"Mainspring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 10th day of April, 1876, this great magnate died. His business was carried on, for a time, by others, but the mainspring was gone, and in 1882 the great clock stopped. Here is an instance that should convince us of the result of courage, energy, and self-reliance. A. T. Stewart began without a dollar, and succeeded, while they who had the benefit of his experience, the use of his ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... has learned by experience that mechanical stimulation of the genital organs induces voluptuous sensations, or when he has been taught this fact by a seducer, does the desire to produce voluptuous sensations become the mainspring driving to masturbation. The danger, of course, increases, in proportion as the child comes fully to understand that in this way it can produce agreeable sensations, all the more because the child is either unaware of the injurious ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... "it didn't seem to soak in, somehow. Cal'late my head must have stopped goin'; maybe the shock I had a spell ago broke the mainspring. All I seem to be real sartin of just now is that the Campbells are comin'. What was it ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of Forzheim rather liked Cousin Betty, for there were certain points of resemblance between them. A man of the ranks, without any education, his courage had been the sole mainspring of his military promotion, and sound sense had taken the place of brilliancy. Of the highest honor and clean-handed, he was ending a noble life in full contentment in the centre of his family, which claimed all his affections, and without ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... As to our chum Dobson, his profession may be styled remonstrance, for he is perpetually checking our levity, as he calls it; always keeping us in order and snubbing us, nevertheless we couldn't do without him. In fact, we may be likened to a social clock, of which Jim is the mainspring, Bob the weight, I the striking part of the works, and Dobson the pendulum. But we are not particular, we are ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... thread of lineal descent. To insist upon its importance is to obscure, as has been obscured, the epic range of Mr. Cabell's creative genius. It is to fail to observe that he has treated in his many books every mainspring of human action and that his themes have been the cardinal dreams and impulses which have in them heroic qualities. Each separate volume has a unity and harmony of a complete and separate life, for the excellent reason that with the consummate skill of an artist he is concerned exclusively ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... changeling carefully. It was, he thought, the revolver Lane Fleming had kept in the drawer of the gunroom desk. There was no obstruction in the two-inch barrel, the weapon had not been either fired or cleaned recently, the firing-pin had not been shortened, the mainspring showed the proper amount of tension, and the mechanism functioned as it should. There was a chance that somebody had made up five special hand-loads for him, using nitroglycerin instead of powder, but that didn't seem ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... since Linforth was greatly concerned in one great undertaking. Moreover, the scheme had been very close to Linforth's heart, even as it was to Luffe's. But Linforth's wife was in England, and thus, as it seemed to him, neither aid nor impediment. But in that he was wrong. She had been the mainspring of Linforth's energy, and so much was evident in the letter which Luffe read slowly ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... with an adroitness revealing that the capitalist class had learned much by experience, not only in reaching out for powers that the previous generation would not have dared to grant, but in being able to make plastic to its own purposes the electorate that believed itself to be the mainspring of political power. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... in later years, when he was asked how he was, he replied, "As one that is waiting and is waited for," and he often wrote, said his son, when the movement of the pen was fierce pain to him. We may see in this physical torment, perhaps, the mainspring of much of his caustic humour. Mr. Cooper, R.A., would ascribe to over-indulgence much of Jerrold's suffering. "His countenance was open and bright (when sober!), and showed nothing of that satirical bitterness for which he was so eminent.... ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... it is not the individual that is drawn, but the type. Where the individual alone is real, the type is a myth of the imagination—a pure invention. And invention is the mainspring of the theatre, which rests purely upon illusion, and does not please us unless it begins ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... true that no kind of Christian service will be effectual, if it lacks the element of grateful praise as its motive and mainspring. Perhaps there would be fewer complaints of toiling all night and wearily hauling in empty nets, if the nets were oftener let down not only 'at Thy word' but with glad remembrance of the fishermen's debt to Jesus, and in the spirit of praise. When all our work ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... would pitilessly send him to remote parts of France to save a trifle of cost. The shrewdness which all women more or less possess, not being employed in the service of her heart, had drifted into that of speculation. A business to pay for,—that thought was the mainspring which kept the machine going and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... confounded with that of Henry VIII, Philip II, or Lewis XIV, and better adapted to a more rational and economic age. Government so understood is the intellectual guide of the nation, the promoter of wealth, the teacher of knowledge, the guardian of morality, the mainspring of the ascending movement of man. That is the tremendous power, supported by millions of bayonets, which grew up in the days of which I have been speaking at Petersburg, and was developed, by much abler minds, chiefly at Berlin; and it is the greatest danger ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the very greatest weight on such questions, calculates that 100 years is about the tenure of our coal fields, according to the present rate of increase in the consumption. Whichever view we take, sooner or later the end must ultimately come when the coal will be exhausted; when the great mainspring of our commercial enterprise will be gone, and we shall revert to that condition in which we were before the coal fields were worked. In this point of view, therefore, coal has an especial interest to us as engineers. If coal is important ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... one thing," said Griggs at last. "You make a spiritual engine of mankind, and you forget the mainspring of the world. You leave love out ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the Royal Bank of Scotland so early as 1729) had shown not only to be the safest to the bank, but by far the most advantageous to the public. Indeed it is not too much to say, that were those credits prohibited, and no other alteration made in the existing system, the mainspring of the machinery of Scottish banking would be broken, and its general utility impaired. With that point we shall deal more fully when we come to the consideration of the system in detail; at present it is only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... restless gaze traveled here, there, everywhere. On casual glance one might have overlooked him as negligible, thereby falling gravely into error. The giant and the slight man had this kinship, that in the workings of great finance they were mainspring and balance wheel, and at their prompting many divisions of the world's industrial ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... any blight upon his ambition or career, but after living quietly in the country for some time, he went to Europe and travelled. When he returned, he resolved to study law, but presently relinquished it. Then he collected materials for a history, but suffered them to lie unused. Somehow the mainspring was gone. He used to come and pass weeks with Prue and me. His coming made the children happy, for he sat with them, and talked and played with them all day long, as one of themselves. They had no quarrels when our cousin the curate was their playmate, and their laugh ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... Gervaise and Nana, watched each other with eyes of baleful hate. It seemed as if some spring had broken—the great mainspring that binds ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of the Sons of Usnech,"[19] woman plays the principal part. The mainspring of the story is love, and by it the heroes are led to death, a thing not to be found elsewhere in the European literature of the period. Still, those same heroes are not slight, fragile dreamers; if we set aside their love, and only consider their ferocity, they are worthy of the Walhalla ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... on, and the upper drawer thereof was half open, thus affording me a glimpse of its contents. Among these was my silent watch with its chain of gold, its pencil and seal attached. I wore it usually (though useless now in its silent condition—the mainspring was broken) from habit and for safe keeping, but had laid it there when I staggered to my bed, ill and weak after my terrible ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... superstition expressed in such terms as "too good to live." The child A seemed destined for the fate thus suggested. The needs of the body did not greatly concern him, and he seemed equally indifferent to those of the mind; goodness was the mainspring of his being. If society does not note such dispositions, and assume the special protection of such frail lives, children of this type go forward to premature death like angels ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... torch for the extinction of which he was so long waiting. Then follows a discussion in which she urges that it was through her act, in pulling down the torch, that he was led from the light of day to the darkness of love. Porges here makes the true remark that the mainspring of Tristan's life is ambition; that love is naturally foreign to him, but that he is at last ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... thought, and regulated every action of her life. Great love and reverence towards God was the foundation of this pure faith, which accompanied her from youth to extreme old age, indeed to her last moments, which gave her strength to endure many sorrows, and was the mainspring of that extreme humility which was so remarkable a feature of ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... boys, as to girls, a dependent existence—a sucker from the parent growth—a home discipline of authority and guidance and communicated impulse. But henceforth it is a transplanted growth of its own—a new and free power of activity in which the mainspring is no longer authority or law from without, but principle or opinion within. The shoot which has been nourished under the shelter of the parent stem, and bent according to its inclination, is transferred ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... not so properly divisible into tragic and comic as into realistic and romantic—into plays of which the mainspring is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical. Two only of the former class remain to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" and "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside." There ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... owner of a lively—or a loaded—conscience, and the reflection recalled to me the photograph found on board the Flying Scud; just such a man, I reasoned, would be capable of just such starts and crises, and I inclined to think that Goddedaal (or Carthew) was the mainspring of the mystery. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Catholics waxed cool. Their union was dissolved. The paroxysm of religious excitement was over on both sides. One party had degenerated as far from the spirit of Loyola as the other from the spirit of Luther. During three generations religion had been the mainspring of politics. The revolutions and civil wars of France, Scotland, Holland, Sweden, the long struggle between Philip and Elizabeth, the bloody competition for the Bohemian crown, had all originated in theological disputes. But a great change now took place. The contest which was raging ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have been contemptuously called the shop- keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement. And one sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can never come, and retiring ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... astonished when he sees the thick masses of leaves on the trees. "What is it, then," he says, "which is laid waste if it was not the garden? Not even a blade of grass is missing. It is I who must live in winter and cold hereafter, not the garden. It is as if the mainspring of life were gone. Ah, you old fool, this will pass like everything else. It is too much ado about ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... adresse au Regent, which places the number of troops in Canada at this time at thirty-two companies of fifty men each.] Denonville was prepared to strike. He had pushed his preparations actively, yet with extreme secrecy; for he meant to fall on the Senecas unawares, and shatter at a blow the mainspring of English intrigue. Harmony reigned among the chiefs of the colony, military, civil, and religious. The intendant Meules had been recalled on the complaints of the governor, who had quarrelled with him; and a new intendant, Champigny, had been sent in his place. He was as pious as Denonville ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... could do was to give him surreptitiously a prayer-book, bidding him perfect himself in the Catechism in view of future Confirmation. But, as emulation of his fellows and not religious zeal was the mainspring of Paul's enthusiasm, the pious behest was disregarded. Paul dived into the volume occasionally, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... us to silence or to wild conjectures. Something—let us call it matter—must always have existed, and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But the external ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however, that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage to exist through ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... chiefly, but the lungs are not safe. He has been whirling his unfortunate machine faster and faster, till no wonder the mainspring has all but broken down. His ideal always was working himself to death, and only Felix could withhold him, so now he has fairly run himself down. No rest from that tremendous parish work, with the bothers about curates, school boards and board schools, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proposed to show, by an allusion to certain prominent facts occurring during the summer of '64, that the so-called Democratic party was the mainspring to the great conspiracy that has been attempted in the North with so much audacity that many men of the best judgment can scarcely believe it to be a reality. In this we do not wish to be understood that all men ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... quite changed, simple, earnest, cheerfully brave, ready for every sacrifice. Everyone was in uniform; there was scarce a head that was not decorated with the kepi of the National Guard. Business of every sort had come to a sudden standstill, as the hands of a watch cease to move when the mainspring snaps, and at the public meetings, among the soldiers in the guard-room, or where the crowds collected in the streets, there was but one subject of conversation, inflaming the hearts and minds of all—the determination to conquer. The contagious ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Governor Nathan L. Miller maintained a neutral position. The mainspring of the opposition from beginning to end was U. S. Senator Oscar W. Underwood. Senator John H. Bankhead was equally opposed. Both Senators had voted against the submission of the Federal Amendment and of the ten members in the Lower House only one, William ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... to make it, in her first indignation at his "even you." She did not pat him on the back for making concessions about the play. She merely said she was glad he was acting so sensibly about it, and that if she was the mainspring of that action she was proud. As for letting him off, he was the only living person who could keep him on, or let him off. If he was the sort of softling who could not stand up under life's discipline because it was uncomfortable or unpleasant, then no power on earth ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... lead an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. "That I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. "Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... those droll little beggars. They bowed and courtesied in an unconcerned, wooden way, as if they were moved by some ingenious piece of Swiss clock-work. The stiff old curee, too, had an air of having been wound up and set a-going. I could almost hear the creak of his mainspring. I was smiling at that, perhaps, and thinking how strongly the scenery of some portions of our own country resembles this part ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... well qualified in all respects to do justice to his rich and comprehensive theme. Professor Botta is a native of Northern Italy, in the first place, and thus by inheritance and natural transmission is heir to a great deal of knowledge as to the important movements of which Cavour was the mainspring, which a foreigner could acquire only by diligent study and inquiry. In the next place, he has not been exclusively a secluded student, but he has taken part in the great political drama which he commemorates, and has been brought into personal relations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... in relation to heat and electricity may have been an important factor. Trap dikes frequently enrich veins where they approach or intersect them, and they have often been the primum mobile of vein formation, but chiefly, if not only, by supplying heat, the mainspring of chemical action. The proximity of heated masses of rock has promoted chemical action in the same way as do the Bunsen burners or the sand baths in the laboratory; but no case has yet come under my observation where it was demonstrable that the filling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... and my powerlessness to influence him filled me with self-contempt. Of course, I said to myself, if I knew him better I should be able to help him. Would vanity do anything? It was his mainspring; I could but try. He might be led by the hope of making Englishmen talk of him again, talk of him as one who had dared to escape; wonder what he would do next. I would try, and I did try. But his dejection foiled me: his dislike of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... nomination, as the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him—the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, half poet and half tinker, fell ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Englishmen used to go about the world talking of it; but for some generations back, having settled the fact of their greatness entirely to their satisfaction, they have ceased to put it into words, merely accepting it as the mainspring of their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... mainspring of Maggie's character—the motive for most of her actions? Does Tom seem to you worthy of the intense affection she bestows upon him? Do you think a person with Maggie's nature would be likely to live a happy or an ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is all the better, because he is a loyal follower of Mr. Tylor. And Mr. Tylor says: 'Savage Animism is almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion.'[31] 'Yet it keeps the Indians very strictly within their own rights and from offending the rights of others.' Our own ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... meeting, after most solemn vows of faith and secrecy, they took me into the secret. This was, however, only to the extent of teaching me the code and method; they still withheld from me rigidly the fact or political secret, or whatever it was that was the mainspring of ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... is serious, and demands close observation. The will, you see, is the mainspring of the mind, and if it is affected the ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... the multitude, they are as likely as not to turn and cry out—"Thy good is our evil! Thy love to us is but thine own serving!"—and so turn and rend their best benefactors. With the loss of Lotys, he lost the one mainspring of faith and enthusiasm which would have helped him to match himself against his destiny and do battle with it. A great weariness seized upon him,—a longing for some wider scope of action than such futile work as that of governing, or attempting to govern, a handful of units ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... is a disagreeable job, as it most undoubtedly is, it has its compensations. Journalism of which the mainspring is the gaining of pleasure may easily degenerate into something akin to the comic actor's function. Stevenson in a famous passage compared the writers of belles-lettres to "filles de joie." That was not, I think, appropriate ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... that the cry for vengeance will rise, until the soul has learnt to transform imprecation into prayer, and the desire for justice into supplication for the guilty. But if, in the presence of crime, we were forced to believe that there will never be either vengeance or pardon, the mainspring of the moral life would be broken, and humanity would at length exclaim, like Brutus in the plains of Philippi:—"Virtue! thou art ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of the known qualified would be exhausted, perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must; it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client's situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter in a novel, from the hour in which ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that knew at which ale-house to call for the regular allowance, quite as well as his master. But as regards talk—which was chiefly of bullocks and pigs—well, there really was no very great difference after all. To such religion was the mainspring which kept the whole intellect going; and religion was to be had at the meeting. And I can well remember how strange it seemed to me that these rough, simple, untutored sons of the soil could speak of it with enthusiasm, and could pray, at any rate, with astonishing fervour. ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... the same strong mainspring urge and guide Our hearts to meet in love's eternal bond? Linked to thine arm, O Raphael, by thy side Might I aspire to reach to souls beyond Our earth, and bid the bright ambition go To that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... man to nature and her physical forces commands the highest functions of the mind, but the relation of man to his fellows not only enlists the highest intellectual effort, but requires that it be tempered by impulses of human kindness. Those who have as the mainspring of their actions the elevation of their fellows live and move upon a higher plane and are better members of society than those who subordinate sentiment and sympathy to gain ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... the administration of the Library during the early years are few, but it appears that the Committee was undoubtedly the mainspring of the organisation. It contained men such as Carleton, Fitzherbert, Travers, and Domett, to mention only the best known, who were interested not only in the Library for its own sake but also in the part it could play in parliamentary affairs and in ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... What was the mainspring of this tragic movement? What unforeseen occurrence had effected a union of powers whose usual attitude is mutual jealousy or secret hostility? In a word, it was humanity. Spurning petty questions of policy, they combined their forces to extinguish ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... peculiarly Christian quality which shaped his career was personal devotion to Christ. This was the supreme characteristic of the man, and from first to last the mainspring of his activities. From the moment of his first meeting with Christ he had but one passion; his love to his Saviour burned with more and more brightness to the end. He delighted to call himself the slave of Christ, and had no ambition except to be the propagator of His ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... depend the mental and physical well-being of every person come to adult years. It is that which gives the rosy blush to the cheek, and the soft light to the eye of the maiden. The elastic step, the ringing laugh, and the strong right arm of the youth, own the same mainspring. How soon do irregularities rob the face of color, the eye of brightness! Everyone knows this. The blood becomes impoverished, the victim PALE. This pallor of the skin is often the outward mark of the trouble within. But to the sufferer there arise a host of symptoms, chiefest ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... a climax in September, when a public service was held in Trinity Church, and Mr. Field, the hero of the hour, as head and mainspring of the expedition, received an ovation in the Crystal Palace at New York. The mayor presented him with a golden casket as a souvenir of 'the grandest enterprise of our day and generation.' The band played 'God save the Queen,' and the whole audience rose to their feet. In the evening there ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... and bearing with characteristic cheerfulness and fortitude the tragedy of a gradually failing eyesight. The American Declaration of War now came to Lord Grey as the complete justification of his policy. The mainspring of that policy, as already explained, had been a determination to keep the friendship of the United States, and so shape events that the support of this country would ultimately be cast on the side of the Allies. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring: man's is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... is no God—or, for I doubt if that be altogether possible—make it, I will say, impossible for him to hope in God—and it cannot be that annihilation should seem an evil. If there is no God, annihilation is the one thing to be longed for, with all that might of longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word, it is not immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immortal eternal thought whose life is its life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways and whose thoughts ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... true constitutional liberty was at an end, for both generals and demagogues could get such laws passed as they pleased, with sufficient money to bribe those who controlled the elections. It was a time of universal corruption and venality. Money was the mainspring of society. Public virtue had passed away,—all elevated sentiment,—all patriotism,—all self-sacrifice. The people cared but little who ruled, if they were supplied with corn and wine at nominal prices. Patrician nobles had become demagogues, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... look upon the belief in Homer as one that has nature herself for its mainspring; while I can join with old Ennius in believing in Homer as the ghost, who, like some patron saint, hovers round the bed of the poet, and even bestows rare gifts from that wealth of imagination which a host of imitators could not exhaust,—still I am far ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... very few exceptions, the unique mainspring of the aristocracy in the Fronde, and La Rochefoucauld has only erected into a maxim and even generalised into excess the principle which he had seen practised everywhere ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... fairly and honestly deprive him. That others should oppose the match was intelligible to him; but it was hardly intelligible that she should betray him. And, as yet, he did not believe that she herself was the mainspring of this renouncing. Others, the countess and the Castle Richmond people, had frightened her into falseness; and, therefore, it became him to maintain his right by any means—almost by any means, within his power. Give her up of his own free will and voice! Say that ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... The mainspring of all progress, individual and social, is the desire to fulfill in character all one has planned in thought. Man's life is one long pursuit of the visions of possible excellence which disquiet, rebuke and tempt ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is three hundred times less known. History is full of sea-power, but histories are not; for most historians know little of sea-power, though British history without British sea-power is like a watch without a mainspring or a wheel without a hub. No wonder we cannot understand the living story of our wars, when, as a rule, we are only told parts of what happened, and neither how they happened nor why they happened. The how ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury, solely or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... purely an American product, to be exercised as a popular benefit, and having no mainspring or motive power but that. It is the co-operation and co-ordination of equal partners, and while by a figure of speech fraternalism might be used to describe it, paternalism can never be properly so used. When Mr. Savage says, or implies otherwise, he is simply imposing upon, or trading ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... the great mainspring of action of the Aztecs. It is true that they had a long peaceful period after their establishing upon the lake-girt island of the Eagle and the Serpent, and that they developed their civilisation in some security within this natural fortification, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... way the sympathies and antipathies between the various animals are regulated. For every individual has not only its specific but also its individual scent. The selection between the sexes, or what, in the case of the human race, is called love, has its mainspring in the odorous harmony subsisting in ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... house, a nation and an army to protect him? No, it is not at all practical. Even Christ could not defend Himself. He was crucified without any resistance, any struggle. To hate is to struggle and that is the mainspring of action. So one must prepare himself to struggle successfully. To hate, to cause to be feared, are the proper motives for life. They are life. Fear is a stronger and far more universal human motive than ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... replied his father testily, "as if your own selfishness in desiring to possess that girl wasn't the mainspring of all your actions!" Waving his son out of the room he added: "Now leave me alone with her for a few moments. Perhaps I can ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... sons of noblemen in which he will forget it," said the friar bitterly; "where they teach disloyalty to princes and unmake men to make machines—and the mainspring is at Rome. Gentle women are won to believe in them by the subtle polish of those who uphold them, and the marvelous learning by which their teachers fit themselves for office. And among them are men noble of character and true of conscience—but bound, soul and ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... But these women are as unseasonable as they are unreasonable. Now, angina pictoris or brist-pang is not curable through the lungs, nor the stomick, nor the liver, nor the stays, nor the saucepan, as the bunglintinkerindox of the schools pretind, but only through that mighty mainspring the Brain; and instid of going meandering to the Brain round by the stomick, and so giving the wumman lots o' time to die first, which is the scholastic practice, I wint at the Brain direct, took a puff o' chlorofm put m' arm round her ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... thought nor reasoned. Had he done so he would probably have met his mysterious assailant, pitting his naked fists against the knife. But the very mainspring of his existence—which is self-preservation—called on him to do otherwise. Before the startled cry on his lips found utterance he flung himself face downward in the snow. The move saved him, and as the other stumbled over his body, pitching headlong ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... his adversary animates the breast of the combatant on either side; it may even be said that frequently some pity for the vanquished is felt, when all is over, by the side which has conquered. At Malta the element of actual personal individual hatred was the mainspring by which the combatants on both sides were moved; each regarded the other as an infidel, the slaying of whom was the sacrifice most acceptable to the God they worshipped. "Infidel" was the term which each hurled ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... came to light a splendid gold watch and chain! I turned faint with jealousy, and when a second glance showed me that the interloper was no other than the identical gold repeater whom I had known and dreaded in my infancy, I was ready to break my mainspring with vexation. To me the surprise had brought nothing but foreboding and despair, and already I felt myself discarded for my rival; but to Charlie it brought a rapture of delight which expressed itself in a whoop which could be ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... mainspring of a cowboy's life. Without enthusiasm a cowboy inevitably falls to the inglorious level of a "hired man"; a nice distinction in the social conditions of frontier life. The cowboy is sometimes a good man—not meaning a man of religion—and often a bad man. He is rarely indifferent. There ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... think for ourselves. Depend upon it, Watty, we won't be able to justify ourselves at the judgment day by saying that things were too deep for us, that things seemed to be in such a muddle that it was of no use trying to clear 'em up. Why, what would you say of the mainspring of a watch if it were suddenly to exclaim, 'I'll give up trying! Here am I—so powerful and energetic, and so well able to spin round— checked, and hindered, and harassed by wheels and pinions and levers, some ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... number of employments, which the instincts of the white man regard as degrading. If the white man be forced by necessity into employments abhorrent to his instincts, it tends to weaken or destroy that sentiment or principle of honor or duty, which is the mainspring of heroic actions, from the beginning of historical times to the present, and is the basis of every thing great and noble in all ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... have opened his mouth wider, perhaps, but not without injuring the mainspring of his neck and turning his epiglottis out ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... would stay a week. If I was to go, that 'ouse would run down like a watch with the mainspring out. I'm telling you because you're 'is friend, and you ought to know. If I was to take 'im at 'is word—but there, I wouldn't have the 'eart. 'E and the missus would be like two babes left out in a bundle. I'm just everything. And then 'e ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the typical cultivator. He loves his land, and to lose it is to break the mainspring of his life. His land gives him a freedom and independence of character which is not found among the English farm-labourers. He is industrious and plodding, and inured to hardship. In some Districts the excellent ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... of his desiring 'to eat some of housewife Keach's prawns', and telling her 'to be no more so familiarity with such people', is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR put together. Ford's jealousy, which is the mainspring of the comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... constitutionalism far excels the Federalism of the United States. Nor is it less obvious that the very qualities in which the English constitution excels that of the United States are essential to the maintenance by England of the British Empire. Home Rulers, whether they know it or not, touch the mainspring of the British constitution. For from the moment that Great Britain becomes part of a federation, the omnipotence of Parliament is gone. The Federal Congress might be called by the name of the Imperial Parliament. It might possibly be made ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... opened the way for the discussion of woman suffrage and the subject is being considered as never before in Europe." [See Chapter on the Alliance.] The Evening with Women in History was opened by Mrs. Catt, who said: "One idea is the mainspring of the opposition to woman suffrage—that women are by nature of the inferior sex. Even Darwin, so scientific that he tried to see all things fairly, entertained this unjust view. When women have had the same ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... a trip to the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to have the mainspring of the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to have a rifle that couldn't be trusted, least of all a hunter ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... child could have strung these incidents into a chain of evidence which pointed toward danger. Obviously the danger was not directly hers, but then it must be directed at some one near to her. Her father? No, he was more apt to be the mainspring of their action. Lord Nick? There was nothing to gain by attacking him. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... this view of society, in which you are about to seek a place in keeping with your intellect and your faculties, you must set before you as a generating principle and mainspring, this maxim: never permit yourself to act against either your own conscience or the public conscience. Though my entreaty may seem to you superfluous, yet I entreat, yes, your Henriette implores you to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... "Joy is the mainspring in the whole Of endless Nature's calm rotation. Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll In the great ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... side, where prayer was "wont to be made." And at Miletus, Paul attended a precious prayer-meeting with the elders of the church of Ephesus. These meetings have been maintained among evangelical Christians in every age. They are the life of the church. They are the mainspring of human agency in all revivals of religion. Without a spirit of prayer, sufficient to bring God's people together in this way, I see not how vital piety can exist in a church. The feelings of a lively ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... says this writer, "Fidelio is governed throughout by one purpose, to which everything is rendered subservient. Determination to discover and liberate her husband is the mainspring not only of all her actions, and the theme of all her soliloquies, but, even when others likely to annunce her design in any way are acting or speaking, we read in the anxious gaze, the breathless anxiety, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... ready to lavish their money in return for articles of pleasure and luxury. The poor, in their thirst for a share of wealth, were strongly stimulated to inventive activity in producing new and desirable wares. Inequality became the mainspring of business activity; thought and inventive ingenuity were strongly exercised; a rapid progress went on in the production of new devices, new methods, and new articles of necessity and luxury; manufacture flourished, commerce increased, civilization appeared, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... were in France. She was the admiration of gifted circles, in which she reigned as a queen of society. Poets sang her praises and extolled her beauty; statesmen craved her influence. Nothing took place at court to which she was not privy. She was the mainspring of all political cabals and intrigues; even the Queen treated her with deference, as well as loaded her with gifts, and Godolphin consulted her on affairs of State. The military fame of her husband gave her ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... writer, but I do not remember a line of poetry in the whole of his work in verse. The temper of his mind was the temper of mind of the prose-writer. His worldly wisdom, his active philosophy, the very mainspring of his plots, are found, characteristically, in his valets and his servant-maids. He satirises the miser, the hypocrite, the bas-bleu, but he chuckles over Frosine and Gros-Rene; he loves them for their freedom of speech and their elastic minds, ready in words or deeds. They ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... he had been let down afresh. Before, the attack had been directed against the worldly hopes of a man, such as all see crushed at some time in life, but now it was his spirit that was aimed at. It was that strong, living soul which was the mainspring of his moral existence. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... taken place in October 1865. The severity of the repressive measures excited indignation in England; and discussions arose conducted with a bitterness not often paralleled. The Gordon case was the chief topic of controversy. Governor Eyre had arrested Gordon, whom he considered to be the mainspring of the insurrection, and sent him to the district in which martial law had been proclaimed. There he was tried by a court-martial ordered by General Nelson, and speedily hanged. The controversy which followed is a curious illustration of the modes of reasoning of philosophers and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies du sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But ALL strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... immense advantage to freedom. This revulsion on the part of the North from lawless attempts to abolish Abolitionism, affected almost unavoidably, and in the beginning of it almost unconsciously, the friendly dispositions of that section toward slavery, the root and mainspring of these attempts. Blows aimed at the agent were sure, regardless of the actor's intention, to glance and strike the principal. In spite of mobs then, and to a remarkable degree because of mobs, Abolitionism had become a powerful motor in revolutionizing ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... advance of the age,—literally Utopian;(24) for it would be well with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But, unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization. They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but without the mainspring. Bentham contemplates the individual man as an agency, rather than as an intellectual and moral integer. He must work under yoke and harness for ends vast and remote, beyond the appreciation of ordinary mortals; and he must hold ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... movement, when other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on its source with variable energy.—But there never was a guild of dealers ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shilling from his office beyond the salary legally attaching to it. Conduct like this, though obviously disinterested, did not go without immediate and ample reward, in the public confidence which it created, and which formed the mainspring of Pitt's power as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... right at the time. Heaven keep us all from those moments of despair. She has got over it now, and nurses and watches my poor sister more like a mother watching her child than a young woman taking care of an old one. She is the mainspring of the house." ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... substance was this, which could not be bent or broken, or even bitten into? The more Black Bruin pushed at the iron bars of his cage, the fainter grew that spark of hope which is the mainspring of all life, until at last he ceased to hope altogether, and bowing to the inevitable, no longer sought to be free. Sullenly he glared at the gaping crowds that passed his cage daily, and the only thing to which he looked ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... that These three persons, with the these three persons, with the three peers mentioned before, were other three lords mentioned united in the closest confidence, before, were of the most intimate and formed the mainspring of the and entire trust with each other, party. Such at least was the and made the engine which (47 general belief. But it was clear a) moved all the rest; (30) that they also admitted to their yet it was visible, that (15) unreserved confidence two others, Nathaniel ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... and perhaps injurious, delay; but I feel sure that the public are prepared to put up with all this discomfort, loss, and privation if thereby their country marches triumphantly out of this great struggle. [Cheers.] We have every reason for confidence; we have none for complacency. Hope is the mainspring of efficiency; ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Religion was the mainspring of his entire life, the real source of all his success. Without it, he might have been honored of men; with it, he was honored of God. Encircling all the separate parts of his character, like a golden chain, it bound them in ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... "You will see by this that I am exact to follow your instruction; and that the SCHULZ of Tremmen [Village in the Brandenburg quarter, with a SCHULZ or Mayor to be depended on], becomes for the present the mainspring of our correspondence. I return you all the things (PIECES) you had the goodness to communicate to me,—except Charles Douze, [Voltaire's new Book; lately come out, "Bale, 1731."] which attaches me infinitely. The particulars hitherto unknown which he reports; the greatness ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... even fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born poet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he clothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the aroma of sentiment rises like ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... The ground or mainspring of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... (ma-gokoro) implanted in you; and then you will never wander from the way.' How this spiritual self- culture may best be obtained, the same great expounder has stated with almost equal brevity: 'Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to them will ever be disrespectful to the Gods or to his living parents. Such a man will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle with his ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... to afford some mysterious pleasure to the disembodied spirits. There was then no idea of propitiation, of benefits to ensue. In later times, the character of the sacrifice underwent a change, until a sentiment of do ut des became the real mainspring of the ceremony. Meanwhile, Confucius had complained that the filial piety of his day only meant the support of parents. "But," argued the Sage, "we support our dogs and our horses; without reverence, what is there to distinguish ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... misfortune I found a happy life. To be to you an indispensable machine, to know myself useful to your comfort, your luxury, has been the source of deep enjoyments. If these enjoyments were great when I thought only of Adam, think what they were to my soul when the woman I loved was the mainspring of all I did. I have known the pleasures of maternity in my love. I accepted life thus. Like the paupers who live along the great highways, I built myself a hut on the borders of your beautiful domain, though I never sought to approach you. Poor and lonely, struck blind by Adam's good ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... ether filled eyes, mouth, and nostrils, till it permeated to his very lungs. Then with every pulsation of the blood Big Ben seemed to be striking inside his brain till something gave way with a great whizz! like the mainspring of a watch, and Tom Ryfe was perfectly quiet and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... satisfied hunger, its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched thirst for ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... 4.—Reached Leavenworth and found Mrs. Colby and Mrs. Saxon ready to begin the campaign for arousing public sentiment to demand a bill from the next legislature to secure Municipal suffrage for women. Dr. Ruth M. Wood is the mainspring ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... here observe, that if I have in no case made her allude to the Virgin Mary, and exhibited the sense of infinite duty and loyalty to Christ alone, as the mainspring of all her noblest deeds, it is merely in accordance with Dietrich's biography. The omission of all Mariolatry is remarkable. My business is to copy that omission, as I should in the opposite case have copied the introduction of Virgin-worship ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... motives during the past two years, expostulation would be futile. In his thoughts of her he fell into a great spiritual dumbness. Never, even in his moments of most theoretical imaginings, did he see himself setting before her fully and calmly the hopes and ambitions of which she had been the mainspring. And before a reconciliation, many such rehearsals must take place in the secret recesses of a ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Christmas expressions are two-fold: the Spirit of Joy, of Celebration, of High Festival—the highest of all; and the Spirit of Giving. These are found wherever Christmas is kept, and make it, as it should be, the glory of the year. In joy and in giving we are most absolutely in line with the mainspring of the Universe: unmeasured happiness—happiness that cannot be quenched—cannot be kept to ourselves. What must run over and pour forth on other people: that is real Love, Christmas Love—and that, of course, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... half by my watch, but five or six by my nerves, I paced the lonely, sequestered halls in the lower regions of the castle. Two or three times I was sure that my watch had stopped, the hands seemed so stationary. The third time I tried to wind it, I broke the mainspring, but as it was nearly one o'clock not ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... intention of wrecking the railway station in Dar-es-Salaam became, by evil chance, deflected in its path and struck the brewery instead. Not the office or the non-essential part of the building, but the very heart, the mainspring of the whole, the precious vats and machinery for making beer. And there will be no more "lager" in German East Africa until the war ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... supposing the same malevolent or selfish desires working in every breast, directed against one object, and rendered irresistible from that very multiplication, and we have the envy of the coterie transformed into the fury of revolution. Whoever will closely observe the working of that mainspring of human actions—selfishness—on the society, whether in a village, a city, a country, or a metropolis in which he resides, will have no difficulty in discerning the real but secret, and therefore unobserved spring of the greatest changes that ever occur in the political ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... as the leaves of the forest. Curiosity, that mainspring of the Indian character, had brought the chiefs, big and little, to see with their own eyes the great Captain of the Long Knives. In vain had the faithful Bowman put them off. They would wait. Clark must come. And Clark was coming, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him from Mrs. Garnet's presence, that Virginia was the Mother of Presidents; that the first slaves ever brought to this country came in Yankee ships; that Northern envy of Southern opulence and refinement had been the mainspring of the abolition movement; and—with a smile of almost womanly heroism—that he—or his father at least—had lost all his slaves ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... the animals. Cows and pigs, horses, goats, sheep and rabbits abandoned by the husbandman, startled, puzzled; the clock with the broken mainspring running backward. The small game: deer, antlered, striped, and spotted; wildsheep, ovis poli, TeddyRooseveltshot and Audubonprinted, mountaingoats leaping in terror to hazardous safety on babel's top, upward to the pinpoint where no ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... could never have coalesced; it was a war for liberty or despotism, and the principal of the warriors on both sides were attached to the religion that was by law established. It is true that many Episcopalians, in the reign of Charles II, charged the Puritans, not only as being the mainspring, but as possessing the overwhelming force in that awful struggle, forgetting that the Nonconformists were then but a handful of men, neither possessed of wealth nor influence. To attribute victory to so small a band, must refer it to the immediate interposition of the Most High, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a watch ceases to be useful as a timekeeper. A handsome case may make it still an ornament and the parts may have a market value, but it cannot serve the purpose of a watch. There is that in each human life that corresponds to the mainspring of a watch—that which is absolutely necessary if the life is to be what it should be, a real life and not a mere existence. That necessary thing is a belief in God. Religion is defined as the relation between God and man, and Tolstoy has described morality ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... meaning of your own tenet—'Perfect Love and Fulfilment'? If you have any doubts upon these points, Mr. Mario, hold your hand. It can profit the world nothing to restir the witches' cauldron. Love must always be the mainspring of life and honour its loftiest ideal. Teach men how to live and leave it to Death to reveal the hereafter. Not for the good of mankind do I tremble—God has the world in his charge—but for yourself. We ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... called the Little Giant on account of his intellect, was a type of man of which our race has had some notable examples, although they are not characteristic. Capable of sacrifice to their country, personal ambition is, nevertheless, the mainspring of their actions. They must either be before the public, or else unhappy. This trait gives them a large theatrical strain, and sometimes brands them as adventurers. Their ability ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the republic or perish with it. Now, in such a situation, the first maxim of your policy should be, to lead the people by reason, and the enemies of the people by terror. If, during peace, virtue be the mainspring of a popular government, its mainspring in the times of revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror becomes fatal, terror, without which virtue is powerless. Subdue, then, the enemies of liberty by terror; and, as the founders of the republic, you will ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... with a little capital go home content when he has invested their money in mortgage of real property. Still the work goes on increasing; additional clerks have to be employed; a fresh wing has to be built to the old house. He has, too, his social duties; he is, perhaps, the head or mainspring of a church movement—this is not for profit, but from conviction. His lady is carried to and fro in the brougham, making social visits. He promotes athletic clubs, reading-rooms, shows, exhibitions. He is eagerly seized upon by promoters of all kinds, because ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... feeling, and the doctrine of justification by faith is stated more emphatically than in any other of his writings. But his earnest insistence upon the "fruit borne by the Spirit" proves that his ideal of practical holiness was rather strengthened than impaired by his plea for Faith as the mainspring of Christian life. ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... had lived a life of bodily and mental indolence, in which all his keenest perceptions and strongest instincts had been lulled into a semi-dormant state. Unknown to himself, the mainspring of all thought and action had been taken out of his existence together with the very memory of it. For years he had lived and moved and wandered over the earth in obedience to one dominant idea. By a magic of which he knew nothing that idea had been annihilated, temporarily, if not for ever, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... however, be mentioned that he invented a method by which the chronometer might be kept going without losing any portion of time. This was during the process of winding up, which was done once in a day. While the mainspring was being wound up, a secondary one preserved the motion of the wheels ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... are a stranger no longer: all men know you, all men are your friends; this it is to possess the friendship of the venerable Solon. Conversing with him, you will forget Scythia and all that is in it. Your toils are rewarded, your desire is fulfilled. In him you have the mainspring of Greek civilization, in him the ideals of Athenian philosophers are realized. Happy man—if you know your happiness—to be the friend and intimate ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... the said line, and then a small piece more, until I arrive at the end of where the spiral ceases, at its base; but now that the volute is developing, I am enabled to complete the line, which brings the whole to its actual junction with the mainspring of conception. This, in a very great state of roughness, I show at an angle (fig. 23), and I reverse the sides, cutting the other in the same manner. It is necessary to have the wood firmly cramped to the bench on ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... violently—you will be heard without doors, where such speeches are but too current already among the common soldiery, and engender discord and contention in the Christian host. Bethink you that your illness mars the mainspring of their enterprise; a mangonel will work without screw and lever better than the Christian ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... all up. Now, equally of course, Mr. Viner, in all these cases, in my experience, the subordinates immediately try to save their own skins by denouncing the principal, and it was so in this instance. Mrs. Killenhall and Cave at once denounced Cortelyon as the mainspring, and the woman, who's a regular coward, got me aside and offered to turn King's evidence, and whispered that Cortelyon actually killed Ashton himself, unaided, as he let him out of his back door ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... book of our history, John de Bermingham, created for his former victory Baron of Athenry, had now the Earldom of Louth conferred on him with a royal pension. He promptly followed up his blow at Faughard by expelling Donald O'Neil, the mainspring of the invasion, from Tyrone; but Donald, after a short sojourn among the mountains of Fermanagh, returned during the winter and resumed his lordship, though he never wholly recovered from the losses he had sustained. The new Earl of Louth ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... line of labor and association had first placed her, she would have come up into such an atmosphere as was here, ready made for her to breathe and abide in? To help make also; to stand at its practical mainspring, and keep it possible that it should ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... further taken for granted that the many-sided effort to grow which is of the essence of the child's nature is the mainspring of, and expresses itself in, certain typical instincts which no one who studies the child with any degree of care can fail to observe; and that by duly cultivating these instincts,—expansive instincts, as one may perhaps call them, since each of them tends to take the child away ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... in his explorations he was told he could not travel in certain places, but he went on just the same to find out for himself. He had a rare faculty of inducing enthusiasm in others, and by reposing complete confidence in the individual, impelled him to do his very best. Thus he became the mainspring for much that was never credited to him, and which was really his in the germ or original idea. Gilbert truly says, "it is not easy to separate the product of his personal work from that which he accomplished through the organisation of the work of others. He was extremely ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... universal passion: fear. Of all the thousand qualities a man may have, the only one you will find as certainly in the youngest drummer boy in my army as in me, is fear. It is fear that makes men fight: it is indifference that makes them run away: fear is the mainspring of war. Fear! I know fear well, better than you, better than any woman. I once saw a regiment of good Swiss soldiers massacred by a mob in Paris because I was afraid to interfere: I felt myself a coward to the ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... divine charity becomes the mainspring of her actions, everything she does develops in her a greater resemblance to God. Then, not only prayer, the sacraments, pious reading, and other spiritual exercises, but voluntary mortifications, temptations ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... placed these general reflections at the beginning of our study, in order to make it clear to the reader that, whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... events at home changed the whole face of affairs. After eight years of childlessness the king became in October the father of a son. With the birth of this boy the rivalry of York and the Beauforts for the right of succession ceased to be the mainspring of English politics; and the crown seemed again to rise out of the turmoil of warring factions. But with the birth of the son came the madness of the father. Henry the Sixth sank into a state of idiotcy which ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... in magic which underlies all this tale might perhaps be thought to be inappropriate to the enlightenment of Greek times. We have seen how in the earliest tales magic is a mainspring of the action, and it is at first sight surprising that its sway should last through so many thousands of years. But there may well have been a recrudescence of such beliefs, along with the revival of ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... been delayed by recent happenings in Russia. Let us rejoice, Romain Rolland, let us rejoice with all our hearts, for Russia is no longer the mainspring of reaction in Europe. Henceforward the Russian people is wedded to liberty, and I trust that this union will give birth to many great souls for ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... danger in curbing individuality by a stereotyped method of instruction. 'All social enactments,' says Harnack, 'have a tendency to circumscribe the activities of the individual. If we unduly fetter the free play of individual effort we break the mainspring of progress and enterprise, and create a state of social immobility which is the antecedent of national decay.'[18] Youth ought to be taught self-reliance and strenuousness of will; and this is a work which can only be done in the home by the firm yet ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... their environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably, led to their leadership in government also, and given them the predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out, its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in ...
— Progress and History • Various
... common among historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... desire, as a people, that every person in their midst should be given a fair, sporting chance in life. 'A fair thing!' In three words one has the national ideal, and who shall say that it is not an admirable one, remembering that its foundation and mainspring are kindness, and if not ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... variety of intellectual points of view, which not only form a great part of the interest of human life, but, by bringing intellects into stimulating collision and by presenting to each innumerable notions that he would not have conceived of himself, are the mainspring of mental and ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... afflicts so many men. It seemed as if he had saved it all for that final summing-up which was to be delivered by his pen instead of his lips. He had become articulate only at the last. It must have taken him weeks upon weeks to write it all down, this autobiography which had been the mainspring of his son's actions for nearly two years. There was wind and sun in it, and blue sky and the gray Gulf heaving; somber colors, passion and grief, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... drawing his chair closer to Perousse, and speaking in a low uneasy tone; "You do not know all! There is some secret agency at work against us; and, among other things, I fear that a foreign spy has been inadvertently allowed to learn the mainspring of our principal moves. Listen, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli |
