"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you tell me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is properly ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... connected with himself and family, which, though amusing from its very simplicity, afforded at the same time a certain indication that the good old grandfather whom they all loved so well, and whose benignant character had been only mellowed by age into a more plastic affection for them all, was soon to be removed from before their eyes, never again to diffuse among them that charm of domestic truth and love, and the holy influences of all those fine old virtues which ancestral integrity sheds over the heart, and transmits ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... remarkable. Every man, when he begins his reasonable life, finds certain general opinions current in the world. He is shaped by these opinions in one way or another, either directly or by reaction. If he is soft and plastic, like the majority of people, he takes the opinions that are about him for his own. If he is self-asserting and defiant, he takes the opposite of these opinions and gives to them his vehement adherence. We ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... drink, and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of your character—that is, your very identity. Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home. As for me and my comrade, however, in this part of our journey we often ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... answer to those who allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... It was a heavy plastic irising door. It was locked and naturally would not respond to the whorl patterns of ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... every child left to his own mode of development is to make, in some plastic material, what he has seen. Trying to fashion the hills and valleys with which he is familiar excites his interest, and leads to closer observation. This may be followed by the reproduction in molder's sand, or in clay, of the forms seen in pictures or learned from description. ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... Suddenly the battle was done, victory easily gained. We were cheered by a gush of level sunlight. Even the dull, gray vapor became a transfigured and beautiful essence. Dull and uniform it had hung over the land; now the plastic winds quarried it, and shaped the whole mass into individuals, each with its character. To the cloud-forms modelled out of formlessness the winds gave life of motion, sunshine gave life of light, and they hastened through the lower atmosphere, or sailed lingering across the blue breadths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... world and a gentleman, Mr. Effingham had looked forward to this passage with a good deal of concern, on account of his daughter, while he shrank with the sensitiveness of his habits from the necessity of exposing one of her delicacy and plastic simplicity to the intercourse of a ship. Accompanied by Mademoiselle Viefville, watched over by Nanny, and guarded by himself and his kinsman, he had lost some of his apprehensions on the subject during the three probationary days, and now took his stand in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of faith," he cried, "is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the 'plastic dance of circumstance'; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... it was not possible to be jealous of his host. Whatever truth there was about his past failure, he could never fascinate Sylvia. She appreciated too fully the plastic side of life; she was a romanticist, and therefore she attached immense importance to the material. (Are not all romantic heroes and heroines beautiful to look at, and always either beautifully or picturesquely dressed?) Sylvia cared far more about her own admiration ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to the ear!—farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks human flesh, and in the plastic expression of the culled excellencies of the human shape, shines forth the god!—farewell to painting, the high wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artists's mind in pictured canvas—to paradisaical scenes, where trees are ever vernal, and the ambrosial air rests ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... aesthetic; the yen for symmetry and balance; the love of beauty; the desire for harmony; the quest for excellence; the lure of magnificence; the search for truth. Out of these urges have arisen the pictorial and plastic arts, architecture, music, the dance, science, and philosophy, providing outlets, occupations and professions that have colored and shaped ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... none of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions bathed by the Spree as it is unknown on the banks of the Darro and ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... statue of Nathan Hale is much less academic than the other sculptures arranged in this gallery. Compared with the high standard of American small plastic art his works are somewhat dry, though ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... preservation, and shows a young and attractive face. The male figure was doubtless sacrificed to Octavianus's command to destroy Antony's statues. We are indebted to Herr Dr. Walther, in Alexandria, for an excellent photograph of this remarkable piece of sculpture. Comparatively few other works of plastic art, in which we here include coins, that could render us familiar with our heroine's appearance, have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the things which are most surely believed' in their day. They 'bear record of what they have seen and heard.' I know not how stronger words could have been used to prevent the notion of that plastic, growing myth which Strauss conceives to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... otherwise a statue so imbued with true classical feeling and so correct in technical finish as that of Sigilgaita in Ravello Cathedral could never have been produced; yet the names of the artist or artists who thus anticipated the great plastic revival remain undiscovered. Portrait-busts, similar in treatment and idea to that of the so-called Sigilgaita, are to be found here and there in museums, but this effigy in remote Ravello remains unique amidst ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... not such an invariable destroyer as he is represented. If he pulls down, he likewise builds up; if he impoverishes one, he enriches another; his very dilapidations furnish matter for new works of controversy, and his rust is more precious than the most costly gilding. Under his plastic hand trifles rise into importance; the nonsense of one age becomes the wisdom of another; the levity of the wit gravitates into the learning of the pedant, and an ancient farthing moulders into infinitely more ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... food processing, medical equipment, textiles and clothing, construction materials, fertilizer, plastic products ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Dodsley, or in the rarer single editions where they occur, is again an interest of curiosity—a desire to trace the various shiftings and turnings of the mighty but unorganised genius which was soon to find its way. Next to the difficulty of inventing a conveniently plastic form seems to have been the difficulty of inventing a suitable verse. For some time the swinging or lumbering doggerel in which a tolerably good rhyme is reached by a kind of scramble through four or five feet, which are most like a very shuffling anapaest—the verse which appears in the comedies ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... life.[34] According to the latter writer, "the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity."[35] It is not very easy to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race as "characterised ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... to suppose if the facts point that way that there are the following layers in the earth's masses:—First, the external, rigid and brittle layer; second, a layer under such temperature and pressure that it is above its plastic yield point and may be considered as a viscous fluid. The pressure must continue to increase toward the center. We do not know what is the temperature, but it is perfectly possible that at a greater depth the earth may become rigid once more if the effect of pressure in promoting solidity ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... bust of his godfather was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the cause he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and mosaics, and the Roman paintings, of which unfortunately very few specimens have come down to us, show that the further developments of this form were most manifold, and indeed they form in conjunction with the Roman achievements in plastic art the highest point that this form reached in its development, a point that the Renaissance, which followed hard upon it, did not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Building was a soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... smashing glass, such songs as never were sung in Carmelo before; an infernal clash of sound which mingled incongruously with the solemn mass of the surf. Chonita's eyes flashed. Even Estenega's face darkened: the traditions planted in plastic youth arose and ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... infallibly have left some trace of it in his dramatic works and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among the vaguer poets of ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... escape is once opened the stuff would soften and ooze upward. There is a growing tendency, moreover, to recognize the importance of gravitation in producing eruptions. The weight of several miles of rock is almost inconceivable, and it certainly ought to compel "potentially plastic" matter to rise through any crevice that might be newly formed. Russell, Gilbert and some other authorities regard this as the chief mechanical agent in an eruption, at least when there is a considerable outpouring ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... swelling, which is either barely visible or sometimes very decided. Everywhere else the two organs may be contiguous, or more or less near together, but they are free from any adherence whatever. If the plastic matters contained in the conjugated cells influence one another reciprocally, no notable modification in their appearance results at first. The large appendiculate cell seems, however, to yield to its consort a portion of the plasma it contains. One thing ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... particular. And yet Jenkins seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have predestined her to the study of the plastic arts. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the hammer is a gracious bearded figure, clad in Gaulish dress, and he carries also a cup. His plastic type is derived from that of the Alexandrian Serapis, ruler of the underworld, and that of Hades-Pluto.[82] His emblems, especially that of the hammer, are also those of the Pluto of the Etruscans, with whom the Celts had been in contact.[83] He is thus a Celtic Dispater, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... former case first. After selecting her pebble, the Mason-bee of the Walls arrives with a little ball of mortar in her mandibles and lays it in a circular pad on the surface of the stone. The fore-legs and above all the mandibles, which are the mason's chief tools, work the material, which is kept plastic by the salivary fluid as this is gradually disgorged. In order to consolidate the clay, angular bits of gravel, the size of a lentil, are inserted separately, but only on the outside, in the as yet soft mass. This is the foundation of the structure. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... itself didn't look too complicated from the outside. It was a black plastic box about an inch and a half square and maybe three and a half long. On one end was a lensed opening, half an inch in diameter, and on two sides there were flat, silver-colored plates. On the top of it, there was a dial which was, say, an inch in diameter, and it was marked ...
— ...Or Your Money Back • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and stability under ordinary circumstances: to these obvious qualities we may add those which especially adapt it to the use of the chemist, namely, that it is unaffected by most acids or other fluids contained within it. At certain temperatures it becomes more ductile and plastic than wax, and may be made to assume in our hands, before the flame of a common lamp, the form of every vessel we need to contain our materials, and of every apparatus required ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... happened that M. le Clerc had inserted in his Select Library an extract from the Intellectual System of the late Mr. Cudworth, and had explained therein certain 'plastic natures' which this admirable author applied to the formation of animals. M. Bayle believed (see the continuation of Divers Thoughts on the Comet, ch. 21, art. 11) that, these natures being without cognition, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... languishing, will continue all the same on the express condition that the respiratory organs and the nervous filaments be respected. It is as it were the flame of the lamp, which, whether full or empty, continues to give light so long as the wick is soaked in oil. Nothing but fluids, the plastic materials held in reserve, can be distilled by the Anthrax' sucker through the unpierced skin of the grub; no part of the respiratory and nervous systems passes. As the two essential functions remain unscathed, life goes on until exhaustion is completed. On the other ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... be studied with the greatest profit. Not that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest individual inspirations came ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Athenians, Romans, Corinthians—doubtless all these and many others have transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local, epichorial, and tied to a particular mythology which has given way, or to a superstition ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... in Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... For, were a bard a bard because he's smart, Laberius' mimes were products of high art. 'Tis not enough to make your reader's face Wear a broad grin, though that too has its place: Terseness there wants, to make the thought ring clear, Nor with a crowd of words confuse the ear: There wants a plastic style, now grave, now light, Now such as bard or orator would write, And now the language of a well-bred man, Who masks his strength, and says not all he can: And pleasantry will often cut clean through Hard knots that gravity would scarce undo. On this ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, 45 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca's part to urge upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking into the degraded position ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... at waist height. Inside was a hand grip. A two-foot plastic globe a quarter full of chips hung in the center. Apparatus was mounted at the top of ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very easy to manage. She has a beautiful disposition. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... was over by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more, but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic truncheons. The Space ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... to artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts—he had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory—and at that time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external assistance. And within two years of that paper ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... pulp, paper, and cork; metals and metalworking; oil refining; chemicals; fish canning; rubber and plastic products; ceramics; electronics and communications equipment; rail transportation equipment; aerospace equipment; ship ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... about books all the time. Even the man whose business it is to express himself in black and white has eyes like other people, and with them he perceives and observes the variegated visible world: its landscapes, cities, plain and cultivated men, plastic art. For him too does Nature exist; he too is moved at sight of such simple happenings as the fall of the leaves in October; he too is stirred as he gazes upon a waterfall, a mountain region, a sunlit glacier, a Dutch ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a failing foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher race or the servile pliancy of a lower one would, each in its way, have preserved them: as it was, their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however Protestants ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... some one person should have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person simply submitted ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in. Now everything becomes fluid. We can redraw the map of the world. A week ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about things too little for human impatience. Now suddenly we face an epoch. This is an epoch. The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation.... And ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... has fought his way to consideration and esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Paolo loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped with genius, but he did not know ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... from the parent planet on a spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of from two ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... skill and daring were his means of evasion. Even without a formal disguise he could elude pursuit. At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features would assume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for a mulatto. Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side, and let the police be baffled by a wooden mechanism, decently finished with a hook. Thus ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Bringing its Thought to birth in human grace, The soul of the grand form, upstarting, when Thou openest thus thy mysteries to our ken, Striking a marble window through blind space. But God, who mouldeth in life-plastic clay, Flashing his thoughts from men with living eyes, Not from still marble forms, changeless alway, Breathed forth his human self in human guise: Thou didst appear, walking unknown abroad, The son of man, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Plastic compositions of papier-mache are essential, especially in mammal and game-head work, for properly finishing the details of ears, face, and feet of specimens after the body has been filled. These are applied partly as a last detail before ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... technical term for working clay to a plastic state in an inclosed space, until it is of the requisite consistence for arresting the flow of water. A term in iron ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Latimer's exhortation to his companion at the stake rang like a trumpet note through the Protestant world. Ridley was the learned theologian and keen controversialist who more than any other man had moulded the plastic mind of the Archbishop since he had been released from the thraldom of Henry's moral and intellectual domination: who had led the campaign against "idolatry" but stood fast against the extravagances of the Nonconformists: who had without hesitation opposed Mary's accession. No one ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Solomon Barkin, Director of Research for the Textile Workers Union of America; L. S. Buckmaster, General President, United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum & Plastic Workers of America; James B. Carey, Secretary-Treasurer of CIO; Albert J. Hayes, International President of International Association of Machinists; and ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... into Egypt, India, Asia Minor, sowing colonies of intelligence wherever they went; but the chief place to which they flocked was Rome. At Rome the hold they gained was such that even tyranny itself could not loosen it. Their light spirits and plastic nature made them adapt themselves to every fashion without difficulty and without regret; even under Tiberius or Domitian there was always something for a cultured Greek ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound down midst ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... ethnological distinction, is a republican of this country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation, and welcome. His very ignorance and debasement are to be welcomed by a country eager to exhibit the plastic power of its divine idea,—how animal restrictions can be gradually obliterated, how superstition and prejudice must die out of stolid countenances before the steady gaze of republican good-will, how ethnic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... progress inevitable and easy. The importance of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... magnificent models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements. They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... see brought together the work of so many really great sculptors. America has a very large number of talented men expressing themselves on the plastic side - and a ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... professional historian, and awakens the reader's lively interest in him, is not so much the matter of his books, as the manner of presentation. It is rare to meet with an historian in whom scientific objectivity and thoroughness are so harmoniously combined with an ardent temperament and plastic ability. Mr. Dubnow's scientific activity, first and last, is a striking refutation of the widespread opinion that identifies attractiveness of form in the work of a scholar with superficiality of content. ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Blyth had been speaking, Mat's hands had been gradually stealing down deeper and deeper into the pockets of his trousers, until his finger and thumb, and a certain plastic substance hidden away in the left-hand pocket came gently into contact, just as Valentine left off speaking. "Let's have another toast," cried Mat, quite briskly, the instant the last word was out of his guest's mouth. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... would have stood out like an elephant. Even before release, the partially inflated gas bags are almost a hundred feet tall. The crowd at the football game would certainly have seen such a monstrous shape above the glare of the floodlights, for the plastic balloons gleam brightly ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the beginning of life, take childhood, for that is where the human material is least protected, most plastic, and where most injury to-day is done. In the way of general suggestion, I would say, exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such as that of all industry and most schools, up to the age of eighteen. After excluding them, what shall we do with them? Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... says Henry James, "but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literateness, wiped out." One of our latter day philosophers tells us that "happiness is a matter of habit; and you had better gather it fresh every day or you will never ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... an active agent in the holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... others to a state of misery almost of distraction, which awakens the most poignant sympathy for his situation. Deserted, as he imagines, by the object of his dearest affections, Rosalie Summers, who is supposed to have eloped with a villain of high rank of the name of Plastic, he goes to London and finds his brother in the last stage of ruin and despair by gambling, and stops his hand just at the moment he is attempting suicide. In the end he reforms the brother, discovers his Rosalie, and finds that she is innocent and faithful; and by a series ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... features of the nervous system. One such characteristic is the plasticity of the nervous substance. If I bend a piece of paper and crease it, the crease will remain even after the paper is straightened out again. The paper is plastic, and plasticity means simply that the substance offers some resistance to adopting a new form, but that when the new form is once impressed upon the substance it is retained. Some effort is required to overcome the plasticity of the paper and to form the crease, but when it is ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal Nature had imparted to him as its noblest gift, which helped Juan ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... endoscopic evisceration with sliding punch forceps. Anterior commissure twice afterward cleared of cicatricial tissue as in the other case shown in Fig. 15. Ultimate result shown in Fig. 8. 5, Same patient as Fig. 1; sketch made two years after decannulation and plastic. 6, Same patient as Fig. 2; sketch made four years after decannulation and plastic. 7, Same patient as Fig. 3; sketch made three years after decannulation and plastic. 8, Same patient as Fig. 4; sketch made one year ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... means are formed, organised, and established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does little to add to or aid in its further ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... civilization, it gets information by literature. The latter operation, however, affects only the literary classes, not the masses, and society never consciously sets about the task of making mores. In the early stages mores are elastic and plastic; later they become rigid and fixed. They seem to grow up, gain strength, become corrupt, decline, and die, as if they were organisms. The phases seem to follow each other by an inherent necessity, and as if independent ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... there, but in the holy calm of the Temple courts it unfolded unstained. A Christian home should breathe the same atmosphere as surrounded Joash, and it, too, should be a temple, where holy peace rules, and where the first impressions printed on plastic little minds are of God and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... clear. From biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population, will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed; and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications needful for complete social life. I think that whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... that unloosed this horror upon the world. One of the grim ironies of this war is that the Hohenzollerns and the junkers are so constituted mentally that they never will be haunted with awful visions like those that visited the more plastic conscience of Charles IX after St. Bartholomew; but at least it will be some compensation to picture them rending the air with lamentations over their own downfall and hurling curses ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... rub in the butter. Mix with water to plastic dough. Divide dough into two cakes, 1 inch in thickness. Cover one evenly with currants, lay the other on top, and roll out to the thickness of one-third of an inch. Cut into sections, and bake in a hot oven for ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel
... abysm-born vapours of doubt; at another, radiant with the sun-fires of faith made perfect by fruition; it can amaze no considerative fraction of humanity, that the explorer of the indefinite, the searcher into the not-to-be-defined, should, at dreary intervals, invent dim, plastic riddles of his own identity, and hesitate at the awful shrine of that dread interrogatory alternative—reality, or dream? This deeply pondering, let the eager beginner in the at once linear and circumferent course of philosophico-metaphysical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... elected in November, 1868, proved no less plastic in the hands of the Boss, who again corrupted the tax levies. After allowing every just item the committee coolly added six millions,[1226] an amount subsequently reduced to three.[1227] This iniquity was immediately denounced and exposed through pamphlets, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... animal paroxysm, who should take it into his head to attach any importance to the negation of his birth? A curse upon the folly of our nurses and teachers, who fill our imaginations with frightful tales, and impress fearful images of punishment upon the plastic brain of childhood, so that involuntary shudders shake the limbs of the man with icy fear, arrest his boldest resolutions, and chain his awakening reason in the fetters of superstitious darkness. Murder! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... endeavoured to establish be disputed or not, the absolute correspondence between the Moral and the Physical is, at any rate, the essential ground of the Plastic arts; which could not else exist, since through Form alone they have to convey, not only thought and emotion, but distinct and permanent character. For our own part, we cannot but consider their success in this ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive from the stoker a supply of 'energy-producing food'; in other words, he ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of breathing purified, sterilized, filtered air, thirty years of drinking distilled water and swallowing synthetic food tablets had changed us. The only things we weren't allergic to were the metal and plastic and synthetics of our ship, this ship. We're allergic to Earth. That's funny, ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... absorbed, and, by the decomposing action of the air, the alkaline silicate is gradually rendered soluble, and at length entirely washed away, leaving a substance which, when mixed with water, becomes plastic, and has all the characters of common clay. The nature of this change will be best seen by the following analysis of the clay produced during this composition, which is employed in the manufacture of porcelain under the name of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... acknowledge the fascination of the romantic school, and the works of Herold (1791-1833) show how powerfully the new leaven had acted. But Weber was not the only foreigner at this time who helped to shape the destiny of French music. The spell of Rossini was too potent for the plastic Gauls to resist, and to his influence may be traced the most salient features of the school of opera comique which is best represented by Auber. Herold, though divided between the camps of Germany and Italy, had individuality enough to write music which ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... searchlight were playing on his magnificent bigness. His deep black eyes, set in a face whose strength had been emphasized by its exposure to sun and wind, gleamed joyous with his mood. His mouth, large, expressive, the plastic mouth of the orator, was curving into a smile as he gave heed to the speech of the prelate beside him. Once he shook his head as the great man, oblivious of their coming before a crowd of intent watchers, continued the words he had been saying on ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... however great his plastic skill, can hope to mould and shape a work of art to suit his fancy, unless the stuff on which he works be first prepared and made ready to obey the craftsman's will. Nor certainly where the raw material consists of men, will you succeed, unless, under God's ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes—they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of oxygen to more than sixteen pounds of hydrogen and carbon. Now as oxygen is the grand supporter of animal heat, the consumption of so large a quantity of it, aids in producing the extraordinary heat which always accompanies comb-building, and which is necessary to keep the wax in the soft and plastic state requisite to enable the bees to mould it into such exquisitely delicate and beautiful shapes! Who can fail to admire the wisdom of the Creator in ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... to his brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now—what if all these processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not the props, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... erratic character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined as they are with a high degree of refinement and delicacy, his compositions owe much of their peculiar charm. The absence of scorn distinguishes the fourth "Scherzo," Op. 54, from the other three; but, like ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... burst of laughter, he set very adroitly to the mimicry of beasts and birds upon his frets. Never have I seen a face so consummately the action's. His every fibre answered to the call; his eyebrows twitched like an orator's; his very nose was plastic. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... tone brought back thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English. She divined from this he had been out of the country—possibly had returned to New York on a British ship. How well she knew his plastic intelligence! It was so characteristic and easy for him—this little affectation.... She was quite cold to him. Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces of ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... possible, too, that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind a fugitive, without the other's knowledge; Burke, for example, before ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... could willingly have pursued the argument in relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given proving how, in Science, an advance of one division presently ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... strength and safe foundation and stability. On this ground, man's biological make-up has a legitimate sphere of growth and expansion shared by no other type of being. We pass into every new moment of time with a preparedness shown in adaptive and constructive activity as well as structure, most plastic and far-reaching in the greatest feat of man, that of imagination. Imagination is not a mere duplication of reality in consciousness and subjectivity; it is a substitute in a way, but actually an amplification, and often a real addition to what we might otherwise call the "crude world," ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... claped the towel across his mouth and nose. The others had secured him, and the more he roared and kicked the more they drenched him with chloroform. Walker was very nice about it, and made the most handsome apologies. He offered to do a plastic on the spot, and make as good an ear as he could, but M'Namara had had enough of it. As to the patient, we found him sleeping placidly under the table, with the ends of the blanket screening him on both sides. Walker sent M'Namara round his ear next day in a jar of methylated ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher. Into this circle of "shining ones" Levinsohn was introduced, and each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote himself to improving the educational system of his people and began to plan his work ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... finger-nail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple, exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was all haole—a ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of some ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the river I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was a great ill-looking thing, and my second little better, but as I progressed ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... aware of what is being done for the improvement of badly-formed noses, crooked mouths, and such defects, by what its practitioners call 'plastic surgery,' or 'facial' or 'feature surgery.' From the 'beauty shops,' then, as the newspapers call them, he got the idea of changing his nose by cutting and folding back the skin, surgically eliminating the hump, and rearranging the skin over the altered bridge so as to produce perfect straightness ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... of his botanical studies from 1768 to 1793, and being puzzled, as systematic botanists are, by the variations of the more plastic species of plants, led to deny the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... certainly had all the appearance of a trapped criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat. Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work. Crepitude, K.C., Oxford's counsel, was in less joyous mood. Priam was Crepitude's own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... saffron standard gay and spears upheld Flashing through thickets green. These kept not line, For Alp was still recounting battles old, Aodh of wizards sang, and Ir of love; While bald-pate Conan, sharpening from his eye The sneering light, shot from his plastic mouth Shrill taunt and biting gibe. The younger sort Eyed the dense copse and launched full many a shaft Through it at flying beast. From ledge to ledge Clomb Angus, keen of sight, with hand o'er brow, Forth gazing on some far blue ridge of war With nostril wide outblown, and snorting ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... Enterprises Incorporated and bring this letter and suitable identifications?" Kennon chuckled. Would he? There was no question about it. The address, 200 Central Avenue, was only a few blocks away. In fact, he could see the building from his window, a tall functional block of durilium and plastic, soaring above the others on the street, the sunlight gleaming off its clean square lines. He eyed it curiously, wondering what ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hardly responsible, they considered, and her last incredible assertion had gone far to nullify the effect of her previous testimony. She was overcome by the nervous shock, or had told less than she knew and was still concealing somewhat, or was so credulous and plastic and fanciful as to be hardly worthy of belief. She was dismissed earlier than she had dared to hope: and with this deterioration of the testimony of the witness who was nearest the time and place of the disaster, the jury presently went to work to evolve out of so slender a thread of fact ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Charles Dickens was reporter on the staff of a newspaper; he had written a book which, although successful, had created no very intense excitement; he was moreover a young man, and consequently plastic, and fifteen pounds a month would be a small fortune to him; so at least argued the artist and his friends. How little they understood the resolute, self-reliant character of this unknown writer! The result was altogether ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... no doubt that this encyclopaedic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first "Faust." Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... of his identity, that's all I wish to know," said the Chief. "I don't want to be trapped by a Marscorp trick with plastic surgery. But if this man is Dark Kensington, it's the best fortune the Phoenix has met with in ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mystic sign of him deep-lettered in the hearthstone of a home; I heard it speaking bravely from the weak lips of a friend; it is carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. No, I do not doubt the immortalities of the soul; in this community, which I have come to love so much, dwells more than one of John North's immortalities—and will continue to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because John ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... a look at the landscape. I had scarcely gone a few steps when a wondrous sight met my astonished eyes: before me was the Nile, old Hapi, to give it its ancient Egyptian name, the inexhaustible Father of Waters. Through one of those involuntary plastic impressions which act upon the imagination, the Nile called up to my mind the colossal marble god in one of the lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... in her lap and pondered deeply the things he had told her. Now and again she gazed into the bearded face, calm, masklike in its repose of unconsciousness, as if to penetrate behind the mask and read the real nature of him. She realized with a feeling almost of fear, that here was no weakling—no plastic irresolute—whose will could be dominated by the will of a stronger; but a man, virile, indomitable; a man of iron will who, though he scorned to stoop to defend his position, was unashamed to vindicate it. A man whose words carried conviction, and whose eyes ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... at first sight to be reversed; for Mr. Browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. Here, however, the poet in him comes into play. He leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. In this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. But this only means that, in his opinion, the relation of music ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... great point—living together. And I do not mean living together when people are mature or old but when young—when minds, sympathies, etc., are plastic and pliable. As long as the young Germans are kept home—never sent abroad unless as spies in some ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... smaller apartment, separated from the former room by a corridor, that could be closed, and by a heavy curtain. Here a table, at which the five girls might easily have found room, was placed in a favorable light for Ulrich. He was to draw from plastic models, and there was no lack of these in the Alcazar, for here rose a high, three-story wing, to which when wearied by the intrigues of statecraft and the restraints of court etiquette, King Philip gladly retired, yielding himself to the only genial impulse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... (not obligatory). (1) Language (vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, semasiology). Handwriting. (2) Arts: A. Plastic arts (conditions of production, conceptions, methods, works). B. Arts of expression, music, dance, literature. (3) Sciences (conditions of production, methods, results). (4) Philosophy and Morals (conceptions, precepts, actual practice). (5) ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... played. Father Hudson resumes the plastic, immobile, and almost invisible attitude which he occupied at the opening of the play. The Choruses file silently out, one on each side of ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... complains of their painting Chimaeras {94} (by the vulgar unaptly called grotesque) saying that men who were born truly to study and emulate Nature did nothing but make monsters against Nature, which Horace so laughed at. {95} The art plastic was moulding in clay, or potter's earth anciently. This is the parent of statuary, sculpture, graving, and picture; cutting in brass and marble, all serve under her. Socrates taught Parrhasius and Clito (two noble ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... in his mellow bass. "How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent—or it may be unconsciously shrank from representing—the mere dramatic moment, the mere ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word 'Plastic,' and all of those in stone, under the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has been proved, that the enemy ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense, homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... circle of Boston transcendentalists, who hoped in a few years to transform our selfish, competitive civilization into a Paradise where all the altruistic virtues might make co-operation possible. But alas! the material at hand was not sufficiently plastic for that higher ideal. In due time the community dissolved and the members returned to their ancestral spheres. Margaret Fuller, who was a frequent visitor there, betook herself to matrimony in sunny Italy, William Henry ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... that followed Marcia's stroke of independence (for which he was not without a secret admiration at times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards and ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this, certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for such a result, that he was successful ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... hallway that led to Colonel Mannheim's suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sometimes intensely miserable, sometimes supremely happy, sometimes pensively sad, but always feeling a special intensity of existence: that elation common to artists, poets, and lovers, to men haunted by a great passion, by a noble thought or a new vision of plastic beauty. ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Glazzard had returned to his old amusement of modelling in clay. He drew and painted, played and composed, at intervals; but plastic art seemed to have the strongest hold upon him. Through April he was busy with a head for which he had made many studies—a head of Judas; in Italy he had tried to paint the same subject, but ineffectually. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... tresses and the drapery were most skillfully arranged to look like the work of the chisel. It is significant of the measure of Miss Anderson's art, that in her animated moments subsequently she should not have excelled the plastic grace of this first picture. At the same time, to her credit it must be said, that she never fell much below it. Her movements on the stage, her management of her drapery, her attitudes were full of classic beauty. Actresses there have been who have given us much more ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... to the readers in his bag. The cards were plastic, and should be good for a week or so of use before they showed wear. During that time, by playing it carefully, he should have his stake. Then, if the gaming tables here were as crudely run as an oldtimer he'd known on Earth had said, he ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... was too spiritual and too volatile. Painting, an art which one could hold fast with one's eyes, and follow step by step with the external senses, seemed more favorable for such an end: the English and French had already theorized about plastic art; and, by a comparison drawn from this, it was thought that poetry might be grounded. The former presented images to the eye, the latter to the imagination: poetical images, therefore, were the first thing which ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... invented before anybody can be bored with it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret Nature.' An internal necessity, yes—except in the case of the Bore Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's anything but secret sense of ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... gravitation to retain them, then the final catastrophe must have been as swift as it was inevitable. Accepting Darwin's hypothesis, that the moon was separated from the earth by tidal action while both were yet plastic or nebulous, we may reasonably conclude that it began its career with a good supply of both water and air, but did not possess sufficient mass to hold them permanently. Yet it may have retained them long enough for life to develop ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss |
