"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Certainly it is difficult to fancy how a modest, rational, practical young person like Charlotte can have thought of so airy a feat of archery into the blue! Charlotte herself never disavowed it, that I heard of; and to Colonel Grahame the Ex-Jacobite, hunting about among potential Queens of England, for behoof of Bute and of a certain Young King and King's Mother, the Letter did seem abundantly unquestionable and adorable. Perhaps authentic, after all;—and certainly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... teachings of Hinduism, this doctrine also has been considerably distorted in the process of appropriation; so that "faith" in the worship of Vishnu's incarnations, to-day, is more potential as an act than is "faith" in Christianity. For, in Hinduism, it matters not on what god or ritual the Bhakthan places his faith, it has power to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... not realize that your true-born libertine never knows it. Whatever Folly's life may have been, and he thought he had no illusions on that score, he seized upon her question as proving that she still held the potential bloom of youth and a measure ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... 1880, the stoker of the yacht Livadia, which was lying in the Thames, near London, was ordered to adjust one of the Jablochkoff candles. He accidently touched the terminals of the lamp, and instantly fell down dead. The difference of potential at the lamp terminals was only fifty volts, but it was admitted at the time that the wires must have been in contact with the iron plate upon which the stoker stood, and that alternating currents of higher ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... Republican as a Democrat. That woman has not been convinced by the final Republican showing on ratification and she will not be convinced until the 36th State has ratified. This ratification is the only solution of the situation that can make actual what is so far a merely potential claim of the Republican party on the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... lull of the flowing river, as it fell over a little cascade, was acting as a potential lullaby to the wayfarer at the foot of the tree. His figure was grotesque, but at the distance the girls were viewing him from it was not possible to discern more than a figure—it might be that of almost any sort of a man, ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected 'potential' energy, pre- existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to be true, because, altho it extends ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That old fixity was of necessity and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... many joys and sorrows not as she has become, but as she was, ay, and is to him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity? There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not seen, potential and crude, again and again in the best and noblest of young men whom we have met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury, effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure accompaniment of a long peace, which war may burn up ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... men. A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things, something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd suffer in potential profits. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... family system that contemporary writers deplore. In Seeley's striking phrase: 'The human harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race. In the terrible words of Swift, facing his own madness, the Roman Empire might have cried: 'I shall die like ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... brilliant weft of swift desire—heavy, perfumed, Oriental—interwoven with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... here grown to, or experienced, or accomplished, the sharply exact reader should seem to detect the requirement of a longer interval than the almanacs could actually give, I meant to have asked that it should be remembered, that we story-tellers write chiefly in the Potential Mood, and that tenses do not very essentially signify. It will all have had opportunity to be true in eighteen-seventy-five, if it have not had in eighteen-seventy-three. Well enough, indeed, if the prophecies be justified as speedily as ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... organically correlated with a thought about the universe in its totality, or in its deepest and essential character. Such thought, the activity and its results, is philosophy. Hence he who lives is, ipso facto, a philosopher. He is not only a potential philosopher, but a partial philosopher. He has already begun to be a philosopher. Between the fitful or prudential thinking of some little man of affairs, and the sustained thought of the devoted lover of truth, there ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... excitement among scientific men, who immediately began active investigations of certain electrical phenomena. Volta showed that all metals could be arranged in a series so that each one would indicate a positive electric potential when in contact with any metal following it in the series. He constructed a pile of metal disks consisting of zinc and copper alternated and separated by wet cloths. At first he believed that mere contact was sufficient, but when, later, it was shown ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... those things which are made of them, are informed by a created power.[2] The matter of which they consist was created; the informing power in these stars which go round about them was created. The ray and the motion of the holy lights draw out from its potential elements[3] the soul of every brute and of the plants; but the Supreme Benignity inspires your life without intermediary, and enamors it of Itself so that ever after it desires It. And hence[4] thou canst argue further your resurrection, if thou refleetest bow the human flesh was made ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... our conduct as "the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in full health and vigour with all their faculties perfect;" upon which Mr. Sidgwick remarks[6] with justice: "Such a reduction of the notion of 'well-being' to 'being' (actual and potential) would be a most important contribution from the doctrine of Evolution to ethical science. But it at least conflicts in a very startling manner with those ordinary notions of progress and development" in which "it is always implied that certain forms of life are qualitatively superior ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Western friendships made me more tolerant of the gun than some others were. Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from any conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of gunpackers: the authorized and the others. I concluded that there would be less trouble, less "lost motion"—that was a phrase learned, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... these good fellows somehow," he said briefly, and room was made. Chester noticed with surprise that each man was armed, not only with a stave, but with a revolver. The French police do not stand on ceremony even with potential criminals. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of China among the nations of the world is quite peculiar, because in population and potential strength China is the greatest nation in the world, while in actual strength at the moment it is one of the least. The international problems raised by this situation have been brought into the forefront of world-politics by the ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... one business he will do equally badly or worse in another. There is nothing beyond a vague, floating reputation or public opinion to enable a new Minister to know his subordinates. The Germans have tabulated the experiences and deficiencies of our leaders, active and potential, in peace and war—we have not! Every British General of any note is analysed, characterised and turned inside out in the bureau records of the great German General Staff in Berlin. We only attempt anything of that sort ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... insinuate these things during the great War for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent to heights undreamed of—is amazing now: what will it be ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... understand clearly what we mean by a subtle body. It is nothing but a minute germ of a living substance. It contains the invisible particles of matter which are held together by vital force, and it also possesses mind or thought-force in a potential state, just as the seed of a plant contains in it the life force and the power of growth. According to Vedanta, the subtle body consists of Antahkaranam, that is, the internal organ or the mind ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... it unquestionably is—affords a curious illustration of the influence which mathematical power has on the minds of men. Every one knows that Professor Tait has potential mathematical energy competent to dispose, in a very short time, of all the difficulties involved in his theory; therefore few seem to inquire whether this potential energy has ever been called into action. It is singular, too, that other mathematicians ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... And Charles had been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek, certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's Library was little but a sinecure for Dury, ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... his Torah. In fact it can be shown that throughout the whole of the older period the Torah was no finished legislative code, but consisted entirely of the oral decisions and instructions of the priests, as a whole it was potential only; what actually existed were the individual sentences given by the priesthood as they were asked for. Thus Moses was not regarded as the promulgator once for all of a national constitution, but rather as the first to call into activity the actual sense for law and justice, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent, in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... of a State differs with the texture of it. A democratic State will decline from a lowering of its potential, that is of its ever-ready energy to act in a crisis, to correct and to control its servants in common times, to watch them narrowly and suspect them at all times. A despotic State will decline when the despot is not in point of fact the true ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... moves means operating along lines of least resistance, and any plan or method that will help to do away with unnecessary moves and make the necessary moves more potential will be received with welcome, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... also they have their Lafayettes, Liancourts, Lameths; above all, their D'Orleans, now cut forever from his Court-moorings, and musing drowsily of high and highest sea-prizes (for is not he too a son of Henri Quatre, and partial potential Heir-Apparent?)—on his voyage towards Chaos. From the Clergy again, so numerous are the Cures, actual deserters have run over: two small parties; in the second party Cure Gregoire. Nay there is talk of a whole Hundred and Forty-nine of them about ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That morality is the essence of things, that wrong must prove its weakness, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... second theory he makes equivalent to Pantheism. "The precipitation of vapor," he says, "into cloud, aids us in forming a symbolic conception of a self-evolved universe;" but, he adds, "really to conceive self-creation, is to conceive potential existence passing into actual existence by some inherent necessity, which we cannot do." (p. 32). The Theistic theory, he says, is equally untenable. "Whoever agrees that the atheistic hypothesis is untenable because it involves ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... and yet the words came out as smoothly as I have written them, as if to show me that I had been a potential scoundrel ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... and of the Boundless Power—the Parabrahman (That Which transcends Brahma), Mula-Prakriti (Root-Nature), and Supreme Ishvara, or the Unmanifested Eternal Logos, of the Vedantic Philosophers. The next stage is the potential unmanifested type of the Trinity, the Three in One and One in Three, the Potentialities of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva, the Preservative, Emanative, and Regenerative Powers—the Supreme Logos, Universal Ideation and Potential Wisdom, called by Simon the Incorruptible ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... indifference to this danger. Boys appear at these dinners in the great houses, because of their uniforms, who would never have been permitted even to come to the front door in other days, for all are potential heroes. Every woman carries her knitting, and it is seldom that you hear a croaker even among the most luxurious class. Well, the dinner is over by half past ten, and I go home to an hour and a half's work, which has been sent from the office, and fall at last into a more or ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... self-extending. And, dreadfully destitute as this country is, the Priesthood of the People can command the means of educating that People, which nobody without their cooeperation can accomplish. Let the Catholic Bishops unite in an earnest and potential call for teachers, and they can summon thousands and tens of thousands of capable and qualified persons from convents, from seminaries, from cloisters, from drawing-rooms, even from foreign lands if need ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... prosperity there had been electric lights and a one-car street tramway, a bank, and a Building and Loan Association attesting its presence in rows of ornate cottages on the second mesa—alluring bait thrown out to catch the potential ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... naively asking why Belgium did not give the same confidence to Germany which she gave to England. The German mind knows quite well, that in building strategic railways to the Belgian frontier she betrayed the line of direction which the potential energy was intended to take, when the burst came. Unofficially Germany has long since proclaimed her intention to invade Belgium; ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... And of potential drama, of the raw material of it, as the days passed, she found increasingly generous store at Brockhurst. It invaded and held her imagination, as the initial conception of his poem will that of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... matters which Hamilton is not discussing; but he hardly ever attempts to trace the history of Hamilton's own view, or the train of thought by which it suggested itself to his mind. And the result of this is, that Mr. Mill's interpretations are generally in the potential mood. He wastes a good deal of conjecture in discovering what Hamilton might have meant, when a little attention in the right quarter would have shown what he ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... afraid of being dull, or of boring her, but he was afraid of wakening against him the wary watchfulness of that side of her nature which he called Margaret Donne, as distinguished from Cordova, of the 'English-girl' side, of the potential old maid that is dormant in every young northern woman until the day she marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such extremes of self-mortification as a converted ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... a superior spotter. He was also a potential danger; the other kids played it as a game and didn't really realize what they were doing. This one knew precisely what he was doing, knew that it was wrong, and had the lucidity of speech to explain in full detail. It was a good idea to keep ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... without waste, as the production of his wells bears to the total production of such common source, is not repugnant to the due process clause.[362] But whether a system of proration based on hourly potential is as fair as one based upon estimated recoverable reserves or some other combination of factors is a question for administrative and not judicial judgment. In a domain of knowledge still shifting and growing, and in a field where judgment is necessarily beset by the necessity ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... He had not thought to defy the Pack and get off lightly; but he had looked for no such overt effort at disciplining him so long as he kept out of the way and suspended his criminal activities. An unwilling recruit is a potential traitor in the camp; and retired competition isn't to be feared. So it seemed that Wertheimer hadn't believed his protestations, or else Bannon had rejected the report which must have been made him by the girl. In either case, the Pack had not waited for the Lone Wolf to ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... identify and assess the nature and scope of terrorist threats to the homeland; (B) detect and identify threats of terrorism against the United States; and (C) understand such threats in light of actual and potential vulnerabilities of the homeland. (2) To carry out comprehensive assessments of the vulnerabilities of the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States, including the performance of risk assessments to determine the risks posed ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
... on their silent but potential course," said the Earl, looking around him, "without a voice which speaks to our ear, but not without influences which affect, at every change, the indwellers of this vile, earthly planet. This, if astrologers fable not, is the very ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... undeserved contempt, and much ill feeling rose against them among the clergy, but the clergy were somewhat prejudiced in their judgment. The order of St. Dominic, which a century before gloried in the approbation of the pope, and in the enjoyment of his potential bulls, now winced under gloomy and foreboding frowns. The sovereign Pontiff Honorius III. gratefully embraced the service of these friars, and confirmed their order with important privileges. His successor, Gregory IX., ratified these favors to gain their useful aid in propping ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... that, when incarnated, this spirit, this divine spark, may be apparently quenched, if it is not guarded, and if the life the man leads is unfavorable to its expansion, as it generally is; but, on the other hand, our conviction is that human beings can develop their potential spiritual powers; that, if they do, no phenomenon will be impossible for their liberated wills, and that they will perform what, in the eyes of the uninitiated, will be much more wondrous than the materialized ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... rhetorical question, "What has Home Rule meant to us?" some graceless Coalitionist promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... marvellous accuracy the exact amount of force which each combatant would be able to put on to the field, and summed up the appalling mass of potential destruction that was ready to burst upon the world at a moment's notice. He showed the position of Italy, and proved to demonstration that if the loan were not immediately granted, it would be necessary either for Britain to seize her fleet, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... a combination of fire, strength, and action. These attributes seemed to cling about him. There was something vital and compelling in his presence. Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit. In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired. The life in him was marvelously significant. The dust, the dirt, the sweat, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... addressed myself to the Foreign Minister's letter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it seemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his desk, ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... refugee. She was naturally somewhat broken in spirit on first entering our establishment, but as the days went by she became happier, and so enterprising and ingratiating that we hastened to smother in its infancy a shameful doubt as to whether or not we had introduced into our sympathetic bosoms a potential viper. Morning, noon and night there was continuous scrubbing, polishing and beeswaxing; at all moments one was meeting a pink and breathless Victorine, and the house echoed to an interminable stream of information in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... find a fairly large brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way up from a ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... the form and semblance of a human being. All children have the same origin, the same development and the same pattern, yet no two are alike. Each has a distinct and different equipment from any of the others. The size of the body, real and potential; the size and fineness of the brain; the delicacy and sensitiveness of the nervous system; the innate instincts upon which conduct mainly rests; the emotions which control action and which flow from the structure—in ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... accumulates a little store of potential energy, and it proceeds to expend this, like an explosive, by acting on its environment. It does so in a very characteristic self-preservative fashion, so that it burns without being consumed and explodes without being blown to bits. It is characteristic of the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... I immediately performed my promise. I had always intended that not only the young lady, but her father, should know what we thought of Patrick, and what he might have been, if he had lived. I wrote to that potential personage, telling him of all the facts of the case, except the poverty, which might be omitted as essentially a slight and temporary circumstance. I reported of his life of industry and simple self-denial,—of his prospects, his friendships, his sweet and gay decline and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... management, it is important to keep to certain simple rules, of which these are the chief:—(1) Never discharge below a potential difference of 1.85 (or in rapid discharge, 1.8) volt. (2) Never leave the cells discharged, if it be avoidable. (3) Give the cells a special full charging once a month. (4) Make a periodic examination ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... radically, differed in the quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... seeking a monster of terrible potential, yet so innocuous looking that he'd not stand out. I couldn't produce him, couldn't say where in the world he was. Nevertheless he was the basis, the motivation second only to mine. I took the long, hard way—three years—making him ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... northern Dobrudja. It was in this latter section that the Teutons now centered their activities. The Russo-Rumanians still remained in Dobrudja, on the south side of the Danube. So long as they had a footing here they remained a potential threat to the Teutons, which might awaken into active danger at the first favorable opportunity. To be ousted from this northern tip of Dobrudja would be even more serious to the Russo-Rumanians than the loss of Wallachia. From this point they might, at some ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Alternating Currents.—Sparking distance of arc formed by a potential difference ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... Surrounded and served by their retainers, agents, vassal tenants and slaves, they lived in princely and licentious style, knowing no law in most matters except their unrestrained will. They beheld themselves as ingenious and memorable founders of a potential landed aristocracy whose possessions were more extended than that of Europe. Wilderness much of it still was, but obviously the time was coming when the population would be fairly abundant. The laws of entail and primogeniture, then in full force, would operate to ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... construction of lines for which there was no economic justification whatever. Trusting shareholders were induced to invest on the unfortunately wrong assumption that the government had assured itself of the need {171} and the potential profit of the line before endorsing it by a subsidy.[1] In the western provinces a parallel policy of aiding local lines was adopted in 1884, except that land instead of cash was offered, ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... Among the normal phenomena of a woman's life is the recurring cycle of potential motherhood. Every three or four weeks a new ovum or egg matures in the ovary and undergoes certain chemical changes, which send into the blood a substance called a hormone. This hormone is a messenger, stimulating the mucous membrane of the womb ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... smiled condescendingly, as befitted the mother of a potential Commissioneress, and the shooting began; all the world standing in a semicircle as the ladies came out ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... true to his origin in the sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... situation of Japan, the feeling in Japan is that of the threatening danger of isolation. Germany is gone; Russia is gone. While those facts simplify matters for Japan somewhat, there is also the belief that in taking away potential allies, they have weakened Japan in the general game of balance and counter-balance of power. Particularly does the removal of imperialistic Russia relieve the threat on India which was such a factor in the willingness of Great Britain to ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... things. The brain allows us not only to remember, but, which is quite as important, to forget and neglect; it is an organ of oblivion. By neglecting most of the things we see and hear, we can focus just on those which are important for action; we can cease to be potential artists and become efficient practical human beings; but it is only by limiting our view, by a great renunciation as to the things we see and feel. The artist does just the reverse. He renounces doing in order to practise seeing. He is by nature what Professor Bergson ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... such powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction. All the rest she has stored in his mind as a sort of reserve, to be drawn upon at need. It is only in this primitive condition that we find the equilibrium between desire and power, and then alone man is not unhappy. As soon as his potential powers of mind begin to function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes, and precedes all the rest. It is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us, whether for ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... (also an idiot!!!)" upon a banner, and the party of each is busy about its placard and banner. What is true at such minor and momentary elections must be much more true in a great and constant election of rulers. The House of Commons lives in a state of perpetual potential choice; at any moment it can choose a ruler and dismiss a ruler. And therefore party is inherent in it, is bone of its bone, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... smouldering-eyed woman of the bathing-beach. She lifted her heavy lids and gave Louise a dull glance, which she let a sudden recognition burn through for a moment and then quenched. But in that moment the two women sealed a dislike that had been merely potential before. Their look said for each that the other was by nature, tradition, and aspiration whatever was most detestable ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... to throw something into the empty cradle, upon which his wife, his mother, and his wife's mother set up loud lamentations, exclaiming, "Oh, if he had been there, he had been killed!" alluding to a potential son. The man was so much shocked at such an exhibition of folly that he left the country in search of three greater noodles. Among other adventures, he goes into a house and plays tricks on some people there, telling them his name ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... a better one is sure to come. We poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an encumbrance, upon him: he is better ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... ever when he comes out of the trenches again. The old straw in the barns and the billets is sure to be infected with lice, and it is very difficult to sterilize the men's blankets. Consequently a persistent continuous fight against this variety of vermin must be kept up, for lice are not only a potential source of danger in transmitting typhus fever and relapsing fever, but they are a great source of irritation to the men and responsible for ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... mention this merely as a criticism on other people's impressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to be understood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the facts I do not profess to ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... by giving the value of one unknown quantity in terms of the other. A child, for instance, is told that "potent" means "efficacious," that "power" means "ability," that "potion" means a "physical draught," that "potential" means "existing in possibility, not in act." These are definitions taken at random from a book in common use in our public schools. The definitions possibly are good enough for the purpose for which they were designed. I am ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... numbers of potential bad men who died mute and inglorious after a life spent at a desk or a plow. They might have been bad if matters had shaped right for that. Each war brings out its own heroes from unsuspected places; each sudden emergency ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... apt to regard this quality in our existence as a somewhat superhuman term, an abstraction beyond the realm of common life, or at most an asset within the reach of a favored few; whereas it is a common attribute playing a potential part in our every-day activities. In its very nature opportunity is democratic and goes, like a wayfarer, knocking at the ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... world may become for us the most magnificent spectacle of all. To imaginative feeling, every landscape is a potential painting, every life-story a romance, history a drama, every man or woman a statue or portrait. Beauty is everywhere, where we who are perhaps not artists but only art lovers can find it; we cannot embody it in enduring form or throw over it the glamour of sensuous ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... if the grand harmony of the Originating Spirit within itself is duly regarded, then the individual mind affords a fresh center from which the Spirit contemplates itself in what I have ventured to call its Artistic Originality—a boundless potential of Creativeness, yet always regulated by its own ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... States, by the most potential voice of Law, says to the whole body of its laboring population, Ye are not men and shall not be; ye are chattels—it is absurd to speak about kind treatment—about happiness. It is about cattle that they are talking! Our vast body of ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... once more to what was doubtless the most terrific burden placed upon the colonial woman—the incessant bearing of offspring. In those days large families were not a liability, but a positive asset. With a vast wilderness teeming with potential wealth, waiting only for a supply of workers, the only economic pressure on the birth rate was the pressure to make it larger to meet the demand for laborers. Every child born in the colonies was assured, through moderate industry, of the comforts of life, and, through patience ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conquests, and settlements of the Northmen in the north of Europe and the northern Atlantic were so detached from the knowledge of the south and came to a pause so early in time that notwithstanding their potential value they contributed practically nothing to the general geographical knowledge of Europe. Nor did Christian, Jewish, or Arabic accounts of Eastern lands written by travellers of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to himself than he says, "I will ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... point of time touched by the earliest ray of historic knowledge, the eye of the student of human annals sees, occupying the Spanish peninsula, a race of men called Iberians. These old Iberians were not a tribe or clan, but a people, numerous and potential, with a fully developed and virile language, skilled in arms and the working of precious metals, and industriously commercial. This much can be clearly inferred from the extent of their territory and the remnant of them, with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... ask that of some unfortunate sleuth with a family. My nearest relative is a third cousin who lives in Chicago but has nevertheless shown no criminal tendency to date. I'm remarkably well-protected from any potential struggle between duty and inclination." He smiled, and added apologetically, "Detective ethics is a pretty complicated subject to discuss, and I'm afraid it isn't getting on with the problem of who stole a notebook from ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... is today the greatest potential creator and transactor of business in the world. But wide as its use is, it still lies idle, an undeveloped possibility, in many a business house where it might be playing ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence, or a slide toward chaos. If current trends continue, the potential consequences are severe. Because of the role and responsibility of the United States in Iraq, and the commitments our government has made, the United States has special obligations. Our country must address as ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... colored, looked down, and then looked up again. Miss Ravenscroft was regarding her with kindly eyes. Hers was a sort of veiled face; she seldom gave way to her feelings. Part of her power lay in her potential attitudes, in the possibilities which she seldom, except on very rare occasions, exhibited to their fullest extent. Alice felt that she had only approached the extreme edge of Miss Ravenscroft's nature. Miss Ravenscroft was silent for a minute; ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... range of it after having discovered that no adult Occidental can perfectly master the language. East and West the fundamental parts of human nature—the emotional bases of it—are much the same: the mental difference between a Japanese and a European child is mainly potential. But with growth the difference rapidly develops and widens, till it becomes, in adult life, inexpressible. The whole of the Japanese mental superstructure evolves into forms having nothing in common with Western psychological development: the expression of thought becomes regulated, and the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... paragraphs of this essay to express again the view which this critic seeks to qualify, but which we still think in the main sound, we are at the same time very glad to be able in this way to invite attention to the undoubted fact that the distinction between the actual and the potential was recognised by the schoolmen as of a very deep significance. We believe further that the real secret of the failure of mediaevalism to extend its Knowledge of Nature was not so much a preference for deductive over inductive ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... the bard and ceased; his work was done: Abroad the tempest burst. 'Twas not his songs Alone that raised it! Memories which they waked, Memories of childhood, fainter year by year, Tripled his might. Meantime a Saxon priest Potential there, bent low, with eye-brow arched, O'er Eardulf's ear, Eardulf old warrior famed, And whispered long, and as he whispered glanced Oft at Birinus. Keen of eye the King, The action noting well, the ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the great event. Goodies by the thousand were stamped out to hawk to the faithful: Badges, banners, bumper stickers, wallet cards, purse-sized pix of Sowles, star-and-cross medallions and lapel pins.... The potential proceeds of the Rally alone began ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... intelligence, as it must always hold its natural high place among the most admired, will always in all probability be also, and as naturally, the least beloved of all. It would be as easy and as profitable a problem to solve the Rabelaisian riddle of the bombinating chimaera with its potential or hypothetical faculty of deriving sustenance from a course of diet on second intentions, as to read the riddle of Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this yet more mysterious and magnificent monster of a play. That on its production in print it was formally announced as "a new ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... justly alarmed and demanded cancellation of the sale. Not only was this done, but the police, in order to prevent another such accident, required that a notice be fixed to Lisette's loose-box informing any potential buyer of her ferocity, and that any sale would be null and void unless the buyer declared in writing that he was aware ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... drew near which I had set for my call on the first of the potential mothers assigned me by the Eugenic Staff, I re-read ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... else: that side of life had been over for herself many years since. Her interest now was in her sons' possible marriages, and it was a little painful to her that Henrietta should be so much excited about what had never after all been more than a potential love affair. To tell the truth, she thought it a trifle petty and not worthy the dignity of one on the verge of old age. She wanted to be sympathetic, and she was too kind to say anything that would wound, but Henrietta could see that Evelyn did not ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... bush. There was much equipment still sealed in cartons. Bunks were made up. Tucked under the blanket of one was a little book with stylus attached. All pages were blank except the first. The entry read: "TC in a sweat to get going. Rain potential. No rest for the weary. This seems to be a nice spot though. Am kind of eager myself to take a look at some of the vegetation hereabouts. Have several ideas along the lines of Thompson's prelim research concerning ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent degree—personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... away with. With tribes just groping their way from barbarism towards civilization natural hygienic and moral laws have been trampled upon, and for this state of affairs the white man's rule is not wholly free from blame. It should be a crime to defile a potential mother and a woman should continue to be regarded as the cradle of the race and her person remain sacred and inviolate under the law, as was the ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... about her ancestry he would, I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Ulrich; named after his august Great-Grandfather; does not write novels like him. At present a young gentleman of eighteen; goes into Russia before long, hoping to beget Czars; which issues dreadfully for himself and the potential Czars he begot. The reader has heard of a potential "Czar Iwan," violently done to death in his room, one dim moonlight night of 1764, in the Fortress of Schlusselburg, middle of Lake Ladoga; misty moon looking down on the stone battlements, on the melancholy waters, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... develop techniques for drawing from your reader as much as he knows about the item he is seeking and the source of the citation. He must have some reason for believing the item exists, and we should be able to pass this information on to the potential lending library. ...
— The Long Island Library Resources Council (LILRC) Interlibrary Loan Manual: January, 1976 • Anonymous
... Committee (in this section referred to as the "Advisory Committee''). The Advisory Committee shall make recommendations with respect to the activities of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology, including identifying research areas of potential importance to the security of the Nation. (b) Membership.— (1) Appointment.—The Advisory Committee shall consist of 20 members appointed by the Under Secretary for Science and Technology, which shall include emergency ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
... introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... for himself now, and this unextinguished and apparently inextinguishable charm by which he had held her was a fact incredibly romantic; but he gazed with a longer face than he had ever had for anything in the world at his potential acceptance of a great bouncing benefit from the person he intimately, if even in a manner indirectly, associated with the conditions to which his lovely wife and his children (who would have been so lovely too) had pitifully succumbed. He had accepted ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... person, old, or of middle age, who has triangulated a race, that is, taken three or more observations from the several standing-places of three different generations, can tell pretty nearly the range of possibilities and the limitations of a child, actual or potential, of a given stock,—errors excepted always, because children of the same stock are not bred just alike, because the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to break out at any time, and because each ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "demonstrated" that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity, with all its present complex powers in a potential state, you seem to me to beg the ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... realized that that was a great allegory of life. The great Sculptor sees in every human being, no matter how rough and irregular, great possibilities. Whereas we can see only the exterior, he sees within the potential image with which he would adorn his glorious building above. Man was created in the image of God, but that image is now obscured by sin and its results. And so the divine Sculptor must do with us as the sculptor did with the stone. He must bring to bear upon us the sharp ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... committing any part of it to paper, balancing and reshaping until it fully satisfied his sense of unity and rhythm. Something of formality and ponderousness quickly becomes evident in his style, together with a rather mannered use of potential instead of direct indicative verb forms; how his style compares with Johnson's and how far it should be called pseudo-classical, are interesting questions to consider. One appreciative description of it may be quoted: 'The language of Gibbon never flags; he walks forever ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... our country where the presence of woman is so strong for good, and where her words of lofty cheer to the stricken and distressed are so potential as in the mountain republics on our extreme western border. There are in that section communities composed almost entirely of men who not only treat the few of the other sex who live among them, with a chivalrous respect, but who listen to their words as if they ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... observance of the letter of the social law for which the Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... in financial speculations, as in battles, there must be what is called "food for powder;" and if one be too solicitous about this worthless pabulum, nothing great can be accomplished. So Camors passed as one of the most scrupulous of this goodly company; and his word was as potential in the region of "the rings," as it was in the more elevated sphere of the clubs ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... a tree, quite helpless, nerveless, and with staring eyes fixed on his. As yet an embryo woman, inexperienced and ignorant, the sex's instinct was potential; she had in one plunge fathomed all that his reason had been ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... constitute "Negro Domination" it does not necessarily follow that negroes must be elected to office, but that in all elections in which white men may be divided, if the negro vote should be sufficiently decisive to be potential in determining the result, the white man or men that would be elected through the aid of negro votes would represent "Negro Domination." In other words, we would have "Negro Domination" whenever the will of a majority of the whites would be defeated ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... which had left Odessa at the time of the summer collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 had gradually worked its way northward from Petrograd on the Petrograd-Kola Railroad with the intention of shipping for the Western fighting front by way of England. They had been of potential aid to the Allied military missions during the summer and now were permitted by the Serbian government to be joined to the Allied expedition. They were accordingly put into position along the Kola Railroad. These ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... have I. And so has she. His rights in this matter are very clear and very potential. I am quite ready to admit that we cannot marry for many years to come, unless he will provide the money. You are quite at liberty to tell him that I say so. I have no right to ask your father for a penny, and ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... could scarcely have been otherwise. For whereas the Japanese language in its original form—a form which differs almost as much from its modern offspring as does Italian from Latin—has little capacity for expansion, Chinese has the most potential of all known tongues in that respect. Chinese may be said to consist of a vast number of monosyllables, each expressed by a different ideograph, each having a distinct significance, and each capable of combination and permutation with one or more of the others, by which combinations and permutations ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... not it ever strike you, in listening to sweet music, that the Rudiment of Potential Infinite Pain is subtly woven into the tissue of our keenest joy" ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... d. vis,) and ic from the Greek [Greek: ikos], (q. d. [Greek: ischus]) both implying power, has well observed that there is a general correspondence of meaning between these two classes of adjectives—both being of "a potential active signification; as purgative, vomitive, operative, &c.; cathartic, emetic, energetic, &c."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii, p. 445. I have before observed, that Tooke spelled all this latter class of words without the final k; but he left it to Dr. Webster to suggest the reformation ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... can lie to our supposing potential or elementary volition and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not. By giving them free will we do no more than those who make ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... to illustrate. It is designed to illustrate the possibility of our choosing actions that will give pleasure to others, in contradistinction to actions that will give pleasure to ourselves. But the miser desires gold for an exactly opposite reason. He desires it as potential selfishness, not as potential philanthropy. Secondly, we are to choose the actions in question because they will make us happy. But the very name we give the miser shows that the analogous choice in his case makes him miserable. Thirdly, the material miser is an ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the world, one-sixth of the wheat supply, and very nearly two-thirds of the gold supply. But while these figures may be taken as in themselves satisfactory, it is far more important to remember that as yet the potential resources of the new lands opened to enterprise have been barely conceived, and their wealth has been little more than scratched. Population as yet has been only very sparsely sprinkled over the surface of many of the areas most suitable for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... make any progress in the spiritual side of science—and every department of science has its spiritual side—we must always keep our minds fixed upon this "innermost within" which contains the potential of all outward manifestation, the "fourth dimension" which generates the cube; and our common forms of speech show how intuitively we do this. We speak of the spirit in which an act is done, of entering into the spirit of a game, of the spirit ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Paris dresses by the gross, and hatfuls of diamonds, where the women were always discovered in boudoirs with a French maid named Fanchette in attendance, receiving bunches of long-stemmed roses from potential correspondents, while the men, all very tall and dark, possessed of interesting pasts, were introduced before fireplaces in sumptuous bachelor apartments, the veins knotted on their temples, and their strong yet aristocratic fingers clutching a photograph ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... left Frankfort was in point of time the youngest member of the guild, now seemed, if one could distinguish him through the gloom of the night, to have become years older, and there was an added dignity in his bearing, for, although now but a potential freebooter, he had received assurance that he would be ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... The Potential implies possibility, liberty, power, will; as, Tahgemewan kahnahbuge, it may rain; Kegahwesenemin kiya kahmenequamin, we shall ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... reason why we might not continue indefinitely to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in the infinite character of its potential destiny. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the great dukes on every frontier. All round the east and north lay the lands of Philip of Burgundy; to the west was the Duke of Brittany, cherishing a jealous independence; the royal Dukes, Berri, Bourbon, Anjou, are all so many potential sources of danger and difficulty to the Crown. The conditions of the nobility are altogether changed; the old barons have sunk into insignificance; the struggle of the future will lie between the King's cousins and himself, rather than with the older lords. A few non-royal princes, such ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... this disesteem? Did it really exist and what defined it? Was it a matter of scant worldly possessions, or commonplace brain force, or breeding, or just an attitude of mind? Was it a term invented by the crafty to dash cold water upon the potential unity of a scattered force? Was it a scarecrow for frightening greedy and resourceful flocks from a concerted assault upon the golden harvests of privilege?... The questions submerged him in a swift flood. He did not know ... he could not tell. Unaccustomed as he was to thinking in the terms of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program, which helped bring down the country's $300 million debt burden. In August 2005, Sao Tome signed on to a new 3-year IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) program worth $4.3 million. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies. Sao Tome is optimistic about the development of petroleum resources in its territorial waters in ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Energy and the inter-convertibility of forces—light, heat, electricity,—taking place constantly everywhere, often on a stupendous scale, require bewildering calculations by an ever-present God. No energy, not even potential energy, can be lost in converting one force into another. It ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... is always found. The final Universal Disarmament Pact which had totally banned all weapons invented since the year 1900 and provided for complete inspection, had not ended the fear of war. And thus there was excuse to give the would-be soldier, the potential defender of the country in some ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... was a more serious hardship, especially as it appeared avoidable. Owing, presumably, to the thinness with which the line was held, and to the lack of potential reinforcements behind, we were not allowed to sleep in the wood. Every night we made our way either to the lower or higher breastworks. The former were just off Mud Lane, and were consequently protected by the ridge from view, and to a certain extent from bullets. ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... region, mainly Paiutes, were a never-ending source of irritation and of potential danger to the settlers. They had grown fields of a few acres along the Muddy and hence resented the coming of the settlers who might include the aboriginal farms within their holdings. In accordance with the traditional ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... implied into self-conscious knowledge brings about an enormous difference; it is the infinite difference which, for example, separates man from the animal. Man is an animal, but, even in his animal functions, does not rest satisfied with the potential and the unconscious as the animal does, but becomes conscious of them, reflects upon them, and raises them—as, for instance, the process of digestion—into self-conscious science. And it is thus that man breaks through ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... for the second person of the perfect-indicative, and 'wert' for the present-potential, simply to be understood; as I should hardly be if I substituted the latter for the former, and therewith ended my phrase. 'Where wert thou, brother, those three days, had He not raised thee?' means one thing, and 'Where wast thou when He did so?' means another. That ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 4). Another scriptural passage also—'now all this was then undeveloped' (B/ri/. Up. I, 4, 7)—shows that this, i.e. this developed world with its distinction of names and forms, is capable of being termed undeveloped in so far as in a former condition it was in a merely seminal or potential state, devoid of the later evolved distinctions ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the canal nearly doubles the potential efficiency of the United States Navy, as long as it is fortified and is in our hands; but if left unfortified it would at once ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... my Liege," said Tristan, "I am but a plain fellow, but I am grateful. I will do my duty within these walls, or elsewhere; and while I live, your Majesty's breath shall pour as potential a note of condemnation, and your sentence be as literally executed, as when you sat on your own throne. They may deal with me the next hour for it if they ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Kesava who is eternal (compared with all other existent things), changes at the end of each Kalpa. He, however, who lies at the Root and who is endued with supreme might and puissance, lies in the waters when universal destruction comes (in the form of the potential Seed of all things). Kesava is that Creator of pure Soul who courseth through all the eternal worlds.[1386] Infinite and Eternal as He is, He fills all space (with emanations from Himself) and courseth through the universe (in the form of everything that constitutes the universe). Freed as He is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... sounds, it would fit the case better to say that people would have been surprised to see hair growing on him; as surprised as if they had found hair growing on the bust of a Roman emperor. His tall figure was buttoned up in a tight-waisted fashion that rather accentuated his potential bulk, and he wore a red flower in his buttonhole. Of the two men walking behind one was also bald, but in a more partial and also a more premature fashion, for his drooping mustache was still yellow, and if his eyes were somewhat heavy ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... is indispensable. We are a maritime power, ruling a maritime empire, our potential enemies being military nations. He has warned us that democracy cannot govern an empire. Perhaps our type of this creed is not so full of the lust for domination and aggrandisement as was that of Athens; it may be suspected ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... nave, and, sitting down, he covered his eyes with one hand and strove to rouse himself from the odd, half-fainting sensation which possessed him. How glorious now was the music that poured like a torrent from the hidden organ-loft! How full of searching and potential proclamation!—the proclamation of an eternal, unguessed mystery, for which no merely human speech might ever find fit utterance! Some divine declaration of God's absolute omnipresence,— or of Heaven's sure nearness,—touched the heart of Felix Bonpre, as ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... ready to demonstrate for equal treatment and opportunity. Although some black papers objected to the movement's militancy, the major civil rights organization showed no such hesitancy. Roy Wilkins, a leader of the NAACP, later claimed that Randolph could supply only about 9,000 potential demonstrators and that the NAACP had provided the bulk ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... book) Improved the Roman plan By spotting a potential crook In every fellow-man. And by the Thousand off they went ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... he would make another attempt to-morrow; and, if still unsuccessful, he would write a letter—not a letter containing an offer, which, according to Archie's ideas, would not be letting her know that he was there in a manner sufficiently potential; but a letter in which he would explain that he had very grave reasons for wishing to see his near and dear connection, Lady Ongar. Soon after two he sallied out, and he also went to a hairdresser's. He was aware that in doing so he was hardly obeying his friend ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Mexican dress, Ezekiel instantly recognized Demorest. With his usual instincts he was naturally pleased to observe that he looked older and more careworn. The softer, sensuous climate had perhaps imparted a heaviness to his figure and a deliberation to his manner that was quite unlike his own potential energy. ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... distance in London. It must not be forgotten, of course, that the New York Express Company would, if necessary, have carried the goods much further for the same charge of forty cents a package. The limit of distance I do not know: it is probably something like twenty miles. But a potential ell does not reconcile me to paying an exorbitant price for the actual inch which is all I have any use for. This method of simplification—fixing the minimum payment on the basis of the maximum bulk, weight, and distance—seems ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... would not fulfil my aim. This method seems to me more conformable to my dignity and to the serious character of the business." The Decrees, as touching the United States alone, were to be quietly withdrawn from action, but not formally revoked. They were to be dormant, yet potential. As convenience might dictate, it would be open to say that they were revoked [in effect], or not revoked [in form]. The one might, and did, satisfy the United States; the other might not, and did not, content Great Britain, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... it. At any rate her young men are always confiding their woes to me. My status as a potential grandmother makes me a suitable repository ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... I have read admit that God's intellect is entirely actual, and not at all potential; as they also admit that God's intellect, and God's will, and God's essence are identical, it follows that, if God had had a different actual intellect and a different will, his essence would also have been different; and thus, as I concluded at first, if things had been brought into being by ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... that the decisions of the commission on the boundary were final, bringing to a completion the official demarcation of the Iraq-Kuwait boundary; Iraqi officials still make public statements claiming Kuwait; periodic disputes with upstream riparian Syria over Euphrates water rights; potential dispute over water development plans by Turkey for the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers Climate: mostly desert; mild to cool winters with dry, hot, cloudless summers; northernmost regions along Iranian and Turkish borders experience ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... steep hillside. Yet all were under perfect control. With invisible, atomic rays Omega made all do his bidding. For countless centuries man had mastered the atom, divided it, harnessed its electrons. Following the discoveries of the great French scientist, Becquerel, man had learned that the potential energy of all atoms—especially that of radium—is almost limitless. And as the disintegration of the atom carries an electrical discharge, man had learned to control this energy. Omega's machines, utilizing atoms ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow |
