"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glimpse of the speakers, for I felt sure that this was an affair of gravity in which ordinary scruples ought not to count. It seemed to me that the woman was in peril; at any rate the man had not disavowed a willingness to murder. When a man is enacting the role of potential assassin he has not the right ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... days, and now still more when he was himself in the sovereign place, had seen all along, with natural arithmetical intellect, That his strength in this world, as at present situated, would very much depend upon the amount of potential-battle that lay in him,—on the quantity and quality of Soldiers he could maintain, and have ready for the field at any time. A most indisputable truth, and a heartfelt one in the present instance. To augment the quantity, to improve the quality, in this thrice-essential particular: ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... growing class, the pied-a-terre hunters, not as a potential neighbour, but as a mere counsellor and very platonic friend, I would say that I have recently discovered two ways of acquiring country places, both of which, although no doubt neither is infallible, have from time ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... after a moment's pause, he asked the fair president for a couple of tickets for each of which he paid threepence; a sum however, according to the printed declaration of the voucher, convertible into potential liquid refreshments, no great compensation to a very strict member of the Temperance Society ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... and Lancaster best under his conditions. Mr. Becker's choice is McDermid but he thinks Crath No. 1 a potential commercial variety. Mr. Oakes likes Crath No. 1 and Ill. No. 3. Mr. Etter lists Burtner and Alleman as his best varieties. Mr. Fateley especially favors one tree because of nut and bearing qualities. Other growers have not as ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in everyone potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... things), changes at the end of each Kalpa. He, however, who lies at the Root and who is endued with supreme might and puissance, lies in the waters when universal destruction comes (in the form of the potential Seed of all things). Kesava is that Creator of pure Soul who courseth through all the eternal worlds.[1386] Infinite and Eternal as He is, He fills all space (with emanations from Himself) and courseth through the universe (in the form of everything that constitutes the universe). Freed as ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent, in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to entail corruption, brings intelligence with it and that intelligence, in days of trial, stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism. That, as I said in the beginning, is the unexpected and consoling revelation of this horrible war: we can rely on man implicitly, place the greatest trust in him, nor fear lest, in ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... uncertain quantity. Incidentally, I am assured that not one of its male workers here is of draft age unless he holds exemption papers to prove his physical unfitness for military service. The Salvationists are taking care to purge themselves of any suspicion that potential slackers have joined their ranks in order to avoid the possibility of having to perform ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... normal to his years. Meanwhile, the financial crash, which at this time so largely affected Europe, swallowed up the greater part of Balder's fortune; and with the remnant (about a thousand pounds sterling), and a potential independence (in the shape of a learned profession) in his head, he sailed ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... free in the air has a certain initial velocity imparted by the winding-drum and line and also a potential energy corresponding to his height above the ground. If the flying or gliding machine is provided with a motor, he can utilize that in his further flight, and if it is a simple gliding machine without motor he can make a descending flight through ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... silent but potential course," said the Earl, looking around him, "without a voice which speaks to our ear, but not without influences which affect, at every change, the indwellers of this vile, earthly planet. This, if astrologers fable not, is the very crisis of my fate! ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... plateau of to-day. Erosion did its work. For a million years or more the floods of spring have washed down the sands and gravels, and the rivers have carried them into the sea. Thousands of vertical feet have disappeared in this way from the potential altitude of the region. The spring floods are still washing down the sands and gravels, and the canyons, cliffs, and mesas of the desert are disclosed to-day as stages ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... With his usual instincts he was naturally pleased to observe that he looked older and more careworn. The softer, sensuous climate had perhaps imparted a heaviness to his figure and a deliberation to his manner that was quite unlike his own potential energy. ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... of it she began to shine all over again! "Funny little fluff o' green," she laughed, "no fatter than a fern!" Her voice went suddenly all wabbly like a preacher's. "But, oh, the glory of it!" she said. "The potential majesty! Great sweeping branches—! Nests for birds, shade for lovers, masts for ships to plow the great world's waters—timbers perhaps for cathedrals! O—h," shivered my mother. "It certainly gave one a very queer feeling! No woman surely in the whole ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... hearts of men by the narrative of heroic deeds inspired by love of country and love of liberty. This truth furnishes the key to the arrangement and method of the present work. The ten epochs treated are those that have been potential in shaping subsequent events; and when men have struck blows for human liberty against odds and regardless of personal consequences. The simple narrative carries its own morals, and the most profitable work for the teacher ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... sang the bard and ceased; his work was done: Abroad the tempest burst. 'Twas not his songs Alone that raised it! Memories which they waked, Memories of childhood, fainter year by year, Tripled his might. Meantime a Saxon priest Potential there, bent low, with eye-brow arched, O'er Eardulf's ear, Eardulf old warrior famed, And whispered long, and as he whispered glanced Oft at Birinus. Keen of eye the King, The action noting well, the ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... conservative, and just, and which, while supplying sufficient revenue for public purposes, will still be signally beneficial and helpful to every section and every enterprise of the people. To this policy we are all, of whatever party, firmly bound by the voice of the people—a power vastly more potential than the expression of any political platform. The paramount duty of Congress is to stop deficiencies by the restoration of that protective legislation which has always been the firmest prop of the Treasury. The passage ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, which I had totally forgotten. Suddenly I felt something like compassion lest the music might never sound from off the death-pale paper." In other words, Lohengrin, though finished in every detail, was merely potential music. To make it anything more, the aid of singers and ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Congress's spending clause power, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and subsidiary to these issues, the First Amendment doctrines of prior restraint, vagueness, and overbreadth. There are a number of potential entry points into the analysis, but the most logical is the spending clause jurisprudence in which the seminal case is South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). Dole outlines four categories of constraints ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... how their colours fled out of things, and the long sand-bank in the sea, which had been the rampart of a town, was washed down in its turn. One of his acquaintance, a penurious young poet, who, having nothing in his pockets but the imaginative or otherwise barely potential gold of manuscript verses, would have grasped so eagerly, had they lain within his reach, at the elegant outsides of life, thought the fortunate Sebastian, possessed of every possible opportunity of that kind, yet bent only ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... presence was most needed. How much England then lost can never be known. Vorontzoff, Russian ambassador at London, who had earlier been a bitter enemy of Pitt, now expressed the fervent desire that death had carried off his weary old frame, rather than that of the potential Saviour of Europe. The words are instinct with prescience. The personality and the actions of Pitt were alike a summons to a life of dignity and manly independence. His successors had perforce to take a course not unlike that which they were about to censure ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Richard had set him agog with angry apprehensions. What! should his best agent of politics, one who was at once the correspondent of that powerful influence the Daily Tory and the authorized mouthpiece of the potential Mr. Gwynn who owned the Anaconda, nay, was the Anaconda, be insulted, and arrayed against him? And for what? Because of the baby heart of a girl scarce grown! Was a White House to be lost by such tawdry argument? Forbidding Richard the door might ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... up, and be polishing their plates like so many Tom-cats," Michael said, indicating their potential patronage by waving his hand toward the courtyard. "Here comes Miss Betty, now. She'll be after lending ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... visionary temperament which, at her age, is ever liable to fantastic caprices. She hears Margrave's song, which you say has a wildness of charm that affects and thrills even you. Who does not know the power of music? and of all music, there is none so potential as that of the human voice. Thus, in some languages, charm and song are identical expressions; and even when a critic, in our own sober newspapers, extols a Malibran or a Grisi, you may be sure that he will call her 'enchantress.' ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our supposing potential or elementary volition and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not. By giving them free will we do no more than those who make them bound to obey fixed laws. They will be as certain to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... are very rich and powerful, and so able to defy the masters that many of the smaller manufacturers, unable to resist, "are removing their works to other countries where the workmen's organizations are not so potential." And in all other countries, according to the stage of their economic and political development, like figures obtain. And Europe, today, confesses that her greatest social problem is the labor problem, and that it is the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... little hand through his arm and carried me off to a lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful relief to be out of the noise and the glare—and alone with Gordon. But instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the evening reacted suddenly ...
— Different Girls • Various
... the body; for Jean Jacques had not a sensual drift in his organism. If there had been a sensual drift, probably Carmen would still have been the lady of his manor, and he would still have been a magnate and not a potential bankrupt; for in her way Carmen had been a kind of balance to his judgment in the business of life, in spite of her own material and (at the very last) sensual strain. It was a godsend to Jean Jacques to have such ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to come later when he was away from her, when he had had leisure to consider that she might regard him in the light of a third potential rifler of her father's treasure-house. But at the moment, looking down into her dark eyes, he reproached himself and wondered where his true ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Mme. de Lauriston was justly alarmed and demanded cancellation of the sale. Not only was this done, but the police, in order to prevent another such accident, required that a notice be fixed to Lisette's loose-box informing any potential buyer of her ferocity, and that any sale would be null and void unless the buyer declared in writing that he was aware ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... of biography led the excellent as learned Bishop of Lincoln to abridge and mutilate so very many—the places not always marked. On this and the principle and motif which approve and vindicate the publication of the Letters of every really potential intellect such as WORDSWORTH'S, the accomplished daughter of SARA COLERIDGE has remarked: 'A book composed of epistolary extracts can never be a wholly satisfactory one, because its contents are not only relative and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... councils of the nation." And, furthermore, the right of the free States to agitate the question inhered in the principle of majority rule—the white population of the free States being almost double that of the slave States, "and the voice of this overwhelming majority should be potential." He repelled in strong language the wrongfulness of allowing the South to multiply the votes of those freemen by the master's right to count three for every five slaves, "because it is absurd and anti-republican to suffer property to be represented as men, and vice versa, because ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... premisses), because only under this supposition is the judgement we may be considering possible a priori; while on the side of the conditioned or the inferences, only an incomplete and becoming, and not a presupposed or given series, consequently only a potential progression, is cogitated. Hence, when a cognition is contemplated as conditioned, reason is compelled to consider the series of conditions in an ascending line as completed and given in their ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... existence we come in touch with other souls, each with its actual or potential wealth of being, and ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... upon the art of editorial writing did the two have, as the days went. The Colonel, mystified but pleased by revelations of actuality and life in his heretofore too-embalmed assistant, found an increasing interest in developing him. Here was a youth, with the qualities of potential great valuableness, and the wise editor, as soon as this appeared, gave him his chance by calling him off the fields of taxation and currency and assigning him to topics plucked alive ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey de Bouillon again set himself sword in ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... he was thinking of other things. "After all," he said to himself—"after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he's already somebody and I'm still only potential..." ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... children, potential sympathizers and supporters of all classes?" the Irishman persisted ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... have been appreciably worse off without it? The question is rather an idle one, since it turns on "might have beens." That the element of good in the message of Jesus has been to some extent efficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of potential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual that to strike a balance between the two forces is impossible, and the question is generally decided by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one scale ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... last two years were good ones for my apple limb, for the growths were long (19 and 15 inches) and most of the buds produced spurs. The result is evidenced also in the fact that the limb is this year laden with potential bloom. On 1918 the two spurs bear flowers, one of them only a single bloom and the other five blooms. On 1919 twelve of the fourteen spurs are bearing flowers in the following numbers: 5 flowers, 5, ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... is the most beautiful, of Dalmatian towns, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), was always more preoccupied with commerce and letters than with warfare. It managed to maintain itself in glory for a very long time, thanks to the astuteness of the citizens, who were ever willing to give handsome tribute to a potential foe. On occasion the Ragusans could be nobly firm, refusing to deliver a political refugee to the Turks, and so forth. In such tempestuous times the little State was forced to trim its sails; there was the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... eyes are going to teach him. In the shop, as he hurried out, his eyes saw many things never seen before. He coveted them all, especially such as shone in steel or brass or bright new wood. He hardly knew their names; but what beautiful playthings they would make. All movable objects are potential playthings to him. He makes them also, like the Creator, out of nothing; if he wants a horse he has it on the instant by straddling a stick or tying a string to a companion. He has epic uses for his father's tools, his mother's knitting needles; they can slay a thousand foes ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... mystery of power behind light, darkness, the seasons, storm, calm—lie the beginnings of poetry; and religion grows from the same seed—the desire of the finite to lay hold on the Infinite. Every man is a potential poet, just so far as he responds to these yearnings after some expression of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... what they were, and at what they hope to become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive, were he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise. These three states, which we may call its potential past, present, and future, may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a race's character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... select one another "to keep company," is like an offer of marriage. To "keep steady company" is the formal announcement of an engagement, which is a potential marriage. It is the first step towards matrimony, and is almost ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... minutely fashioned, as a sculptor would, by investing his model with a code of spirituality, inspired with fire, which epicureanly endows fleeting emotion with a voice, and vitality lends also to distant-reaching invisible ends: hinting that the picturesque alchemy of music is potential too in reaching and touching the lower chords of animal passion, where movement is rapid and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever to animal instincts without measure in extolling the complex phases of court, ecclesiastic, and domestic oligarchy. ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... strong impulse that my Americanization has made the driving power of my life. And I ask no greater privilege than to be allowed to live to see my potential America become actual: the America that I like to think of as the America of Abraham Lincoln and of Theodore Roosevelt—not faultless, but less faulty. It is a part in trying to shape that America, and an opportunity to work in that America when it comes, ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... felt my blood warm to think that the men of common hard labor in my country would resent a blow as quickly as the man on horseback—that even the poor black—emancipated the other day from the subjugation of slavery by a masterful and potential race, stands up in conscious manhood, and that the teachings of the day are that consistently with the progress of the country—as one respects himself, he must be respected—and that the air and the earth have the inspiration and the stimulus of freedom. The Chinese and Japanese ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... of Crassus, very glibly, no doubt, and had done his best to "show off" before Pompey, his new listener.[228] More than six years had passed since Pompey could have heard him, and then Cicero's voice had not become potential in the Senate. Cicero had praised Pompey with all the eloquence in his power. "Anteponatur omnibus Pompeius," he had said, in the last Catiline oration to the Senate; and Pompey, though he had not heard the words spoken, knew very well what had ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... went on inexorably, "there are potential freeman and potential slaves. The latter invariably outnumber the former. They're cowards: the timid, the unsacrificing—the ones that want peace at any price—the ones who will trade freedom for security. Those were the ones who hid rather than risk their lives fighting the aggressor. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... poor men, to give them a good meal, to speak to Basset at the Bull's Head in their favour that they might be taken in for the night and made comfortable, but to open her purse and take a real sovereign from it, a whole potential pound, would not have come into her head. Had such a thing been done, for instance, by the united subscriptions of the party, in case of some peculiarly touching situation, the illness of a wife, the loss of a child, it would have been ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Principle, of the Universal Root and of the Boundless Power—the Parabrahman (That Which transcends Brahma), Mula-Prakriti (Root-Nature), and Supreme Ishvara, or the Unmanifested Eternal Logos, of the Vedantic Philosophers. The next stage is the potential unmanifested type of the Trinity, the Three in One and One in Three, the Potentialities of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva, the Preservative, Emanative, and Regenerative Powers—the Supreme Logos, Universal Ideation and Potential Wisdom, called by Simon ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... detail. He recalled the illustrations and diagrams that he had been poring over only the day before at the library building, and he was sure that this monster could be nothing else than an electric dynamo, and one of the very largest size, delivering as high as fifteen thousand horse-power of potential energy. But how to account for the chance that had preserved this mightiest of the Old-World forces? What miracle had been wrought to keep this soulless giant in life through so many years of darkness and of silence? Constans felt his head spinning; the consciousness of a fact so tremendous ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... favorites?[132] He could not have been perfectly sincere, at all events, when he afterward declared that he supposed he was taking leave of political life forever.[133] No one knew better than he, that a popular judge is a potential candidate for almost any office in ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... reason together." And "letters" are only a form of reasoning together adapted to our special needs, gaining perhaps some added pathos from the implied separation of kindred souls, and a further value from the permanence and potential artistry of the form itself. It is not incumbent upon us to be very deep in the eighteenth century to remark that, with conversation, letter-writing dwindles and dies before the rush of mechanism and trade. It is easy to see the reason of this. Mechanism and trade are ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Lord Randolph was the leader. But compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hydroelectric potential; significant deposits of gold and rare earth metals; locally exploitable coal, oil, and natural gas; other deposits of nepheline, mercury, bismuth, ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... had struck; for leaving out my infinitesimal share, Dudley was sole owner,—and he had bought a thousand acres mining concession from the Government for ten dollars an acre, which is the law when a potential mining district in unsurveyed territory is more than twenty miles by a wagon road from a railway. All he had to do with would-be prospectors was to chuck them out. He had got in ten stamps for his mill over the road I had ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... conforming attitude of tolerance toward the experience of being unsuccessful. Therefore it is particularly momentous to the pupil, should the school record ascribed to him prove frequently to be incongruous with his potential powers. It has already been pointed out in these pages that the failures frequently tend to designate specific difficulties rather than what is actually the negative of 'ability plus application.' This does not at all deny that in some instances there appears to be the ability minus ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... through the most remarkable white fir nursery we have yet seen. Not far away were a few hoary monarchs from the still hanging but burst open cones of which winged seeds were flying before the breeze. These potential firs were carried in many cases over a mile before they found lodgement. It was a beautiful and delightful demonstration of Nature's lavish method of preserving this useful ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... this: "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."[42] The verb here, it will be again observed, is potential. This is not a dogma of theology, but a necessity of Science. And Science, for the most part, has consistently accepted the situation. It has always proclaimed its ignorance of the Spiritual World. When Mr. Herbert Spencer affirms, "Regarding Science as a gradually increasing sphere we may say that ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Marxist President SASSOU-NGUESSO, but ushered in a period of ethnic unrest. Southern-based rebel groups agreed to a final peace accord in March 2003. The Republic of Congo is one of Africa's largest petroleum producers with significant potential for offshore development. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning, when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North, and this, with the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... geometrician;—of this the various systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place, afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence,—or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the 'esurience', the [Greek: pothos] or 'desideratum', the unfuelled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... order of society which Daniel O'Connell was accustomed to refer to as 'that highly important and respectable class, the men of no property'—true makers of history, if the fools only knew, or could be taught, their power and responsibility. Occasionally one of these potential rulers and practical slaves would come to me with ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... that it's all their fault," she continued. "We do all we can to attract them—the way we dress. Who was it said that to every woman every man is a potential lover. We can't get it out of our minds. It's there even when we don't know it. We will ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... virgin: but Chaeroboscos claims that it comes from [Greek: kore] and [Greek: alion], because it is a maritime product used to make ornaments for maidens. In any case coral is a "giver of life" and as such identified with a maiden,[394] as the most potential embodiment of life-giving force. But this specific application of the word for "giver of life" was due to the fact that in all the Semitic languages, as well as in literary references in the Egyptian ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... quicker beating of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston possible. We are trying to "realize" to ourselves the importance of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning man; and if he did not discover ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of a gravitational field centred within the globe, and extending thence in all directions through space, across and beyond the earth's body. Every point in space, both inside and outside the earth, is characterized by a definite intensity of this field, the so-called gravitational potential. This is subject to variations due to the presence of other physical masses, which carry their own fields of gravity. What happens between such masses and that of the earth, as well as mutually between such masses themselves, is brought about by the particular conditions in space ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... from it, will be charged negatively, as shown at B. On closing the switch the opposite charges rush together and form a current which flows to and fro between the metal plates. [Footnote: Strictly speaking it is the difference of potential that ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... dragons. Distances have vanished before the patience of the humble workers of the world, which is reduced to pettiness by the genius of man. The longest journeys have become well-trodden promenades; the most gigantic tasks are accomplished under the potential and tireless hand of this unseen force; a telegraphic despatch flies, in the twinkling of an eye, from one continent to the other; without leaving our armchairs, we converse with the inhabitants of London and Saint Petersburg; yet these ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... not yet made so truly national a name, perhaps, as to warrant any assumption that such a work would be acceptable. Many of his close friends have asked me to do just this, however; for they realize, as I do so strongly, that his life was so big, so full, so potential, that, even as the story of a man, it ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Sicilians can lower their standard to any extent. But they can never raise it. They are the cancer of Tunisia. Wherever they go, they bring their filth, their mafia, roguery and corruption. Every Sicilian is a potential Arab, the difference between them being merely external; the true African variety wears less clothes and keeps his house cleaner. I know them! A race of sinister buffoons and cut-throats, incapable of any ennobling thought, whose highest virtues are other men's ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... not? That a President of the United States should assert or even insinuate these things during the great War for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent to heights undreamed of—is amazing now: what will it be a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... intervals along the dusty way, once a narrow trail worn by the patient feet of that gentle and great padre, Junipero Serra,—a trail from the San Gabriel Valley to the shores of Monterey. A narrow trail then, but, even then, to him it was broad in its potential significance of the dawn of Grace upon the mountain shores of ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against the Germans. But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us. We talked with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper. He received us beneath ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... worse in another. There is nothing beyond a vague, floating reputation or public opinion to enable a new Minister to know his subordinates. The Germans have tabulated the experiences and deficiencies of our leaders, active and potential, in peace and war—we have not! Every British General of any note is analysed, characterised and turned inside out in the bureau records of the great German General Staff in Berlin. We only attempt anything of that sort with burglars. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... the Western world. In another Eastern empire there are vast resources—especially coal and iron in juxtaposition—awaiting only industrial leadership to utilise a practically limitless labour supply for their development. These are facts worthy of consideration for their potential bearing upon the industrial and commercial ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... a scarcity of arable land, and most food has to be imported. The principal livestock activity is sheep raising. Manufacturing consists mainly of cigarettes, cigars, and furniture. The rapid pace of European economic integration is a potential threat to Andorra's ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... drew near which I had set for my call on the first of the potential mothers assigned me by the Eugenic Staff, I re-read the rules ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... the faculty of the University of Wisconsin tells of some amusing replies made by a pupil undergoing an examination in English. The candidate had been instructed to write out examples of the indicative, the subjunctive, the potential and the exclamatory moods. His ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... brief was the frozen instant while she stood transfixed. One of them was John Galbraith, in the back row, and he let his breath go out again in relief almost in the act of catching it. He guessed what had happened well enough—that she'd recognized one of those friends whose potential horror had made her willing to give up her promotion and her little part—the one she'd spoken of, perhaps, as the "only one that really mattered." But it was all right. She was going on as ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... untrodden wilderness, until that which had ridden and hunted and passed so buoyantly through life should become but a few dry bones, a handful of dust. He was of his time, and its laxness of principle and conduct; if he held within himself the potential scholar, statesman, and philosopher, there were also the skeptic, the egotist, and the libertine. He followed the fashion and disbelieved much, but he knew that if he died to-night his soul would not stay with his body upon the hilltop. He wondered, somewhat ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... again, skirting the room in column of fours, preparatory to the march-past: but now the Lieutenant-Governor surveyed it from a new, and a dual point-of-view,—as a thousand individuals, that is, each a potential factor for immeasurable good in the coming rehabilitation of the state; and, then, as a vast fighting-machine perfect in every detail, resistless and awe-inspiring in its very integrity. He noted the faces as they passed—stern, intelligent ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... befitted the mother of a potential Commissioneress, and the shooting began; all the world standing in a semicircle as the ladies came out one after ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... she is at home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential wealth of the land is wrapped ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... FRANCE.—In all calculations on which a declaration of war is based the moral fibre of the actual and potential enemy nations is fully considered. It is difficult to imagine that the Headquarters Staff of the German and Austrian Armies failed to bring under review the moral of the nations against whom their armies were to be launched in July, 1914. The Spirit of France had shown ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... In reality, he was struggling to suppress any betrayal of the exultation that was beginning to take hold of him. Premature this might prove to be, but it seemed impossible to misunderstand the emotion under which the chief engineer was labouring or to underestimate its potential value to Lanyard. Surely it would seem that his faith in his star had been well-placed: was it not now—or all signs failed—delivering into his hand the forged tool he had so desperately needed, for which ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... bill and coo of sex. All poets are lovers, and all lovers, either actual or potential, are poets. Potential poets are the people who read poetry; and so without lovers the poet would never have a market ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... state has had not only continuous existence always, but continuous, potential readiness, if not continuous employment; and the greatest changes in the mutual relations of nations have been brought about by the victory of the armed force of one state over the armed force of another state. This does not mean that ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bow of the Cormoran. By mid-June five German men-of-war under command of Vice Admiral von Diedrichs were in the Bay—a force nearly if not quite the match of the American squadron. When the Germans continued their disregard of the regulations controlling the blockade, indicating a potential if not an actual hostility, it became necessary for Admiral Dewey to have done with the Teutonic peril at once. He sent a verbal message to von Diedrichs which effectually ended all controversy. Admiral Dewey has not disclosed the exact ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... to realize interiorly. This is manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... between the various parts of the earth's surface and those portions of the atmosphere adjacent to or above them. Inasmuch as air is one of the very best insulators, this difference of condition (or potential) in any particular region is in most cases incapable of being neutralized or equilibrated by an electric flow. Consequently the air remains more or less continually charged. With these points admitted as facts, the question arises, Whence this electricity? There have been very many and various ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... been,—and wondered. It was six years ago: if it had lived, it would have been as old as Carry. The arms which were folded loosely around the sleeping child began to tremble, and tighten their clasp. And then the deep potential impulse came, and with a half-sob, half-sigh, she threw her arms out, and drew the body of the sleeping child down, down, into her breast, down again and again as if she would hide it in the grave dug there ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... imagination and the courage to use it; he is not, usually, afraid of facts, even when an admission carries reproach. But in this field he shows simply the old race-mind, that attitude which considers women as mothers, potential, active, and in retrospect; and as nothing else. He likes them as mothers. He honors them as mothers. He wants to have them salaried, as mothers. But he thinks it quite beyond reason that they should appear as regular members of the working world; their motherhood, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT.—The suffrage movement has steadily increased the number of potential voters until at the present time there are more than 30,000,000 persons in the United States who are entitled to the vote. The important groups of the adult population have been enfranchised, but the suffrage movement still involves ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... spirits departed from him, and more and more sluggish grew his limbs; the previous tension yielded to an intolerable exhaustion, which affected not only body but mind. And as every act of the exhausted body is hard and painful to perform, so every past and potential act seems to the exhausted spirit, which would fain weep over what it laughed at before; what formerly caused pleasure and joy now brings only grief and sorrow; the things but yesterday eagerly grasped now bring a craze that would tear the hair from its head, aye, even the whole ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of cases, other than that spoken of in the text, which he thinks must be regarded as an exception to the Composition of Causes. "Causes that merely make good the collocation for bringing a prime mover into action, or that release a potential force, do not follow any such rule. One man may direct a gun upon a fort as well as three: two sparks are not more effectual than one in exploding a barrel of gunpowder. In medicine there is a certain dose that answers the end; and adding to ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... grotesque—witness that unearthly last scene, which must be taken as an hallucination—and its swift movement; also a vivid sense of caricature—consider the trial scene in the school; but created by a young poet of potential gifts. The seduction scene is well managed at the Kammerspielhaus. We are not shown the room, but a curtain slightly divided allows the voices of the youthful lovers to be overheard. A truly moving effect is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... they brought about the doom of their empire by a series of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the greatest power in the world—in numbers of men and in potential energy—to their list of enemies at a time when their own man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course, was great. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... life-energy is not a thing unique and created at a particular time in the past. If evolution be true, living matter has been evolved by natural processes from matter which is, apparently, not alive. But if life is potential in matter, it is a thousand times more evident that Mind is potential in Life. The evolutionist is impelled to believe that Mind is potential in matter. (I adopt that form of words for the moment, but not without ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... units may be marked by differences in tone-quality as well, and thus the potential complexity is greatly increased; but in spoken language, as has been said, this element of rhythm is negligible. In speech-rhythm, however, the three conditions of time, stress, and pitch are always ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... cycles per second, and to be delivered through three-conductor cables to transformers and converters in sub-stations suitably located with reference to the track system, the current there to be transformed and converted to direct current for delivery to the third-rail conductor at a potential of ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... had cooked the dinner, and Alexina and her friends waited on the table. Then the girls, to Alexina's relief, went home to inquire after their families, and she accompanied Mr. Dwight while he explored every corner of the grounds to make sure that no potential thieves lurked in the heavy shadows cast ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... swift desire—heavy, perfumed, Oriental—interwoven with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning hells beneath our ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... and enthusiasm which brings him out afield even before break of day, which leads him over hill and dale, mountain and valley, in his insatiable quest for the pictorial. Miles are as nothing; hunger stays him not; nor rests he at night until his potential treasures are ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1920 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... of these prophets was invariably the signal for a stampede on Short's part, who, never having completed his work, dreaded encountering the mournful scrutiny and reproachful bleating of the Lamb no less than the sad, stern rebukes and potential Wellington boots of the Messiah. Into no single item of the day's programme did he put so much zest as into the grand dive he would make into any available hiding-place, and he would lie for hours flat on his stomach under M'Dermott's bed sooner ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... him still better in furthering his political fortunes. He was not one that could be grossly corrupted, yet he was willing to play to the galleries in order to serve his ambition, and he was willing to forecast his political acts in order to obtain potential support. ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... with a complex pattern. If then we find a fairly large brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way up from a simian ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... offered a facile means of acquiring new helpmates in the East by emancipating its various peoples in the name of right and justice. It held out to the capitalists who deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of that loss might be made good.[128] To the zealots of the League of Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Robert and his cabinet was, therefore, justly held to be opposed to the practice of parliament and the doctrines of the constitution. Much of the odium of this procedure fell upon the Duke of Wellington, who was supposed to be the potential adviser of Sir Robert in this matter, and whose despotic sympathies, betrayed in many ways, gave great offence to the people. Had not the previous ministers, by their inconsistency, incompetency, and truckling to O'Connell and the Irish priest ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... had the impression that the prospect was very good. But after she had closed the door, she turned in the outer room, stood still a moment and looked back, allowing her face for a moment to betray what she felt. The expression was a strange one; for it showed doubt, fear, conditional hatred, and potential vengeance—a complicated state of mind, which the cleverest judge of human faces could hardly have understood from Matilde's features. Then, with bent head, and closed hands hanging by her sides, she ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... empire; that she is not fully to be trusted; and that the road to a more effectual union lies, not through stricter coercion, but through a system of instant defence making itself apparent to the people as a means of provisional or potential coercion in the proper case arising. One traitor cannot exist as a public and demonstrative character without many minor traitors to back him. To Great Britain it ought to cost no visible effort, resolutely and instantly to trample out every overture ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... for instance, on those strange reminiscences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence—the fancy of the Platonists—the old heresy of Origen. It was in this mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 3. The potential mood signifies power or duty. The signs by which it is known are, may, can, might, would, could, should, or ought— as, Amem, I may love (when I leave school). Amavissem, I should have loved (if I had not known better,) ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... manner, like Larry King's when there was something in the wind, seemed quiet, easy, potential. His searching glance held warmth and a gleam that thrilled Neale. But he was ceremonious, not permitting himself his old familiarity before these dignitaries of ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... are not as yet near the goal it prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in the infinite character of its potential destiny. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... year 1850,—due to special causes, which, though suggestive, were not adequate, and summarized as to results in the paralyzing Clayton-Bulwer Treaty,—the importance of the Central American Isthmus has been merely potential and dormant. But, while thus temporarily obscured, its intrinsic conditions of position and conformation bestow upon it a consequence in relation to the rest of the world which is inalienable, and therefore, to become operative, only awaits those changes ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... being dull, or of boring her, but he was afraid of wakening against him the wary watchfulness of that side of her nature which he called Margaret Donne, as distinguished from Cordova, of the 'English-girl' side, of the potential old maid that is dormant in every young northern woman until the day she marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... sometimes exist on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of fire, strength, and action. These attributes seemed to cling about him. There was something vital and compelling in his presence. Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit. In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired. The life in him was marvelously significant. The dust, the dirt, the sweat, the soiled clothes, the bruised and bandaged hand, the brawn ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... due rather to a development which takes place within the individual himself as a result of experiencing. In other words, the child as an intelligent being is born with certain attributes which, though at first only potential, may be developed into actual capacities or powers. Thus it is held that the real aim of education is to develop to the full such capacities as are found already within the child. Moreover, it is because the child has such possibilities of development within ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... then it may be said, on the other hand, that as yet we see no limit of man's mastery over nature, and that apparently we are just entering upon the stage of material progress. Moreover, so far as any given country is concerned, wealth is potential food supply, and in the United States during the last fifty years wealth has increased four times as fast as the population. Malthus, of course, did not foresee the inventions and agricultural progress of the nineteenth century. Still, it is evident that ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... is not the only element of nature with which railway management has to contend. Another, not less serious in its potential consequences, was brought to mind in sinister fashion a few years later, when, during the winter storms of 1868, the Severn and its tributaries rose in flood with such alarming rapidity that the driver of an ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... with his former assurance. While outwardly he was the same suave, debonair old beau, he was beginning to have inner doubtings and despairs. And Joe, who had, as it were, taken up the pen when he had cast aside the sword, became for him a potential straw adrift on the ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... were powerless to render assistance, and there was at that time no means of communicating with the guard or driver. Poor Edwin thought of Captain Lee, who lay bleeding on the floor, and of Emma, and the power of thought was so potential that in his great wrath he almost lifted the three men in the air; but they clung to him like leeches, and it is certain that they would have finally overcome him, had he not in one of his frantic struggles thrust his foot below one of the seats and ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... distinction which Eckhart draws between the outer and inner consciousness in the personality. The outer consciousness is bound up with the earthly life; to it all images must come through sense; but in this way it can have no image of itself. But the higher consciousness is supra-temporal. The potential ground of the soul is and remains sinless; but the personality is also united to the bodily nature; its guilt is that it inclines to its sinful nature instead ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. One might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. Growth can and does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant; and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... that it was not to St. John primarily, or secondarily to St. John's guests, that he could celebrate the fact of his apparition. In the presence of St. John's potential vulgarity he keenly felt his own, and he recoiled from what he had imagined doing. He even realized that he would have been working St. John an injury by betraying his house to his guests as the scene of a ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... citizen (loud applause). In this country there was a place for all, no matter from what country they came, a place for the Ruthenian (enumeration of the various European and Asiatic states from which potential citizens of Canada had come). Let us join hands and hearts in building up a great empire where our children, free from old-world entanglements, free to develop in our own way our own institutions (eloquent passages on freedom) in obedience to laws of our ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... light falls upon them I think of ebon fangs protruding from white guns, and call the place 'The Mouth of Hell.' If those boys but show their heads above the crest the awful silence is broken by the roar of guns. What a life! Always under potential fire and for three years within range of the deadly ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt |
