"Innovate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider in the next place whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this, he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned in both languages; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... principle of which we are now speaking—that their young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they fixed, and exhibited the patterns of them in their temples; and no painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms and invent new ones. To this day, no alteration is allowed either in these arts, or in music at all. And you will find that their works of art are painted or moulded ...
— Laws • Plato
... battle, and their towers upreared, A counter-fortress to Acropolis;— To Ares they did sacrifice, and hence This rock is titled Areopagus. Here then shall sacred Awe, to Fear allied, By day and night my lieges hold from wrong, Save if themselves do innovate my laws, If thou with mud, or influx base, bedim The sparkling water, nought thou'lt find to drink. Nor Anarchy, nor Tyrant's lawless rule Commend I to my people's reverence;— Nor let them banish ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... permanent and unchangeable head of the State. Turn the United Kingdom into a Federal State, and Parliamentary Government, as Englishmen now know it, is at an end. This may or may not be an evil, but it is a revolution which ought to give pause to innovators who deem it a slighter danger to innovate on the Act of Union than to remodel the procedure ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... indefensible gradation from the most material laws to the most trivial, and from the most antient laws to the most modem, that it will be impossible to set bounds to the legislative power, and determine how far it may innovate in the principles of government. That is the work more of imagination and passion ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume |
