"Seesaw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Phillips, and asked me what I was going to do. She didn't appear to be at all struck by the fact that lay at the bottom of my disclosures; that it was her own hand that had caused the mischief, but went on at a wild rate about my approaching 'sentimental seesaw,' as she called it, when my whole time would have to be divided between my two fiancees. She remarked that the old proverb called man a pendulum between a smile and a tear, but that I was the first true case of a human pendulum ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... and easily explained. The tree had fallen midway and at right angles across the trunk of another prostrate monarch. So accurately and evenly was it balanced that the child was satisfied, from a liberal experience of the application of these principles to the game of "seesaw," that a very slight impulse to either end was sufficient to destroy the equilibrium. That impulse proceeded from his end of the tree, as he saw when the uplifted trunk disclosed an opening in the ground beneath it, and the head and shoulders ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of the humble and painful sentiment which I now feel, and is drawn out of the desire and hope of my eternal welfare. You have to represent to yourself mankind balancing between damnation and redemption to understand me truly when I say that at the present hour I am sitting on the good end of the seesaw after having been this very morning on the wrong end. I freely avow that in passing through the mandrake lane, from whence Mosaide's cottage is to be seen, I hid behind an ivy-thorn bush, waiting for Jahel to appear at her window. Very soon she came. I showed ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... was a wilderness of scorched and crumbling walls. As you ascend Mountain Street, the Bishop's Palace, on the right, was a skeleton of tottering masonry, and the buildings on the left were a mass of ruin, where ragged boys were playing at seesaw among the fallen planks and timbers.[815] Even in the Upper Town few of the churches and public buildings had escaped. The Cathedral was burned to a shell. The solid front of the College of the Jesuits was pockmarked by ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... speculative thought the prevailing school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge, till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in philosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley reverted to the ideal philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of metaphysics. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and, what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... a seesaw, and a tether ball (a ball swinging from the top of a pole eight feet high) for the children will help to ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... each tower a steel arch was started on each side, built of steel tubes braced securely; the building on each side of every tower was carried on simultaneously, one side of every arch balancing the weight on the other side. Each section was like a gigantic seesaw, the tower acting as the centre support; the ends, of course, not swinging up and down. Gradually the two sections of every arch approached each other until they met over the turbid water and were permanently connected. With the completion of the three arches, ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... vowed that he couldn't sleep with a light so I blew out the candle, and in about two minutes the steady seesaw snoring resumed. I took the opportunity to empty half the contents of a whisky bottle into the spittoon, and after lighting a pipe proceeded to clink a tumbler at steady intervals as evidence of debauch well ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... before it will explode. So in life, what is it that sets up this slow gentle explosion that makes the machinery of our vital economies go—that draws new matter into the vortex and casts the used-up material out—in short, that creates and keeps up the unstable condition, the seesaw upon which life depends? To enable the mind to grasp it we have to invent or posit some principle, call it the vital force, as so many have done and still do, or call it molecular force, as Tyndall does, or the power of God, as our orthodox brethren do, it matters not. We are on the border-land ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... is not enough the voice' be sound and clear', 'T is modulation' that must charm the ear. When desperate heroes grieve with tedious moan, And whine their sorrows in a seesaw tone, The same soft sounds of unimpassioned woes, Can only make the yawning ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... foregone conclusion. Save for national lunacy, it will be brought about by the side that will win, and because that side knows that it will win. More and more it will have the quality of surprise, of pitiless revelation. Instead of the seesaw, the bickering interchange of battles of the old time, will come swiftly and amazingly blow, and blow, and blow, no pause, no time for recovery, disasters cumulative ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold, And, for strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine, He also must be such a lady's scorner! Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau: Now up, now down, the world's one seesaw. —So, I shall find out some snug corner Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight, {910} Turn myself round and bid the world goodnight; And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen) ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... would further imply that difference is apprehended on the apprehension of a thing distinguished by attributes such as generic character and so on, and at the same time that the thing thus distinguished is apprehended on the apprehension of difference; and this would constitute a logical seesaw.— 'Difference' thus showing itself incapable of logical definition, we are confirmed in our view that perception reveals ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... compromise. Knowledge and ignorance, such are the two irreconcilable terms of this problem. Between these two abysses we seem to see Louis XVIII reckoning up the felicities of the eighteenth century, and the unhappiness of the nineteenth. Seated in the centre of the seesaw, which he knew so well how to balance by his own weight, he contemplates at one end of it the fanatic ignorance of a lay brother, the apathy of a serf, the shining armor on the horses of a banneret; he thinks he hears the cry, "France ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac |
