a characteristic fault that menace of self-supporting fancy which is so insidious in its attack upon the mental wholesomeness ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... for use as stop-motions in and about the various machines in the cotton mill has been to a certain extent something like the search after perpetual motion. Very available and quite satisfactory stop-motions have for a number of years been employed wherever the thread or sliver has been twisted so that strength was given it to resist a slight amount ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... great numbers of these creatures are crushed and smashed by the trembling rocks, so that these unfortunate creatures, beset by so many dangers, exist always in a chronic state of fear and anxiety, and almost perpetual motion. These hills also have the metallic clang of the Bell Rock, and are highly magnetic. In the scrubs to-day Gibson found a Lowan's or scrub pheasant's nest. These birds inhabit the most waterless regions and the densest scrubs, and live entirely ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... ETHER (Gr. aither, probably from aitho, burn, though Plato in his Cratylus (41O B) derives the name from its perpetual motion— oti aei thei peri ton aera reon, aeitheer dikaios an kaloito), a material substance of a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of space which are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the masses were deaf to truth, and knew not that one good man counts for more than thousands; but he held the existing order in no superstitious reverence. Strife, he says, is the source and the master of all things. Life is perpetual motion, and repose is death. No man can plunge twice into the same current, for it is always flowing and passing, and is never the same. The only thing fixed and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign reason, which all men may not perceive, but which is common to all. Laws ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... that a force might under certain circumstances be originated—created, as it were—and hence the attempts to contrive machines for perpetual motion—that is, machines for the production of force. This idea is now wholly renounced by all well-informed men as utterly impossible in the nature of things. All that human mechanism can do is to provide modes for using advantageously a force previously existing, without ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... times, the old man would probably have made all the gyrations in politics that have distinguished the school to which he would have belonged, and, without his own knowledge, most probably, would have been as near an example of perpetual motion as the world will ever see, through his devotion to what are now called "Whig Principles." We are no great politician, but time has given us the means of comparing; and we often smile when we hear the disciples of Hamilton, and of Adams, and of all that high-toned ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... whale. He wanted to get out. However much he may have liked fish, he did not want it three times a day and all the time. So he kept up a fidget, and a struggle, and a turning over, and he gave the whale no time to assimilate him. The man knew that if he was ever to get out he must be in perpetual motion. We know men that are so lethargic they would have given the matter up, and lain down so quietly that in a few hours they would have gone into flukes and fish bones, blow-holes ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... the shadders of 'em. And then he wouldn't let the old pianner go. He for'ard two'd, he crost over first gentleman, he chassade right and left, back to your places, he all hands'd aroun', ladies to the right, promenade all, in and out, here and there, back and forth, up and down, perpetual motion, double twisted and turned and tacked and tangled into forty-eleven thousand ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various

... was somewhat the more induced by the relations I have met with in Geographical Writers, of drawing fresh Water from the bottom of the Sea, which is salt above. I cannot now stand to examine, whether this natural perpetual motion may not artificially be imitated: Nor can I stand to answer the Objections which may be made against this my Supposition: As, First, How it comes to pass, that there are sometimes salt Springs much higher then the Superficies of the Water? And, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... could never stand it. Philip the Second himself, the Alexander of dissimulation, would have told his secrets if condemned to a month's tete-a-tete in the country. Perhaps this is why kings seek to live in perpetual motion, and allow no one to see them more than fifteen ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... in the shortest time. Wheat raising was merely a summer's job, with a prospective winter's outing in some city center. It was and is still the lazy farmer's trick. It was an effort similar to that of attempting the invention of a perpetual motion machine; it was an attempt, if not to get something for nothing, at least to get something at the lowest cost, regardless of the future. But nature cannot be cheated, and the modern farmer has learned ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy









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