"Equipoise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:" or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the name, and apparently to the profit, of the Hindoo princes. France and England had made peace; the English and French Companies in India had not laid down arms. Their power, as well as the importance of their establishments was as yet in equipoise. At Surat both Companies had places of business; on the coast of Malabar the English had Bombay, and the French Mahe; on the coast of Coromandel the former held Madras and Fort St. George, the latter Pondicherry and Karikal. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and my share of the unclaimed stones, I found that I had a very considerable fortune. The whole of my stones I sold to De Beers, for if I had placed them on the open market I should have upset the delicate equipoise of diamond values. When I came finally to cast up my accounts, I found that I had secured a fortune of a trifle over a quarter of a ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... have listened to you; you shall listen to me!" She spoke sharply. Now she displayed the equipoise of one who had learned much from self-reliant contact with men. "I'll not argue with you about what you call love. But there's something which love must have, and that's self-respect. If your folly on account of me takes you away from ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... short of our word 'religious.' This condition of language we need not wonder at: the language of life must naturally receive, as in a mirror, the realities of life. Difficult it is to maintain a just equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks back over his uttered past—brown desert to him, in which there is no sustenance—he looks forward ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a "mast-fed lawyer" and it is true that his opportunities for reading continued to be most restricted. Davis said in regard to Lincoln's work as a lawyer: "He had a magnificent equipoise of head, conscience, and heart. In non-essentials he was pliable; but on the underlying principles of truth and justice, his will was as firm as steel." We find from the record of Lincoln's work in the Assembly and later in Congress ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... that Waring maintained from first to last. "Pills" ventured a query as to whether the amount of Krug and Clicquot consumed might not have overthrown his mental equipoise. No, Sam declared, he drank very little. "The only bacchanalian thing I did was to join in a jovial chorus from a new French opera which Lascelles's friend piped up and I ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... that I too can take liberties,—else I should not have come. Your letter solved the difficulty, for, when I was at the very height of the struggle before mentioned—at equipoise so to speak,—and knew not whether to go to the right or to the left, that decided me. I regarded it ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... moment read in Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can the mighty conception of duty alone hold us erect—I have no other care than to keep myself in equipoise. The body must, the spirit will, and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing—fill ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... weaknesses had been so mercifully adjusted by destiny that each could find in the other some support—whether real or fancied does not matter. For illusions, if they last, form as good a working basis for life as reality, and in the Gore household, whether by imagination or not, the equipoise of life had been most skilfully adjusted. The amount of shining phantasies that had interwoven themselves into the woof of the family destiny had become so much a part of the real fabric that they ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... surpassed by none; yet have they led me up till now, I admit, to no very definite conclusions. With suspension of judgment, therefore, not being given to dogmatize on anything, and with open mind I trust, in equipoise of thought desiring to hold an even balance of opinion 'twixt this and that, I am studious still of being receptive of light from every source—rejecting nothing that in the least degree makes for righteousness, hence my taking the chair here tonight, hoping to learn what may help to resolve ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... fallen to 27.6 and the size of the family to 3.6 children.[100] It should be added that in all the Australasian colonies the birth-rate reached its lowest point some years ago, and may now be regarded as in a state of normal equipoise with a slight tendency to rise. The case of New Zealand is specially interesting. New Zealand once had the highest birth-rate of all the Australasian colonies; it is without doubt the most advanced of all in social and legislative matters; a variety of social ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... wherewith crowned, Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire. How many trampled and deciduous joys Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still, Before the distance shall fulfil Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise! Happiness is the shadow of things past, Which fools still take for that which is to be! And not all foolishly: For all the past, read true, is prophecy, And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last, And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring. Then leaf, and flower, ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... a dull exhausted calm appears to fall upon them—a period of repose, a lull after the excitement of hurried events, a pause in which to draw breath for the renewal of the story. Grateful are these interludes, and necessary for the preservation of true equipoise, but they are not interesting, and in novels all description of them is carelessly skipped over. In stories we ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... reason, the dual system of government has been profoundly modified by the great elemental forces of our mechanical age, so that the scales, which try to hold in nice equipoise the Federal Government on the one hand and the States on the other, have been greatly disturbed. Originally, the States were the powerful political entities, and the central government a mere agent for certain specific purposes; but, in the development ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... and social matters—to produce, in fact, a book for British citizens and British subjects, rather than a book for students of political history. That the inner working of the unwritten constitution of the country; that some of the unrealised checks and balances; that the delicate equipoise of the component parts of our executive machinery, should stand revealed, was inevitable. We have thought it best, throughout, to abstain from unnecessary comment and illustration. The period is so recent, ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... possession of the eternal vision. When once the eternal vision has been ours, the memory of it does not associate itself with any energy of our own. The memory of these eternal moments associates itself with a mood in which the creative energy rests upon its own equipoise, upon its own rhythm; a mood in which the spectacle of the universe, the magic of Nature, the love in all living souls, the contact of mortality with immortality, become things which blend themselves together; a mood in which ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... sat with Kate, often dangled in the line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise—one or the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance could be ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... life. "From Rome," says Friedrich von Mueller, "from the midst of the richest and grandest life, dates the stern maxim of 'Renunciation' which governed his subsequent being and doing, and which furnished his only guarantee of mental equipoise ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... three travellers got into their car. The doctor lit the combustible in his cylinder and turned the flame so as to produce a rapid heat, and the balloon, which had rested on the ground in perfect equipoise, began to rise in a few minutes, so that the seamen had to slacken the ropes they held it by. The car then rose about twenty feet ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... command the most speed, but their apparatus seems the most delicate and consummate. Apparently a fine play of muscle, a subtle shifting of the power along the outstretched wings, a perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equipoise, sustains them and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art; not merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that work becomes leisure and movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in general AS-YOU-WERE! Yes truly, the tornado was Infernal; but Heaven too had silently its purposes in it. Nor is the mere expenditure of men's diabolic rages, in mutual clash as of opposite electricities, with reduction to equipoise, and restoration of zero and repose again after seven years, the one or the principal result arrived at. Inarticulately, little dreamt of at the time by any by-stander, the results, on survey ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that he could expect nothing in future from New England and Pennsylvania, but would look to the South for support for the presidency.[392] On the contrary, one would say that his strong New England following would act as an equipoise, preventing too great a dip toward the Southern end of the scales. Besides, Douglas's hold on his own constituents and the West was contingent upon the favor of the strong New England element in the Northwest. If this convention taught ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... loved God to go on for a twelvemonth and never think of, or care to please, or desire to be near, the object that he loved? And inasmuch as, deep down at the bottom of our moral being, there is no such thing possible as indifference and a perfect equipoise in reference to God, it is clear enough, I think, that—although the word must not be pressed as if it meant conscious and active antagonism,—where there is no love ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... its only important feature; for St. Paul's is not a Byzantine church in which the dome is practically not a part, but the whole. It is the most magnificent member of a magnificent building, and with its graceful equipoise and conscious evidence of stability stands alone and in a class by itself amongst the cathedral ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think, was more at home with Addison than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... is goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering, barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end. One misses the ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide. But when the dubium concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are enough? Now Impressionists have told us things as to their impressions—as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this man and upon the mood of that—which should not be asserted except on the artistic point of honour. The ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... enthusiasm of her Puritan ancestors, she combined that charm which is so rare among their descendants,—a grace which fascinated the humblest, while it would have been just the same in the society of kings. Her person had the equipoise and symmetry of her mind. While it had its separate points of beauty, each a source of distinct and peculiar pleasure,—as, the outline of her temples, the white line that parted her nightblack hair, the bend of her wrists, the moulding of her ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... by the thrice forbidden fruit, She'd lose her equipoise, And like a wayward Pleiad ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... pretext for these and all similar proceedings, was the proper adjustment in Porpheero, of what he facetiously styled the "Equipoise of Calabashes;" which he stoutly swore was essential to the security of the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... hitherto produced, some from the labours of every publisher I have advanced into the text; those are to be considered as in my opinion sufficiently supported; some I have rejected without mention, as evidently erroneous; some I have left in the notes without censure or approbation, as resting in equipoise between objection and defence; and some, which seemed specious but not right, I have inserted ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... yourself, what did that do to make up for the wrong? That you may have bettered by your suffering is well for you, but what atonement is there in the suffering? The notion is a false one altogether. Punishment, deserved suffering, is no equipoise to sin. It is no use laying it in the other scale. It will not move it a hair's breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin. It is not of the same kind, not under the same laws, any more than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment; but when we forgive and ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... of the Sa@nkhyas that the pradhana may be called all-knowing on account of knowledge constituting an attribute of the gu/n/a Goodness is inadmissible. For as in the pradhana-condition the three gu/n/as are in a state of equipoise, knowledge which is a quality of Goodness only is not possible[91]. Nor can we admit the explanation that the pradhana is all-knowing because endowed with the capacity for all knowledge. For if, in the condition of equipoise of the gu/n/as, we term the pradhana ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut |
