"Constructive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does little for constructive progress. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... mere form is concerned, 'Tannhaeuser' (1845) is far freer from the conventionalities of the Italian school than 'Der Fliegende Hollaender,' but this would not have availed much if Wagner's constructive powers had not matured in so remarkable a way. It would have been useless to sweep away the old conventions if he had had nothing to set in their place. Apart from the strictly musical side of the question, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... then appealed to me. (I except the original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different texture and color was subtle and pleasurable. I think the note of constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and snatched about by ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... had no "origin." Just as God, the Constructive Force, had none. It was, as God was. It is and always will be, while ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 1908, came the election of that great constitutionist, Taft, to the American Presidency upon a platform less radical than that of his opponent. This heartened the constructive forces of the country. But very little upbuilding resulted. The coming revision of the tariff was of itself sufficient further to restrict business undertakings, and to cause many great producers of goods to arrange to unload at ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... elements of happiness; and their consoling efficacy is most felt in the languid or troubled hours when it is most needed. We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge. The imagination, which is altogether constructive, probably contributes more to our happiness than the reason, which in the sphere of speculation is mainly critical and destructive. The rude charm which, in the hour of danger or distress, the savage clasps so confidently ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific, prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate. There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama; realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... criticise is the persistent effort to discredit honest attempts at a better understanding of the facts of international relationship, the everlasting gibe which it is thought necessary to fling at any constructive effort, apart from armament, to make peace secure. These men profess to be friends of peace, they profess to regret the growth of armament, to deplore the unwisdom, ignorance, prejudice and misunderstanding ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... exhausted the vocabulary of contempt on the President, his character, ability, and policy. He felt as a shock the first impression of supreme authority with which he spoke. The man he had despised had grown into the great constructive statesman who would dispute with him every inch of ground in the attainment ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... I contend that the original unsophisticated man was by no means constructive. He lived in the open ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... far more satisfactory. The inventor is related to his time or to human society by means of the usefulness of his invention. The statesman is rated by means of the deep-seated influence for improvement he has had on his age. The educator finds his evaluation in the constructive spirit and method he displays in bringing useful spirit and methods to light. The scientist is measured by the uplift his discovery gives to the sum and substance of human welfare. If a product which some individual creates can not be utilized by society, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... balderdash, yet these phrases recur with painful reiteration and with all the color tints which Puccini is able to scrape from a marvelously varied and garish orchestral palette. The most remarkable feature, the feature which shows the composer's constructive talent in its brightest aspect, is the fluency of it all. Even when reduced to the extremity of a tremolo of empty fifths on the strings pianissimo, or a single sustained tone, Puccini still manages to cling to a thread of his melodramatic fabric and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... so long as the caste system dominates them and their ideas. The only tie which binds together these people is the spirit of opposition to this foreign government. Among the classes and the masses there is absolutely no coherence or unity of sentiment in any line of constructive activity. So that in the matter of self-government they would prove themselves to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... construction of the present tower that it was the original intention to surmount it by some other erection, probably a spire. Each interior angle contains strong and massive squinches which are of no constructive use at present, and must have been originally inserted to carry some superstructure. The buttresses at the angles are also carried up to the parapet, which would seem to point to the same conclusion. Why ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... intelligently (or reflectively) just that underlying system of Analogy which the primitive Instinct was competent to appreciate unintelligently; and, by the greater clearness of this intelligent perception, be able to elevate the Science of Language, and found it upon a new and constructive, instead of upon this merely instinctual plane? To all these questions the Universologists return an affirmative answer. They go farther, and aver that this great intellectual undertaking is now fully achieved, and is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pottery. The making of pottery is the occupation peculiarly of a sedentary race, and hence of a race likely to be agriculturists. As it requires the building faculty to originate the mounds, so it requires the constructive faculty to make pottery. In constructive ability our Indians are singularly deficient, just as it is with greatest difficulty that they can be induced even on a small scale to practice agriculture. It has been objected ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... of Christ, the First Christmas Tree (see Appendix); Arbor Day; Constructive work suggested by St. Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... dear fellow, a mere dream," I stopped him, yet with sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. "Your constructive imagination is too active." ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... was, moreover, unfeignedly religious. It seemed as if a king as great as Edward I. was about to ascend the throne. Yet between the character of Edward I. and the character of Prince Henry there was a great difference. Edward I. worked for the future as well as for the present. His constructive legislation served his country for generations after his death. Even his mistaken attempt to unite England and Scotland was, to some extent at least, an anticipation of that which was done by the Act of Union four hundred years after his death. The young Henry had no ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... avert the fate which had befallen the mission, and stern in the punishment of an atrocity which touched him so nearly. But instead, he was taken on trust so fully that Afghans resisting the British advance were not so much regarded as enemies resisting an invasion and as constructive vindicators of the massacre, as they were held traitors to their sovereign harbouring ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... to leave end papers to be pasted on after the book has been forwarded, as in that case they have little constructive value. Every leaf of such an end paper as is described above will open right to the back, and the zigzag allows play for the drag ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... sleep for many years, and it is reported that when interested in some problem he would miss a night or two. Yet he has lived longer than the average individual and is now in good health. Very few have done as much constructive work as he. Many other prominent ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the surplus swarm of her born subjects?"[37] That is the final question of imperialism; and Elgin had earned the right not only to put it to the home government with emphasis, but also to answer it in an affirmative and constructive sense. ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... know, whether any constructive art will make any, even the most trivial thing, out of bad and good materials indifferently, if this can be helped? does not all art rather reject the bad as far as possible, and accept the good and fit materials, and ...
— Statesman • Plato
... the matter into further consideration, advised a different course altogether—no less than an application from the other side, on the ground of neglect, ill-treatment, and constructive conjugal infidelity, based on the important letter already referred to. Mrs. Dewey caught eagerly at this suggestion, as soon as it was presented to her. If a divorce were thus obtained, her vindication would ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... colonists with a temptation to smuggle. On the other hand, Lord Camden, as a lawyer, denied that the Americans were in a state of rebellion, and drew sundry nice distinctions between actual treason and constructive treason. He also disclaimed all participation in the law for taxing America, as he had not been consulted on the subject. The Duke of Grafton complained of both these lords, and accused Camden of meanness ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that analytic view of which I have ventured to give a hint—the view of Mr. Reinhart as an artist of immense capacity who yet somehow doesn't care. I must add that this aspect of him is modified, in the one case very gracefully, in the other by the operation of a sort of constructive humor, remarkably strong, in his illustrations of Spanish life and his sketches of the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Greek ritual and art we might well despair. The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their cloud-capp'd towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging for foundations. There is scarcely ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... Jane say was a good job? Poor dolly coming out?" A long, grave headshake denies this. The constructive difficulties of the tale are beyond the young narrator's skill. She has to resort ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the thinkers," said Telemachus; his mother Penelope's maxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly in his mind like tickets ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... the book during the first eight or constructive years of its existence, beyond which it is necessary to trace it, until at least we have touched upon the long-vexed question of ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... dominate him. Probably this must ever be the case, when an author's characters are not puppets but real creations. They then have a will and a way of their own; a free-will which their creator cannot predetermine and correct. Something like this appears to have been Scott's own theory of his lack of constructive power. No one was so assured of its absence, no one criticised it more severely than he did himself. The Edinburgh Review about this time counselled the "Author of Waverley" to attempt a drama, doubting only his powers of compression. Possibly ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the discursive manner in which Ewart was committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to work with me in some ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... for the new order of things—that new order of things which longo intervallo has finally landed us in the developed capitalistic Individualism of the twentieth century. Yet when we come to consider their constructive programmes we find the positive demands put forward are based either on ideal conceptions derived from reminiscences of primitive communism, or else that they distinctly postulate a return to a state of things—the old mark-organisation—upon ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... be rendered to the citizen in the mode prescribed by the measure we now have under consideration? If not, a perpetual state of constructive war would be a great blessing to very many American citizens. If a suspension of martial law and a restoration of the ordinary forms of civil law are to result in a subjection of our people to ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... there. He saw nothing in its society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive imagination. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... nineteenth-century civilization have been effected. Who are the debtors in this country? Who are the borrowers of money? The men of enterprise, of energy, of skill, the men of industry, of fore-sight, of calculation, of daring. In the ranks of the debtors will be found a large preponderance of the constructive energy of every country. The debtors are the upbuilders of the national wealth and prosperity; they are the men of initiative, the men who conceive plans and set on foot enterprises. They are those who by borrowing money ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... they lessen its ultimate chance of achievement; their hardships will always distress and preoccupy minds,—fine, generous minds,—that might have done great things if free: that might have done something constructive at least, for their era, instead of being burned ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... of my Opus when it should be published. As science, however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... a kind of tepid, ineffectual anarchists, unconvinced and wholly unconvincing. Broadly speaking, theirs was a policy of blind reversal. They were not constructive, but they were opposed vaguely to the existing order of things, and, particularly, to everything British. They pinned their faith to the foreigner in all things, even though the foreigner's whole energies might be devoted to the honest endeavour to raise conditions in his ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... idleness, because work will not involve overwork or slavery, or that excessive specialization that industrialism has brought about, but will be merely a pleasant activity for certain hours of the day, giving a man an outlet for his spontaneous constructive impulses. There is to be no compulsion, no law, no government exercising force; there will still be acts of the community, but these are to spring from universal consent, not from any enforced submission of even the smallest minority. We shall examine in a later chapter how far ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... constitution derived from his use of opium,—qualities which, although they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power, at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record. Nor is this all. The reader knows how often a secondary interest will attach to the mightiest of conquerors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... meantime, we have our work too—the five children. But it is a little constructive work—not a great one. For in this beautiful, safe island, there is not much that we can do besides feed them. And so, here we sit day after day, five women who could once fly, big, strong, full-bodied, teeming with various efficiencies and ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that subject, which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old "Chronicle histories," such as Thomas Lord Cromwell and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering the place for nothing. These finical refinements revolt me; it is not right, it is not honorable; it is constructive nepotism to keep in office a Had that is so delicate it can't come out when the wind's in the nor'west—I won't have this dude on the payroll. Cancel his exequator; ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the function of architects to design suitable spaces for color decoration, so bound in by dignified mouldings and other details of his constructive art, in such a manner that the addition of decorative color shall in no way mar the scheme of his complete work, but shall (under these well ordered distributions) have set on them the seal and crown of color which is inseparable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... alienate them from each other. The responsibility for communication in such instances calls for each partner to pay attention to the meanings that the other one brings to the conflict, and try also to help the other say what he means, for his own and the sake of the other. In this way, constructive communication may be resumed. ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... him—that an architect should have a knowledge of anatomy. There is assuredly a germ and a promise in the phrase. It delights us, first, because it seems to recognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive, character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades us that Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size—the unit that is sometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measure of what is great and small among things animate and inanimate. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... have a very good medical man, and through him it has been discovered that these pretended safeguards are all but absolutely worthless. He had the stuff analysed. Now, isn't this shameful? Isn't this abominable? For my own part, I should call it constructive murder.' ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... from his study of Dryden's Fables, a debt perhaps to Chaucer rather than to Dryden, was a notable advance in constructive power. In Lamia he shows a very much greater sense of proportion and power of selection than in his earlier work. There is, as it were, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... than the last, and the promise to reduce taxation or lower the rates overrides more and more certainly any other consideration. What are Empire or Education to men who feel themselves drifting helplessly into debt? What chance has any constructive scheme with an electorate of men who are being slowly ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... stirred Festing's blood. He had a touch of constructive genius, but lack of specialized training had forced him into the ranks of the pioneers. Others must add the artistic finish and divide the prizes of ultimate victory; his part was to rough out the work and clear the ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... never eat it again!" The reporter straightened his coat and tie and gave his hatbrim a jaunty flick. "Well, here I go for my haircut. Might as well do something constructive." ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... the question in the back of her mind. Suppose (so it ran in his constructive fancy) that instead of being a prosperous, protected young woman playing the wage-earner more or less as Marie Antoinette had played the milkmaid, she had been Mamie Riley across the hall, whose work was bitter earnest, whose earnings were not pin-money, but bread and meat and brother's schooling ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... statement of the usual process may seem, perhaps, to cast excessive emphasis on the constructive phase of the playwright's problem; and allowance must of course be made for the divergent mental habits of individual authors. But almost any playwright will tell you that he feels as if his task were practically finished when he arrives at the point when he finds himself prepared to begin ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... can't stand shouting and I can't stand smashing. And that's all there is. These newspapers and these arguments you hear—it's all shouting and smashing. It's never thinking and building. It's all destructive; never constructive. All blind hatred of the other views, never fair examination of them. You get some of these Unionists together, my class, my friends. They say absolutely nothing else but damning and blasting and foaming at Lloyd George and Asquith and the trade-unionists. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... The Morrill Act of 1862 was the first important step toward the emancipation of agriculture. The establishment of the Land Grant Colleges was the biggest piece of constructive legislation that Congress has enacted during the past century. By means of higher education thus redirected and vitalized, industrial independence will ultimately be realized. But the work moves slowly. However, in spite of ridicule and unmerited handicaps, and even ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... fish of three hundred pounds over the lowered side of the canoe by a single effort. They catch whales also by means of harpoons with bladders attached. The oil is sold to the Hudson's Bay Company. It has been said that their houses were made of boards, but some constructive art is displayed in their erection as was much ingenuity in procuring the materials before axes were introduced among them; for they contrived to fell trees with a rough chisel and mallet. The houses are made of centre-posts about eighteen feet high, upon which a long pole ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... if it overrules the synthetic faculty; reflection is to be feared if it destroys our power of intuition, and inquiry is fatal if it supplants faith. Decomposition becomes deadly when it surpasses in strength the combining and constructive energies of life, and the separate action of the powers of the soul tends to mere disintegration and destruction as soon as it becomes impossible to bring them to bear as one undivided force. When the sovereign ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length. One finds traces of it even in works professedly devoted to disposing of it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this: "What all the skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and nobility of soul." In other words, by her possession of some recondite ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... his 'Inner Temple Masque' which was then enacted, but not printed till a hundred and twenty years after the author's death, when Dr Farmer transcribed it from a MS. of the Bodleian Library, and it appeared in Tom Davies' edition of Browne's poems. Browne has no constructive power, and no human interest in his pastorals, but he has an eye for nature, and we quote from him some excellent specimens of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... has reversed that of {396} the great historian, [Sidenote: Constructive work] at least as far as the value of the work done at Trent to the cause of Catholicism is concerned. If the church shut out the Protestants and recognized her limited domain, she at least took appropriate measures to establish her rule over what was left. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Constitution. When we take account of all that governments have sought to do and have failed to do in this selfish and sinful world, we find that as a rule the application of new theories of government, though devised by the most brilliant constructive genius, have availed but little to preserve the people of any considerable regions of the earth for any long periods from the evils of despotism on the one hand or of anarchy on the other, or to raise any considerable portion of the mass of mankind above the hard ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... directed, and also to estimate the character and force of the weapons employed. With or without design, they are, each in their way, assailing one or other of the principles upon which we rest our demonstration of the being of God. As we proceed, we shall find that Mill and the Constructive Idealists are really engaged in undermining "the principle of substance;" their doctrine is a virtual denial of all objective realities answering to our subjective ideas of matter, mind, and God. The assaults of Comte and the Materialists of his school are mainly directed against ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... work are of incalculable importance to the present age and to future generations. With eagle vision he surveyed the whole domain of Jewish learning, and traced the lines of its development. Constructive as well as critical, he raised widely scattered fragments to the rank of a literature which may well claim a place beside the literatures of the nations. Endowed with rare strength of character, he remained unflinchingly loyal to ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... 1833. Goderich became Privy Seal, and this enabled Stanley to exchange the Irish Secretaryship for that of the Colonies. He had driven Ireland to the verge of revolt, but he had nevertheless made an honest attempt to grapple with many practical evils, and his Education Bill was a piece of constructive statesmanship which placed Roman Catholics on an equality with Protestants. Early in the session of 1834 Althorp introduced the Poor Law Amendment Act, and the measure was passed in July. The changes which it brought about ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... that cannot be read in books. It must learn to believe things that cannot be proved, or perhaps even definitely formulated as truth. The soul of the nation must be subjected, in a word, to some kind of spiritual leadership. Constructive statesmanship must be felt as an influence in the school. The problem is really nothing less than that of educating and forming national character. Now that we stand less alone as a nation our character ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... called the man. "I beg your pardon for troubling you, but you seem to be a mechanic, and that's just the sort of man I'm looking for. Are you open to an offer to do some inventive and constructive work?" ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... plants. Their cells have not cellulose walls, nor in most cases much wall of any kind, and motility in the majority is unrestricted. Animals live much more nearly up to their income. If we could make for an animal and a plant of equal weight two fractions showing the ratio of the upbuilding, constructive, chemical processes to the down-breaking, disruptive, chemical processes that go on in their respective bodies, the ratio for the plant would be much greater than the corresponding ratio for the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... look like a Pekingese. That was not vulgar abuse. It was sound, constructive criticism, with no motive behind it but the kindly desire to keep her from making an exhibition of herself in public. Wantonly to accuse a man of puffing when he goes up a flight of ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... say, and could not say it if he had; but he can speak in public. You will observe the inference is obvious. One who is really capable of constructive thought (like you and me); who has a wide range of words to choose from even when running; who is touched, by events, to admiration, to indignation, to alarm, to—to all that sort of thing, he could ... the plastic audience would be in his skilful hands, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... February 22d, Mr. Rantoul, of Massachusetts, appeared and took his seat for the remaining ten days of his term. The bill abolishing constructive mileage on the part of the Senate passed both houses. The River and Harbor Bill, appropriating between two and three millions of dollars for the improvement of the harbors of the coast and the lakes, and the river navigation of the interior, was ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... remain voting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for a non-representative democracy which were associated with the communist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... Hazelton, on the other hand, had felt no call to military glory. For their work in life they longed to become part of the great constructive force wielded by modern civil engineers. During the latter part of their high school work they had studied hard with ambition to become surveyors and civil engineers. In their school vacations they had sought training and experience in the offices of ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... modifications Jefferson's ordinance, or the Ordinance of 1784 as it was commonly called, was ultimately adopted. In this case Jefferson rendered a service similar to that of framing the Declaration of Independence. His plan was somewhat theoretical and visionary, but largely practical, and it was constructive work of a high order, displaying not so much originality as sympathetic appreciation of what had already been done and an instinctive forecast of future development. Jefferson seemed to be able to gather up ideas, some conscious and some latent in ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... familiar when Jefferson wrote them. The American Revolution, which led up to the Declaration, is especially significant in this: that it began as a struggle not for new privileges but for old rights. So the constructive character of that Revolution, which ended with a democracy and a noble constitution, was due largely to the fact that brave men stood ready to defend the old freedom, the old manhood, the old charters, "the good old cause" ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... is to understand the workings of the mind as it exists today, and to try to find some of its most constructive uses; and on that we shall focus attention. To that end we must first examine the various ways ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... showed self-control, as well as practical wisdom, in handing over functions discharged by the baronage as a whole to the various committees of their selection. The danger of general control by the magnates was that a large assembly, more skilled in opposition than in constructive work, was almost sure to become infected by faction. By strictly limiting and defining who the new rulers of England were to be, the barons approached a combination of aristocratic control with the stability and continuity resulting from limited numbers and defined ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... power of the writing I say not a word, or of its originality and boldness, or of its quite extraordinary constructive skill. I confine myself solely to your misgiving, and to the question whether there is any ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... by things which are habitual, that we consider this idea of the decision of a majority as if it were a law of our original nature. But such constructive whole, residing in a part only, is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out of civil society Nature knows nothing of it; nor are men, even when arranged ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... convert Corporations of Municipalities into Electoral Councils, was introduced in the House of Commons on the 15th of February. The Bill was opposed by the Conservatives, but passed the House of Commons. In the Lords an amendment of Lyndhurst's struck out the constructive clauses, and the Act became, on the 18th of May, an Act for the Abolition of Municipalities in Ireland. Lord John Russell brought forward a motion to reconstruct the Bill. But the Peers declined to pass it, and ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... is strong; my stomach is strong, my heart is strong, etc." In this form of suggestion you use positive Denial as well as Positive Affirmation. The former is destructive of evil if rightly applied, the latter is constructive of good. Belief and confident expectation are mighty forces. Be sure you apply them wisely. The power of mind over matter is ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... in the garden, and Cherry was in that world of joy and something like inspiration known to spirits imbued with any of the constructive poetry of art, always endeavouring to fulfil an ideal, never indeed satisfying themselves, but never so at rest as in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been responsible for great strides in certain directions in the development and use of artificial light and the era of peace will inherit these developments and will adapt them to more constructive purposes. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... have been more definitely constructive. In Life's Basis and Life's Ideal, and The Truth of Religion, he gives respectively a full account of his philosophical system, and of his ideas ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... on paper, or at a distance—that is one thing. For a white man to work it out—that too, is an easy thing. For a coloured man to work it out in the South, where, in its constructive period, he was necessarily misunderstood by his own people as well as by the whites, and where he had to adjust it at every step to the strained race relations—that is so very different and ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... is thus seen to be philosophic rather than constructive, and terminology reform will undoubtedly make more immediate progress through the efforts of the N.E.A. Committee with its specific recommendations (even though these are sometimes admittedly fussy) than through the policy of the M.T.N.A. of waiting ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... of the day the Terror applied his indisputable constructive genius to the creation of cat-hutches. That evening Erebus wrote his warm letter of thanks ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... of these fellows. The unrestrained lust for money is always the essence of murder, and the man or woman who surrenders to its spell will kill when put to the test. The law which holds burglary constructive murder is founded on an elemental truth. The man who puts on a mask, arms himself with revolver, knife, and dark lantern and enters my house to rob me of my goods will not hesitate to kill if a human life stands in the way of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... barely to enunciate the leading doctrine of the fathers is, in the ear of any chronologist, to overthrow it. But, though successful enough in its functions of destruction, on the other hand, as an affirmative or constructive work, the long treatise of Van Dale is most unsatisfactory. It leaves us with a hollow sound ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes and imps grinning over the weaknesses of man—his ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... be needed for the moment. But before undertaking even a synoptical account of the transcendental ethic, I think it advisable to remark that Kant's title to philosophical immortality rests upon his constructive work as an ethicist, and not on his critical work as a speculative thinker. It is well known that the two philosophies of Kant are not prima facie harmonious, that he finds himself compelled to deny as a critic that of which he is most certain as a moralist. Thus the great ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... that has made all the lowlands at the mouth of Great Slave and Athabaska Rivers. And the lines of tree trunks to-day, preparing for the next constructive annexation of the lake, are so regular that one's first thought is that this is the work of man. But these are things that my sketches and photographs will show ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... confronting him would perhaps have dismayed a less enthusiastic and a less determined man. Everything was at loose ends; under the shiftless hand of Gunterson even the fine insurance machine built up by Mr. Wintermuth in his best constructive days had suddenly grown to creak painfully in its joints. The heads of departments, seeing no inspiring or even efficient leadership above them, had become discouraged, and there had been no one to brace their failing spirits. Mr. Cuyler and Mr. Bartels in particular ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... (3) To present the constructive results of the modern historical and literary study of the Bible, not dogmatically but tentatively, so that the reader and student may be in a position to judge for himself regarding the conclusions that are held by a large ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... I call constructive oratory," presently continued the Secretary in a low voice. "You will notice that what he says is always calculated to strengthen the mind, although the soldiers themselves ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... had learned at the station, some miles away, that the German lady and gentleman were staying, and the lady was said to be very ill. Madame von Marwitz's glance, as it rested upon the goal of her journey, had in it the look of vast, constructive power, as when, for the first time, it rested on a new piece of music, realized it, mastered it, possessed it, actual, in her mind, before her fingers gave it to the world. So, now, she realized and mastered and possessed the scene that was ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... it too long, you'll never get an office," he said, "and so the only work you'll be able to do will be critical work: you'll never get a chance to do anything constructive; and if you let the Government nobble you, and give you an Under Secretaryship the moment they see you getting dangerous, then you're done for. And anyhow, I don't believe in independent members of parliament. A certain number of sheep are necessary in every organisation, in parliament ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with other minds. It is not good for a poet to be alone. Even where the constructive faculty is absent, its place may be supplied through the development of that artistic sense which files, weighs, and adjusts,—which reconciles the utmost freedom and force of thought with the mechanical symmetries of language,—and which, first a fetter to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... idea of peace is positive, constructive, forward-looking. It is not content with a mere cessation of hostilities at any particular period of the world's history. It aims at the establishment of reason and justice as the rule of the world's life. It proposes to find the basis of this establishment in the freely expressed will of the peoples ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... instincts to the detail and ornament of this alien style; and one is struck by the delicacy and self-restraint of, say, the Tuscan ones among the Scaliger tombs compared with the more picturesque looseness of genuine Veronese and Venetian Gothic sculpture. But the constructive, and, so to speak, space enclosing, principles of the great art of mediaeval France were even less understood by the Tuscan than by any other Italian builders; and, as the finest work of Tuscan facade architecture was given before the Gothic interregnum, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... used to create turmoil. The population of the continent was confined to the staffs of research-bases established during the International Geophysical Year. In theory the bases were an object-lesson in co-operation for a constructive purpose, which splendid spirit of mutual trust and confidence must spread through the world and some day lead to an era of blissful ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... you go deep enough," he added, fingering the ends of his short gray moustache while he kept an eye on his champagne glass. "We've done with mere classifying and imitation, and we're waiting for a fresh explosion of raw energy. Now for pure constructive imagination the North and South don't hold a candle—they simply don't hold a candle—to the West. Mark my words, in twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that he was not fitted for such a position; and he retired in favor of John Lawrence, the only man in his delegation really capable of controlling the brothers. Lawrence was a man like Gates. He would, Hugh knew, carry on the constructive work that Gates had so splendidly started. Nu Delta was in the throes of one of those ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... following epistle, we behold Mr. Sawin returning a miles emeritus, to the bosom of his family. Quantum mutatus! The good Father of us all had doubtless entrusted to the keeping of this child of his certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put in him a share of that vital force, the nicest economy of every minute atom of which is necessary to the perfect development of Humanity. He had given him a brain and heart, and so had equipped his soul with the two ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... the most difficult parts of our selection, namely, how to present enough excitement for the child and yet include enough constructive element which will satisfy him when the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... many young women of education, wealth and leisure, free as the winds of heaven to do as they wish. In no country are there more interesting problems to be solved and one would think such work would appeal to this very class, especially as most of them are the daughters of men who by their large constructive minds have created conditions and opportunities and developed them into the great industries for which America is justly famous; and it would seem by the law of cross inheritance that these daughters would inherit some of the great creative ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... flowing into constructive use and would instead confine itself, to an extent at least, to municipal, state and federal tax-exempt securities. Enterprise would be seriously hampered and in some respects ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... modeling wax to reproduce objects and animals, and to construct models of imaginary houses, yards, trees, etc. A sand pile, or a large, shallow sand box, perhaps five feet square, with sides six inches high, and completely lined with enamel cloth to make it watertight, is a wonderful implement for constructive play on the part of the child. Whole villages of farms, fields, and forests, ponds and brooks, roads and railroads, can be ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... in the development of this work as we proceed, to slightly modify our conception of the aetherial atom, but that modification will rather be of a constructive character, than a destructive one. There may also be certain objections to meet and explain away when we deal with the phenomena of light, heat, and electricity, and Gravitation, and the part which the aetherial atom plays in ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... splendor, while, like lava pouring from a volcano's crater, they take no prescribed channel, they flow into no immortal mould. It is this fiery gleam on the surface of matter hot from chaos, which the multitude honor as the highest manifestation of genius. But this is to desecrate a word which implies constructive power of the first order. Form is its highest expression. Without the shaping faculty, which artistically rounds to perfection, no glitter of decoration, nor even force and fire of expression, can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a pathological condition of a tissue, characterized by altered function, disturbance of circulation, and destructive and constructive changes in the irritated part. Heat, redness, swelling, pain and disturbed function are ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... teaching of eugenics. It is not wholly new. The early Greeks gave much thought to it, and with the insight which characterized them, they rightly put the emphasis on the constructive side; they sought to breed better men and women, not merely to accomplish a work of hygiene, to lessen taxes, and reduce suffering, by reducing the number of unfortunates among them. As early as the first half of the sixth century B. C. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... already full of extraordinary personages—Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who became President of that republic in 1861. In some respects the counterpart of Francia of Paraguay, in others both a medieval mystic and an enlightened ruler of modern type, he was a man of remarkable intellect, constructive ability, earnest patriotism, and disinterested zeal for orderliness and progress. On his presidential sash were inscribed the words: "My Power in the Constitution"; but is real power lay in himself and in the system which ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... of mind that I became a constructive microscopist. After another year passed in this new pursuit, experimenting on every imaginable substance—glass, gems, flints, crystals, artificial crystals formed of the alloy of various vitreous materials—in short, having ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... break-up of Europe which followed the death of the Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered. France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most important ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... (much as it may surprise you), has three states: a vapour, a liquid, a solid. These are fortune in the vapour: these are ideas. What are ideas? the protoplasm of wealth. To your head - which, by the way, is a solid, Bertrand - what are they but foul air? To mine, to my prehensile and constructive intellects, see, as I grasp and work them, to what lineaments of the future they transform themselves: a palace, a barouche, a pair of luminous footmen, plate, wine, respect, and ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... intense was his instinctive love of life and dread of such physical damage as would destroy his body that man unconsciously avoided thinking of the chance of his own death: hence his belief in the continuance of life cannot be regarded as the outcome of an active process of constructive thought. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... achieved the popularity of "Thaddeus of Warsaw"—the first romance originated by the active brain and singularly constructive power of Jane Porter—produced at an ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... problems in present-day constructive social economics which are more important than the development of a State-wide and a nation-wide policy for the compulsory official identification and registration of feeble-minded children, particularly all those who come from homes where the conditions ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... victory of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, which had in it much of aristocracy but much also of liberty, over that logical ambition of the Kirk which would have made Protestantism, if possible, as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might be called the victory of Individualist Puritanism over Socialist Puritanism. It was what Milton meant when he said that the new presbyter was an exaggeration of the old priest; ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... association between catalpas and chestnut trees growing adjacent to one another. Constructive symbiosis apparently develops when a young chestnut tree is planted within the radius of the root system of a catalpa. The latter very definitely influences the chestnut tree to grow more vigorously than it ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... penetration, this force of scientific insight, more conspicuously than Sir Thomas Dick-Lauder. Two distinct mental processes are involved in the treatment of such a question. Firstly, the faithful and sufficient observation of the data; and secondly, that higher mental process in which the constructive imagination comes into play, connecting the separate facts of observation with their common cause, and weaving them into an organic whole. In neither of these requirements did Sir Thomas ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... he at the time of his capture accompanied by any United Irishman." "He, however, acknowledges that there are others concerned, and that he is not the principal instigator." All Federalists agreed that the Southern Democratic talk was constructive insurrection,—which it certainly was,—-and they painted graphic pictures of noisy "Jacobins" over their wine, and eager dusky listeners behind their chairs. "It is evident that the French principles of liberty and equality have been effused into ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of a bad and remorseless heart. The expression of his mouth was at the same time both hard and wanton, and his eyes, though full of a lively lustre, resembled in their brightness those of a serpent or hyena. His forehead was constructive but low, and, we may say, rather unintellectual than otherwise. He was without whiskers, a circumstance which caused a wound on the back part of his jaw to be visible, and one-half of the left-hand little finger ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... cannot produce new species or varieties or cause modifications of living organisms to come into existence. On the contrary, its sole function is to prevent evolution. In its action it is destructive merely,—not constructive,—causing death and extinction, not life and progression. Death cannot produce life; and though natural selection may produce the death of the unfit, it cannot produce the fit, far less evolve the fittest. It may permit the fit to survive by not killing them off, if they are already in existence; ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... which may be called the Heart of European Civilization. There, all to which the spirit of society attaches itself appears broken, vague, and half developed,—the Antique in ruins, and the New not formed. It is, perhaps, the only country in which the Constructive principle has not kept pace with the Destructive. The Has Been is blotted out; the To Be is as the shadow of a far land in a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as Constructive Notice.—Recordation of a document in the Copyright Office gives all persons constructive notice of the facts stated in the recorded ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America: - contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. • Library of Congress Copyright Office
... in any other known gold field, so finding it and getting it out, and then getting the mineral out of the strange new kind of ore, required resourcefulness, "original research," as the scientists say, and constructive imagination. And the technical problems of discovering and manipulation once solved, there was still needed organization, system, and administration to make ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... and systems of thought more inconsistent with modern ideas. As a consequence, where in India the modern spirit has come, it has stripped men barer of belief. Listen to the following curious conglomeration, showing the influences at work, constructive and destructive. It is a passage from the pamphlet already referred to, The Future of India; the author is arguing for what he calls "practical recognition of the Fatherhood of God"—one new positive idea. That idea he takes to mean ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison |
