"Inventive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my inventive genius. Well;—yes; I should say that would be nice,—travelling about Europe with a clergyman. I shouldn't get enough advantage out of it to make it pay, but I fancy it will ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Although bred in a remote provincial town, and without the benefit of a liberal education, they were possessed in a high degree of ingenuity and the spirit of observation. They educated themselves, and acquired an unusually large stock of information, which their inventive and original minds led them to apply in new fields of speculation. They were associated in business with their father, a man who passed his quiet days like a patriarch amidst a large family and a numerous body of dependants, until he reached the ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... possess the facile play and classic grace of their pens, but his vigorous eloquence had the clear ring of our mother tongue. I will not say that he was so astute, so quick, so inventive as the one or another of them—that his mind was characterized by the vivacity of wit, the rich colorings of fancy, or daring flights of imagination. But with him thought and action like well-trained coursers kept abreast in the chariot race, guided by an eye that never quailed, reined ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... books are not," said Mr. Carmyle shortly. He was finding Ginger's reserve a little trying, and wished that he had been more inventive. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the station she was designed to occupy in the scale of being. Tender and affectionate, it is her highest bliss to minister to the wants, the convenience, or the pleasure of those she loves; and hence, her inventive powers have been, in all ages, called into early and active exercise, in the fabrication of those articles calculated to accomplish those desirable ends. Amongst these, Useful and Ornamental Needlework, ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... things I went to one of the principal Fire Brigade Stations. We all know, or ought to know, the Americans are an inventive race. Much I saw showed great ingenuity, and not only that but high powers of organization. I may mention one instance. The horses for service stand ready harnessed except their collars (the harness is peculiarly simple). The said collars are suspended in front of the fire-engine, ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... and inventive genius to dioptrics, which, when treated of by him, became a new art. And if he was mistaken in some things, the reason of that is, a man who discovers a new tract of land cannot at once know all ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... with humorous situations and singular plots, and peopled with eccentric characters that afford amusement on every page. His most successful writing is done when he explains contrivances upon which his story depends. He is an original and inventive expert juggler who moves with careless ease to the most effective ends. His characters are little more than pieces of mechanism that act when he pulls the string. They have little emotion and even in their love-making ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... legend we read of a character who was satisfied with nothing, "even pudding would not content him," and this unconscionable fellow worried his family out of all heart with his new ways and ideas. He represents a progressive, inventive race. He was building a great house, but the days were too short; so, like Maui, he determined to catch the sun in nets and ropes; but the sun went on. At last he succeeded; he caught him. The good man then had time to finish his house, but the sun cried and cried "until ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... 5,000,000 square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of only 39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As France had, a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to the backward peoples of Africa and the East; and was finding in ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... sighting shot on my part. I argued that he must be an English-speaking man. The smart and inventive turn of the modern Yank has made him a specialist in ingenious devices, straight or crooked. Unpickable locks and invincible lock-pickers, burglar-proof safes and safe-specializing burglars, come equally from the States. So I tried a very simple test. As we talked that day and ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... impossibility of supplying the amount, intensity, and variety of movement required to make it most effective. The power of the arm and the strength of the operator are exhausted before the desired effect is produced. Inventive genius has at last overcome the obstacles to the successful and perfect administration of motion as a curative agent. We have now a series of machines propelled by mechanical power, by the use of which we ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... science are beginning to see—is precisely a newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has been unfortunately necessary—or perhaps fortunately necessary—for the great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is appallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bourgeois gathering, the most brilliant talent and highest nobility flocked to them, regardless of rank or station, wealth or influence. Pellisson, the great master, the prince, the Apollo of her Saturdays, was a man of wonderfully inventive genius, and possessed in a higher degree than any of his contemporaries the art of inventing surprises for the society that lived on novelty. When, on account of his devotion to Fouquet, he was imprisoned in the Bastille, Mlle. de Scudery managed to persuade Colbert to brighten ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... was Erica's favorite resort, her own particular property. It was about fifteen feet square, and no one but a Londoner would have bestowed on it so dignified a name. But Erica, who was of an inventive turn, had contrived to make the most of the little patch of ground, had induced ivy to grow on the ugly brick walls, and with infinite care and satisfaction had nursed a few flowers and shrubs into tolerably healthy though smutty ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... what he shall do (there being no practical reason for doing one thing more than another, or indeed anything at all), instead of applying his power, with steady, habitual certainty of purpose and efficiency of execution, to doing it in the very best way. Hence, despite this outlay of inventive force, or rather in direct consequence thereof, there is none of that completeness and measure and congruity, that restrained exuberance of fancy, that more than adequate carrying out, that all-round harmony, which are possible ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a bit spoiled by all this flattery and homage. He worked all the harder; resolved to achieve yet greater triumphs in science than he had yet done. An opportunity soon arose to turn his knowledge and inventive powers to account in a very important way. For a long time the English public had every now and then been horrified by the terrible explosions which took place in the coal mines. These explosions resulted often in an appalling loss of human life. Their ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... number of States in this Union has nearly doubled, the population has almost quadrupled, and our boundaries have been extended from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Our territory is checkered over with railroads and furrowed with canals. The inventive talent of our country is excited to the highest pitch, and the numerous applications for patents for valuable improvements distinguish this age and this people from all others. The genius of one American has enabled our commerce to move against wind and tide and that of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... sly wink to the company, proposed to take me as an apprentice to one or other of his professions, either of which undoubtedly would have given full scope to whatever inventive talent I might possess. The bibliopolist spoke a few words in opposition to my plan—influenced partly, I suspect, by the jealousy of authorship, and partly by an apprehension that the viva-voce practice would become general among ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... renewed by the London daily press, of surprise at the meagerness of our country's share in the Great Exhibition. Had any other young nation of Twenty Millions, located three to five thousand miles off, sent a collection so large and so creditable to its industrial proficiency and inventive power, it would have been warmly commended by these same journals; but it is deemed desirable to make an impression on the public mind of Europe adverse to American skill and attainment in the Arts, and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... sell his property for their profit; and this because, in spite of the violated conscience of the nation, we refuse to give him protection for his property. Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property there recognized as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive genius of our brethren of the North is a source of vast wealth to them and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... however, when there is no alternative; and the British sailor is, with all his faults, an ingenious fellow, not altogether devoid of the inventive faculty, and possessed of a pretty turn for adaptation; give him but the idea and he will generally find the means to ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... influences the sculpture will have will be in the direction of a new impulse to inventive decoration. This field has remained relatively undeveloped, partly owing to our fondness for the portrait idea, but the direction is legitimate and worthy. Architecture, which is the growth of a selective ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... at each promotion earned the goodwill of the men. To-day he is manager-in-chief, and there is a rumour that backed by the influence of his old friend, Sir Dale Melville, he will rise to a junior partnership at no distant date. And in every department of the works some evidence of his inventive genius may be found. But he does not forget the struggles and sorrows of the early days when he was only a "'cumbrance," and in his own happy life there is always sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Perhaps nobody will be surprised to hear that he married pretty ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... remark the blemishes and imperfections of this poet, we must acknowledge his extraordinary merits. In composition he is, in general, elegant and correct; and where the subject is capable of connection with sentiment, his inventive ingenuity never fails to extract from it the essence of delight and surprise. His fancy is prolific of beautiful images, and his (505) judgment expert in arranging them to the greatest advantage. He bestows panegyric with inimitable ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... progress by shaking with a grin before the wearied inventor some skeleton puppet of buried ages, which resembles his great thought as a hut resembles a palace. On the contrary, I find in this strange frequency of anticipation among Indo-Germanic races, and in its premature failures, a vast proof of inventive vitality and of promise of great rising truths into all future ages. 'Steam power is nothing new,' say the advocates of the genius of the past. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam toy—as he who can read his Spiritalia published by the Jesuits in 1693 may learn for himself. But ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... producing almost every article in the market. In this country, especially, are inventors a class of indirect laborers essential to all ultimate production as it now goes on. The improvements in the instruments of production are the results of an inventive ability which has made American machinery known all over the world. They, too, as well as the teacher, are paid (a small fraction, of course) out of the ultimate result, by an indirect path, and materially change the ease or difficulty, cheapness or dearness, of production in nearly every branch ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... some form of inventive genius. Tom Swift is a bright, ingenious boy and his inventions and adventures make the most interesting kind ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... naivete, the simple pleasures, the ignorance, and the honest boredom with the solitudes of nature—of a whole class of Italians, not only of the time when it was written, but of the present day. It is a delightful, inventive piece of gay and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... that Gaudenzio Ferrari's feeling was profound, whereas Raphael's was at best only skin deep. Nevertheless Signor Morelli is impressed with Ferrari's greatness, and places him, "for all in all, as regards inventive genius, dramatic life, and picturesqueness * * far above Luini." Bernardino Luini must stand so very high that no one can be placed far above him; nevertheless, it is hard not to think that Gaudenzio Ferrari was upon the whole the ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... Arnold, who is much in favour of founding an academy, which is not only to judge of original works but of the criticisms of others upon them, states the matter very fairly. He says, "So far as routine and authority tend to embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius; and, to this extent, to the human spirit's general advance. But then this evil is so much compensated by the propagation on a large ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... mother of progress. The Chinese for centuries have been taught to be satisfied with having things like their fathers had. As a consequence they have almost entirely lost the inventive faculty. Long ago they were an inventive nation, but now an invention among them is a rarity. As long as people are satisfied, they are content to remain as they are. Satisfaction is the foe to progress. As long as you are fully satisfied, you ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart—this remains a spectacle for the gods—for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic spirit ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... exercised too much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by the common modes of education. Whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories; whilst they are learning tables of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and their reasoning faculties are absolutely passive; nor are any of the facts which they learn in this manner, associated with circumstances in real life. These trains of ideas may with much pains and labour be fixed in the ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... volute modification of the helix to show the concentration of magnetism at its centre, adapted to the electric magnet, the modification since universally adopted in the construction of the electro-magnet, is justly due, I think, to the inventive mind of Prof. James Freeman Dana. Death, in striking him down at the threshold of his fame, not only extinguished a brilliant light in science—one which gave the highest promise of future distinction—but the suddenness of the stroke put to peril the just ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... chased him into the shop to turn over the old debris of the stock. At one time he showed the alarming symptom of brooding over his wife's death. Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly scared. But she was not inventive. It was left to Alvina to suggest: "Why doesn't father let the shop, and some of ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the enemy, will doubtless be very welcome to him!'—'And as to what concerns your secret mission and your discovered conspiracy,' said I to the Austrian ambassador, 'I am sorry that you cannot here give birth to the dear children of your inventive head; go with them to our midwife, Minister Golopkin, and hasten a little, for I see in your face that you are already in ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... something, hammer out something that shall be known as yours for all time. Your other property will find a succession of heirs when you are gone; what I speak of will continue yours for ever—if once it begins to be. I know the capacity and inventive wit that I am spurring on. You have only to think of yourself as the able man others will think you when you have ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... more than ever that which the inscrutable future held for me, I sat down and framed an advertisement, which I contemplated putting in all the newspapers, weeklies, and monthly periodicals, offering a handsome reward for any suggestion which might result in ridding me of the cockney ghost. The inventive mind of man has been able to cope successfully with rats and mice and other household pests. Why, then, should there not be somewhere in the world a person of sufficient ingenuity to cope with an obnoxious spirit? If rat -dynamite and rough on ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... pattern, British and French,—one hundred in all,—stretched across the Gulf of Finland in front of the fortresses of Cronstadt. Behind the fortresses lay the Russian fleet, helpless and abject; and yet, as events showed during our own Civil War half a dozen years later, a very slight degree of inventive ability would have enabled the Russians to annihilate the hostile fleet, and to gain the most prodigious naval victory of modern times. Had they simply taken one or two of their own great ships to the Baird iron-works hard by, and plated them with railway iron, of which there was plenty, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... customs of the peoples of his day in the Far East. He was not satisfied with doing this, but added to his narrative a number of on-dit more or less marvellous in character, which he collected from credulous or inventive persons with whom he came into contact, principally from mariners and ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... turn of mind go about with lanterns on their hats, on their sticks, and wherever they can possibly hang; and the most inventive of all strolls around with his sweetheart under a great umbrella, with a lantern ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity; in all that I have hitherto said, I only wished to guard against admitting that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives: it will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them, whereas, in the serious part of his dramas, he has generally laid hold of some well-known story. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... a case in which a man had to encounter three successive trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him. Failure in one would have been ruin. The odds against him in each trial were desperate, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming. Nevertheless, he made the attempt, and was triumphant, by the narrowest margin, in every struggle. That which is of most ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... seventeenth century (after Lope de Vega) came Calderon. Almost as prolific as Lope, author of at least two hundred plays, some authorities say a thousand, Calderon was first prodigiously inventive, then he was dogmatic, moralising, almost a preacher. Whether in his religious plays, in his love dramas, in his cap and sword tragedies, even in his comedies and highly complicated intrigues, the great sentiments of the Spanish soul—honour, faith, the inviolability ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... error to imagine, that the mind of man, so far as relates to its active and inventive powers, was sunk into a profound sleep, from which it gradually recovered itself at the period when Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and the books and the teachers of the ancient Greek language were dispersed through Europe. The epoch from which modern invention took its rise, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was guarded by numerous sentries. There were small gates in the walls, and these were placed opposite each other, the inner one generally remaining open. The prisoners were allowed the privilege of the yard nearly all day, and this set the inventive mind of Barney upon the scheme, which, in the end, terminated in his liberty; not, however, without infinite danger and trouble. He set about finding out some small chance which might afford the least hope of release; and having discovered one of the sentries ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... write this check in order that it may not be tampered with and "raised" is something that has held the attentions and invited the inventive talents of many people, in and out of business. Even when the best of the chemical papers are used in the bank check the drawer of the paper may have not the slightest protection from "raising" at the ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... with professed philosophers; I am only surprised at his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... an intelligence of which his outer appearance gave no indication; but it seems to be an established fact that the inventive faculties, even of men of inferior mental quality, are sharpened when they are ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... American character, and he illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... handed down from century to century and from nation to nation, and the human mind is in general so slow to invent, that originality in any department of mental exertion is everywhere a rare phenomenon. We are desirous of seeing the result of the efforts of inventive geniuses when, regardless of what in the same line has elsewhere been carried to a high degree of perfection, they set to work in good earnest to invent altogether for themselves; when they lay the foundation of the new edifice on uncovered ground, and draw all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a woman now, Beauteous, majestic, in all elegant arts Accomplish'd, and with accents wing'd replied. Who passes thee in artifice well-framed And in imposture various, need shall find Of all his policy, although a God. Canst thou not cease, inventive as thou art And subtle, from the wiles which thou hast lov'd Since thou wast infant, and from tricks of speech 350 Delusive, even in thy native land? But come, dismiss we these ingenious shifts From our discourse, in which we both excel; For thou of all men in expedients most Abound'st ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... picture of society in present and past times so fresh, so vivid, so natural, so charming, and so true, and all with such inimitable humor, that he still reigns without a peer in his peculiar domain. He is as rich in humor as Fielding, without his coarseness; as inventive as Swift, without his bitterness; as moral as Richardson, without his tediousness. He did not aim to teach ethics or political economy directly, although he did not disguise his opinions. His chief end was to please and instruct at the same ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... by that most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment,—to feed them by the labour of others,—to move them and provide them with destructive machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack,—to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;—and if, finally, having brought masses of men, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... appear to have experienced more or less the impulse given to the sciences towards the close of the eighteenth century. While calamities oppressed this country, and commerce was suspended, the inventive and fertile genius of the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... full of articles of commerce made the courtyard of the inn always a bustling and busy corner of a hustling and busy neighbourhood. In the coaching era, therefore, the "White Hart" was a household word to travellers and business men. Dickens, with his magic pen and inventive genius, made it a household word to the inhabitants of the whole globe, who never had occasion to visit it ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... of his round, squat, busy head he had an inkling that some day he would even matters with some people. Meanwhile he was patient, good-humoured, amusing when given a chance, and, as the few people he knew found out, inventive and resourceful in suggesting new methods of time-killing to any wealthy and fashionable ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Patsy's father, with a solemn wink at the row of curious faces, "your inventive relative has ordered the automobile rebuilt, thinking he's wiser than the makers. He's having a furnace put in it, for one thing—it's a limousine, you know, and all enclosed in glass. Also it's as big as a barn, as ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... inventive," she said, "take heed, when you find your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... purpose was not to be broken; and thereupon a vast cunning came to possess him. He must have time and a chance to plan again: if he should feign sleep, perhaps the woman whose presence and personality were shackling the inventive thought would go away and leave ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... is perhaps the greatest work of human wit. Very well; the same Cervantes, mischievously influenced afterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively proof of his inventive talent, and wrote the 'Persiles and Sigismunda,' where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it really fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine," says Seflor ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... once a time when people all mingled together and cultivated the valleys. Each one by doing his part made it lighter for all. But after many years a few schemers combined and by their inventive genius succeeded in erecting vast sliding curtains over the valleys. These curtains were supported from the tops of the ridges on each side and, by their manipulation, the operators could keep the sunlight from any particular ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Brown may reach the highest range of artistic excellence, he may achieve world-wide fame as an architect, his canvas may glow with the marvellous coloring of Titian or repeat the rare and delicate grace of Correggio, the triumphs of his chisel may reflect honor upon England and his age; the inventive genius of Jones, painfully elaborating, through long and suffering years of obscure poverty, the crude conceptions of his boyhood, may confer inestimable benefits upon his race; the scientific discoveries of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... gradual. It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting life. The appearance of arrow heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen, or with his dog. The scraping knives of flint, indicate the use of skin for clothing, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... themselves of these resources, which must have led to great improvements in their architecture, and almost entirely reserved the use of stone for ornamental purposes. This would tend to show, at all events, that the Assyrians were not distinguished for inventive genius. They had wandered northward from the lowlands, where they had dwelt for centuries as a portion of the Chaldean nation. When they separated from it and went off to found cities for themselves, they took with them certain arts ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... and the fecund root, once planted, shot into a luxuriant beauty and symmetry, which nothing could check. The Church wisely gave up its opposition, and henceforth there was nothing to impede the progress of a product which spread and naturalized itself in England, France, and Germany. The inventive genius of Monteverde, Carissimi, Scarlatti (the friend and rival of Handel), Durante, and Leonardo Leo, perfected the forms of the opera nearly as we have them today. A line of brilliant composers in the school of Durante and Leo brings us down through ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... hatred of all the Russian bores who had made his life weary, he selected an old, ruined man, Potugin, to express his own sentiments—disgust with the present condition of Russia, and admiration for the culture of Europe and the practical inventive power of America. Potugin says that he had just visited the exposition at the Crystal Palace in London, and that he reflected that "our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... in the village of Shopton, New York, and their factories covered many acres of ground. Those who wish to read of the earliest activities of Tom in the inventive line are referred to the initial volume, "Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle." From then on he and his father had many and exciting adventures. In a motor boat, an airship, and a submarine respectively the young inventor had gone through ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... Camp-of-Chlum time, pretty far on:... "There are continual foragings, on both sides; with parties mutually dashing out to hinder the same. The Prussians have a detached post at Smirzitz; which is much harassed by Hungarians lurking about, shooting our sentry and the like. An inventive head contrives this expedient. Stuff a Prussian uniform with straw; fix it up, by aid of ropes and check-strings, to stand with musket shouldered, and even to glide about to right and left, on judicious pulling. So it is done: straw man is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to a height obvious to all mankind; respect for its authority was not more apparent at its ancient than it is at its present limits; new and inexhaustible sources of general prosperity have been opened; the effects of distance have been averted by the inventive genius of our people, developed and fostered by the spirit of our institutions; and the enlarged variety and amount of interests, productions, and pursuits have strengthened the chain of mutual dependence and ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... worker in marble, his inventive genius presently wrought out a style of sculpture peculiarly his own. This was the enamelled terra-cotta bas-relief showing pure white figures against a background of pale blue. They were made chiefly in circular medallions, lunettes, and tabernacles, and were scattered throughout the churches ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... reluctantly applied for his old job and became once more a $14 a week shipping clerk. This however was a temporary makeshift, he protested. He was chock full of good ideas, and now he was rid of Stafford, who he claimed, had really paralyzed his efforts, he would be able to give free rein to his inventive genius. Fanny listened patiently. By this time she had few illusions left concerning her husband's chances of success in life. All she asked was that they should get along ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... disadvantages of the language into beauties,[258] in enriching it with circumlocutions and metaphors, in pruning it of harsh and uncouth expressions, in systematizing the structure of a sentence.[259] This is that copia dicendi which gained Cicero the high testimony of Caesar to his inventive powers,[260] and which, we may add, constitutes him the greatest master of composition that the world ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... government gazette, and only a few of the grown-up people are able to read. News travel quickly from one town to another, but every incident is greatly exaggerated; and many extravagant stories are set afloat with no other foundation than the inventive faculties of some idle brain. To appreciate what an immense aid a newspaper press is to the dissemination of truth one must travel in some such country as Nicaragua where newspapers do not circulate. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... the Poetical Character is here and there a little involved and obscure; but its general conception is magnificent, and beaming that spirit of inventive enthusiasm, which alone can cherish the poet's powers, and bring forth the due fruits. Collins never touched the lyre but he was borne away by the inspiration under which he laboured. The Dirge in Cymbeline, the lines on Thomson, and the Ode on Colonel Ross breathe ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... man, and he had hitherto shown much inventive ability; but in that month in the cave he had developed into an intellectual giant. After mature deliberation, he proposed a prodigious scheme to his followers. He explained that, while they might, by using the utmost ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... a famine of invention in the land, we must travel, he says, like Joseph's brethren, far for food; we must visit the remote and rich ancients. But an inventive genius may safely stay at home: that, like the widow's cruise, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight. He asks why it should seem altogether impossible, that heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the rest of the World: But Business and Trade is not to be managed by the same Heads which write Poetry, and make Plans for the Conduct of Life in general. So tho' we are at this day beholden to the late witty and inventive Duke of Buckingham for the whole Trade and Manufacture of Glass, yet I suppose there is no one will aver, that, were his Grace yet living, they would not rather deal with my diligent Friend and Neighbour, Mr. Gumley, for any Goods ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... camped. He was too much a part of nature—too natural—to be separated from his mountains, trees and glaciers. Somewhere, I am sure, he is making other explorations, solving other natural problems, using that brilliant, inventive genius to good effect; and some time again I shall hear him unfold anew, with still clearer insight and more eloquent words, fresh secrets of his "mountains ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... common dish. But all the natives ate them boiled—they say— Because the stranger taught no other way. At last the experiment by one was tried— Sagacious man!—of having his eggs fried. And, O! what boundless honors, for his pains, His fruitful and inventive fancy gains! Another, now, to have them baked devised— Most happy thought I—and still another, spiced. Who ever thought eggs were so delicate! Next, some one gave his friends an omelette. "Ah!" all exclaimed, "what an ingenious feat!" But scarce a year went by, an ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... ABEL. I'm usually inventive. Let me see. Look here, why couldn't you have his refused picture brought home just as all your friends have ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... habitually accept a mechanical routine, because in the exercise of their ostensible calling their imaginative faculties are drawn away to pursuits more alluring. Therefore, in their proper vocation they are seldom bold or inventive,—out of it they are sometimes both to excess. And when they do take up a novelty in their own profession they cherish it with an obstinate tenacity, and an extravagant passion, unknown to those quiet philosophers who take up novelties every day, examine them with the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Second were trained during the civil war and the revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd, vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the firm and masculine virtues. The statesman ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... right—eh, Connie? Bravo—that's grand!—Oh, you needn't tell me! I can imagine it's been a beastly piece of work, but anyway it's over now. You must go home and go to bed, and I'll account for you somehow to Louisa. My mind's becoming quite inventive to-night, I promise you.—There, get in—try to pull yourself together. Miss St. Quentin, upon my word, I don't know how to thank you. You've been magnificent, and put us under an everlasting obligation, Con and Decies, and my father and I.—Nice ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... these, others such as this one only two. These ornaments were roughly cast in brass and afterward more carefully lacquered and finished by the clockmaker himself. Sometimes, however, we find them crudely executed as if they had been taken direct from the mold. Clockmakers of that time were not so inventive as we; neither had they had training in design, and as a result we see little variety in these brass ornamentations. At one period all these spandrels took the form of cherub's heads, an idea that may possibly have been copied from the Italians. Later a pattern with two cherubs ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... oblique opening and occasionally awkward style, Barksted's Mirrha is a poem of more power than Dom Diego. Among its more affecting passages are a vivid portrayal of a "gloomy gallerie" lined with portraits of Mirrha's suitors (p. 128) and an inventive account of Hebe's spilling the nectar that rained spices on Panchaia (p. 147). Barksted's early and unqualified recognition of Shakespeare's greatness, and his humbly accurate assessment of his own limited powers, compared to "neighbor" Shakespeare's, are quite ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... mere taunt flung out by his inventive fancy; but as he persisted in it, and threatened exposure and a variety of consequences, I became alarmed, for I had little doubt that, innocent as I was, I could be made very uncomfortable by accusations which ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... these, and perhaps other occasions, Bonaparte displayed some of the frolic temper of youth, mixed with the inventive genius and the talent for commanding others by which he was distinguished in after time, his life at school was in general that of a recluse and severe student, acquiring by his judgment, and treasuring in his memory, that wonderful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... on a bit, Poppity," said Quashy, whose inventive capacity in the way of endearing terms was great, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... think of the speed and prompt regularity with which they were produced; and the fertile ingenuity with which the pill of political economy is wrapped up in the confectionery of a tale, may stand as a marvel of true cleverness and inventive dexterity. Of course, of imagination or invention in a high sense there is not a trace. Such a quality was not in the gifts of the writer, nor could it in any case have worked within such limitations as those set by the matter and the object ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... the reason why we prefer the logic of those men who, declaiming against the invasion of exotic merchandise, have, at least, the courage to declaim as well against the excess of production due to the inventive ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... francs' worth of jewellery to mine, this man, this wretched youth would not perhaps have had the stupid idea of robbing me. Who can say what schemes had floated through the mind of the poor fellow, who was perhaps half-starved, or perhaps excited by a clever, inventive brain? Perhaps when he stopped and looked at the jeweller's window he said to himself: "There is jewellery there worth a million francs. If it were all mine I would sell it and go back to Belgium. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... were always his favourite exercise; the bird or figure he did as a task, but was relieved by working the scenery and back-ground; and after each figure he flew to the tail-piece with avidity, for in the inventive faculty his imagination revelled." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also the larger imagination which can people situation with character and which can make situation significant as an opportunity ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... capital for a given output; and the striking fact is that this effect may be realized by means of devices which actually save capital at particular points in the industry. If, after power looms were introduced, some inventive genius had made them cost only a quarter as much as on their first introduction they had cost, the profits of the business would have been increased and, in time, far more capital in the shape of spinning machinery, engines, etc., would have been required ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... could not drag a complicated, ramifying simile through half a dozen pages at least. These artificialities lacked the saving grace of those of the Renaissance writers—their abounding vigour and their inventive skill. They were cold-blooded artificialities, evolved elaborately, simply for their own sake. The new school, with its twisted conceits and its super-subtle elegances, came to be known as the 'Precious' school, and it is under that name that the satire of subsequent writers has handed it ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... was able, in 1814, by the adaptation of the glue and molasses roller, to print the first edition of a newspaper that was ever run from a cylinder press—the historic edition of The London Times. The problem of the inking apparatus solved, there was no longer any limit to the exercise of inventive genius in the advancement of the printing art; and it is, therefore, to the printer's roller, more than to any one thing, that that art owes ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... in knowledge and invention. It is not the Power that has the most ships or the biggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Power that thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive. Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for a quicker adversary. Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navy is going to keep above the general national level in these things? Is the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... cross-roads, detective vigilance kept sleepless watch, and fancied in every approaching form, the doomed victims, who were at once to satisfy the angry gallows and its own excited avarice. Equally well assured were we that the most inventive and hazardous scrutiny would never track our footsteps to the dizzy height of Carn-Tuathail. One motive with us was to baffle all calculation on the part of our pursuers. When we found we were tracked and discovered, our first care was to consider how our enemies would be likely ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... what I should have said. As I am not an inventive liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which the gods forbid, my means would not enable ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... publish them. Ascanio Condivi, at the close of his biography, makes this announcement: 'I hope ere long to make public some of his sonnets and madrigals, which I have been long collecting, both from himself and others who possessed them, with a view to proving to the world the force of his inventive genius and the beauty of the thoughts produced by that divine spirit.' Condivi's promise was not fulfilled. With the exception of two or three pieces printed by Vasari, and the extracts quoted by Varchi in his 'Lezione,'[5] the poems of Michael Angelo remained in manuscript ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... bad as that. And anyhow I'm an inventive genius, and I'll bet we can have some fun even ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... legend connected with this story worth telling. Daedalus, the builder of the Labyrinth, at length fell under the displeasure of Minos, and was confined within the windings of his own edifice. He had no clue like Theseus, but he had resources in his inventive skill. Making wings for himself and his son Icarus, the two flew away from the Labyrinth and their foe. The father safely reached Sicily; but the son, who refused to be governed by his father's wise advice, flew so high in his ambitious folly that the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in sleeping-cars are much indebted to Henry Bessemer, to whose inventive genius they owe the beautiful steel rails over which the cars glide so steadily. It was he who so simplified and cheapened the process of making steel that it can ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... observer his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... merely with a view to their immediate utility. They would be introduced to the pupil under analogous relationships. In cutting out pieces for his card-houses, in drawing ornamental diagrams for colouring, and in those various instructive occupations which an inventive teacher will lead him into, he may for a length of time be advantageously left, like the primitive builder, to tentative processes; and so will learn through experience the difficulty of achieving his aims by ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... from Paradise, to long hard labor and development; and Paradise was taken from earth. Even the paradisaical condition, with its short duration, was deficient in all the various gifts of life which are a product of human inventive faculty and skill, and which can leave behind vestiges and remains. But what the Holy Scripture relates or indicates of the after-paradisaical primitive history of man, wholly corresponds to the idea of ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... sealskin bags—the winter provision of gas-tank, electric storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the chaplain examined the cards with curiosity and that admiration of inventive resource which a superior mind cannot help feeling. There they were, a fine red deuce of hearts and a fine black four of spades—cards made without pasteboard and painted without paint. But how? that was the question. The chaplain entered ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... histrionic prevails,—by facility of association and colloquial aptitude in the common intercourse of life,—by the inventive element in dress, furniture, and material arrangements, plastic to the caprice of taste and ingenuity,—by the habitudes of out-of-door life, giving greater variety and adaptation to manners,—and by a national temperament, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... breadth and depth, in tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;—it is in these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs until the mail should be ready and the fun could begin. But at no other time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that first duty to his children; and there is a pleasant tale of the inventive Master Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane, bringing to the study where his father sat at work a half-wound reel that formed some part of his design, and observing, "Papa, you might finiss windin' this for me; I am ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an inventive genius. He invented things for the pleasure of it rather than with any idea of ultimately profiting from the results of his ingenuity, which may explain why it was that his friends deemed many of his contrivances a sheer waste of time. Among other ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... been said on the mysteries of the writer's art. We know, it may be, how the links of Shakespeare's magic chain of words are forged, but the same cannot be said of any other poet. We have studied Dante's philosophy and his ideal of love; but have we found out the secrets of his "inventive handling of rhythmical language"? If Flaubert is univerally acknowledged to have created a masterpiece in "Madame Bovary," should there not be an interest for criticism in following out, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, word by word, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... have been displayed. It was chiefly with railway enterprises, and this almost from their inception, and to an extent far beyond the rivalry of any other constructor, that Mr. Brassey was engaged; and the railway system, not only by its own immense demands on capital, labor and inventive skill, but still more by the stimulus and aid it has given to industrial enterprises of every kind, must be regarded as the main lever of a material progress that has outstripped the conceptions and possibilities of all previous ages. With the development ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... setting forth its defects, and advancing some of the views upon which he acted himself in after life. Here he also met with Watt, who had just produced the steam-engine, which Fulton studied enthusiastically. His own inventive genius was not idle, and while living in Devonshire, he produced an improved mill for sawing marble, which won him the thanks and medal of the British Society for the Promotion of the Arts and Commerce; a machine for spinning flax and making ropes; and an excavator for scooping out the channels ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... scarcely so much. Since the death of his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in all the mysteries of his science, and who, being distinguished by an experimental and inventive tendency, was generally believed to have poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation),— since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing struggle, he found it expedient to take down the ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... drama of an inventive and exacting faith, Laura Fountain passed like a being from another world, an alien and a mocking spirit. She said nothing, but her eyes were satires. The effect of her presence in the house was felt probably ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... retain no defilement or agitation; which a child could scatter and divide, and yet was absolutely powerful and insuperable. I will call him Amroth. Him, I say, because though there was no thought of sex left in my consciousness, his was a courageous, inventive, masterful spirit, which gave rather than received, and was withal of a perfect kindness and directness, love undefiled and strong. The moment I became aware of his presence, I felt him to be like one of those wonderful, pure youths of an Italian picture, whose whole mind is ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in external nature; but which, from the data of external nature, the mind creates, partly by combination, and partly from a power of its own invention altogether. The external senses in educated man are obedient to this inventive direction of the mind, and at length receive their greater, perhaps often only, pleasures from it. It is easy to imagine how the more evident and real beauties of the inferior schools, for we do not hesitate to speak of the Italian as the higher, more easily captivate, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Bittra Campion and the launch of the great fishing-boat, that was to bring untold wealth to Kilronan. Meanwhile our faculties were not permitted to rust, for we had a glorious procession on the great Fete-Dieu, organized, of course, and carried on to complete success by the zeal and inventive piety of my young curate. My own timidity, and dread of offending Protestant susceptibilities—a timidity, I suppose, inherited from the penal days—would have limited that procession to the narrow confines of the chapel yard; but the larger and more trusting ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Unparalleled resources, the fortuitous historical moment, the tide of immigration drawing on the best of the world, the implicit good in conception necessarily resultant in the explicit best of being; high purpose, inventive genius, exploratory urge, competitive spirit, fraternal enthusiasm, what does the ascription matter if the end product was clear for ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocracies—it may be, worshipped ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... the same time the material interests of his country and the influence of his government. There can be no doubt but that Jacques Coeur was unscrupulous and frequently visionary as a man of business; but, at the same time, he was inventive, able, and bold, and, whilst pushing his own fortunes to the utmost, he contributed a great deal to develop, in the ways of peace, the commercial, industrial, diplomatic, and artistic enterprise of France. In his relations towards his king, Jacques Coeur ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... bridges and other important structures in all parts of the kingdom, but more especially in Scotland and on the Welsh border. Many of the most picturesque bridges in Britain, which every tourist has admired, often without inquiring or thinking of the hand that planned them, were designed by his inventive brain. The exquisite stone arch which links the two banks of the lesser Scotch Dee in its gorge at Tongueland is one of the most picturesque; for Telford was a bit of an artist at heart, and, unlike too many modern railway constructors, he always ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... a crowd is less headlong when it sees a strong force arrayed against it in front. But it seems to me that, at present, Conservatism can but be what it now is,—a party that may combine for resistance, and will not combine for inventive construction. We are living in an age in which the process of unsettlement is going blindly at work, as if impelled by a Nemesis as blind as itself. New ideas come beating into surf and surge against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and breakwaters; ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... again, never dreaming that it was supposed to have originally issued from the station, she meditated much upon this temperamental savagery in man, and the difficulty it occasioned in conforming him to those sagacious schemes for his benefit which she nourished in her inventive little pate. The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers from the Keowee vanished like mist. On the one hand the stationers were assured that the stampede of the cattle was now regarded as inadvertent, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically,—a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... sentiment had appeared. There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave trade should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton, sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far into the reign of King Charles; but, ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... intriguing to accomplish their destruction. Curry says, in his Historical Review: "The great possessions of these two devoted Irish princes, proved the cause of their ruin. After the successful issue of the plot-contriving Cecil's gunpowder adventure in England, he turned his inventive thoughts towards this country. A plot to implicate the great northern chieftains was soon set on foot, and finally proved successful. The conspiracy is thus related by a learned English divine, Dr. Anderson, in his Royal Genealogies, printed in London, 1736: 'Artful Cecil employed ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... ordinarily the most inventive of the four; but it must be also said that the very name of ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was regarded as representing the personification of divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the human mind. A little library of forty-two books—which a patricist saw, but not being initiate could not read—was attributed to him.[17] The books contained the entire hieratic belief. Fragments that are held to have survived in an extant ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... the gay, inventive nineties, Emil Frey, a young delicatessen keeper in New York, tried to please some bereft customers by making an imitation of Bismarck Schlosskaese. This was imperative because the imported German cheese didn't stand up during the long sea trip and Emil's customers, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... Perhaps he might form some traps, as he knew that such means were used for catching birds, but how to construct them was the puzzle. He turned the matter over and over again in his mind, and discovered that he had no inventive genius. "I shall have to go back to the shellfish, after all," he said, with a sigh; "but I must get a stick for a bow. I will try two or three, out of which one surely will answer ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... to undertake the higher branches of industrial work, to reach the position in which they may render that service to the community. If all our educational expenditure did nothing but pick one man of scientific or inventive genius, each year, from amidst the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and give him the chance of making the best of his inborn faculties, it would be a very good investment. If there is one such child among the hundreds of thousands of our annual ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... eyes to the sky with a sense of impatience at the slowness of the sun's rising. In his mind he reviewed the whole chapter of events which during the past three years had made him the paid vassal of a rich woman's fancy—his entire time taken up, and all the resources of his inventive and artistic nature (which were exceptionally great) drawn upon for the purpose of carrying out designs which at first seemed freakish and impossible, but which later astonished him by the extraordinary scientific acumen they displayed, as well as by their adaptability to the forces of nature. ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... needs, and shown its power of entire adaptation to the requirements of new conditions. In its details no less than in its general scope it exhibits the recognition by its builders of the essential characteristics of the best Gothic Art, and shows in the harmonized variety of its parts the inventive thought and the independent execution of many minds and hands presided over by a single will. Gothic architecture in its best development is the expression at once of law and of liberty. The exactest principles of proportion are combined in it with the freest play of fancy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Auntie Sue wondered about Judy, while Brian and Betty Jo exhausted their inventive faculties in efforts to satisfy the dear old lady with plausible reasons for ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... of it, some inventive workman apparently had shoved in, on the top of one of the rows, a part of a volume thin enough to lie between it and the bottom of the next shelf: he had cut away diagonally a considerable portion, and fixed the remnant with one of its open corners ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... lost in making my will." Monsieur Crapaud was too wise to express any astonishment; and his master began to hunt for a tidy-looking stone (paper and cambric were both at an end). They were all rough and dirty; but necessity had made the Viscount inventive, and he took a couple and rubbed them together till he had polished both. Then he pulled out the little pencil, and for the next half hour composed and wrote busily. When it was done he lay down, and read it ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing |
