"Inventiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he was regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and depth of feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic exaggeration. The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At times ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... tell of the life that monkey led them all on board the Vulcan. After the first week only two things lay between him and death at any moment. One was his inventiveness. Tricky's wickedness was nothing, if not original. Every day he was at some new villainy; and anything new on board ship is sacred. There is no Punch published on board ship; but Tricky was all the comic papers ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... "Furthermore, the inventiveness of David is beyond that of Porthos, who cannot play by himself, and knows not even how to take a solitary walk, while David invents playfully all day long. Lastly, when David is discovered of some offence and expresses ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... all times, to justify his ways and tastes, his fancies and even his appearance, to boys and masters alike. Bullying is indeed practically extinct in well-managed schools; but small boys are inquisitive, observant, extremely conventional, almost like savages in their inventiveness of prohibitions and taboos, and perfectly merciless in criticism. The instinct for power is shown by small boys in the desire to make themselves felt, which is most easily accomplished by minute ridicule. Hugh made friends there, but he ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inventiveness, and lyrical qualities, his poetry shows an advance over the Caedmonian cycle. He has a poet's love for the beauty of the sun and the moon (heofon-condelle), for the dew and the rain, for the strife of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... being delighted with trifles,—seem characteristic of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you, no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen. What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you, or in finding some queer thing to show you,—some fantastic plant, or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking trouble to gratify,—what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... conceived in a truly southern spirit, without fantastic efflorescence or imaginative complexity of multiplied parts; while the Renaissance manner, as applied by Tommaso Rodari, has not yet stiffened into the lifeless neo-Latinism of the later cinquecento: it is still distinguished by delicate inventiveness, and beautiful subordination of decorative detail to architectural effect. Under these happy conditions we feel that the Gothic of the nave, with its superior severity and sombreness, dilates into the lucid harmonies of choir and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... letter to a friend, Browning wrote:—"I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the Poem [Ferishtah's Fancies] will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the Poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such person as Ferishtah—the stories are all inventions. ... The Hebrew quotations are ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... so he did not lose the opportunity of expounding how he would change everything! after his own fashion, if the power were in his hands. "Russia," he said, "has fallen behind Europe; we must catch her up. It is maintained that we are young—that's nonsense. Moreover we have no inventiveness: Homakov himself admits that we have not even invented mouse-traps. Consequently, whether we will or no, we must borrow from others. We are sick, Lermontov says—I agree with him. But we are sick from having only half become Europeans, we must take a hair of the dog ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... loss to discover the effects of the combined influences here stated. The ordinary phrases of our country-people denote an alert judgment,—as, "I reckon," "I calculate," "I guess." The inventiveness which characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson dissolves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... what nature has given we have won a kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are new in the world. For example, nothing like the rapidity of the destruction of American forests has ever been known in forest history, and nothing like the efficiency and vigor and inventiveness of the American lumberman has ever been developed by any attack on any forests elsewhere. Probably the most effective tool that the human mind and hand have ever made is the American axe. So the American business man has ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness, on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to achieve what leadership ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... There is little speculation or animation or intelligence or interest among us, and people who desire such an atmosphere are held to be fanciful, eccentric, and artistic. It was not always so with our race. In Elizabethan times we had all the inventiveness, the love of adventure, the pride of dominance that we have now; but there was then a great interest in things of the mind as well, a lively taste for ideas, a love of beautiful things and thoughts. The ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and polished neoliths of an altogether later age applies equally well to the New World—it was just as easy to have got an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in the Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike out a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but it did not occur to their minds ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... experience in poetical conception and metrical arrangement, he but did what artists have always done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost every case surpassing their achievement on the lines they had laid down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that the ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... with emeralds and rubies, and bat-like wings of iridescent hue surpassing the opal, and a tail like a serpent. Our contemporary, nothing doubting, at once published this as original matter in a letter from New York, and had to bear the responsibility. But I did not invest my inventiveness wisely; I should have shared the idea ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... health is to be alive, and I don't see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That's the way they ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... with bitter and tedious moralising, is evidently modelled on Macilente in Every Man Out of His Humour. The very dog—Getica's dog—was suggested by Puntarvolo's dog. Indeed, throughout the play we are constantly reminded of Every Man Out of His Humour; but the unknown writer had some inventiveness of his own, and was not a mere copyist. The jolly fat host, with his cheery cry "merry hearts live long," is pleasant company; and his wife, the hard-working hostess, constantly repining at her lot, yet seemingly not dissatisfied at heart, has the appearance ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen |
