"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... These thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat; and are, for your behoof a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity. Few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came, by tap of drum enlisted, or ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... 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 ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... to be formless or empty; or in any respect less the seat of law and order than it is now. One might as well talk of a fresh-laid hen's egg being "without form and void," because the chick therein is potential and not actual, as apply such terms to the nebulous mass which contains ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Concealing our find under our taa-taa we scraped and slid over the faulted and tilted strata to which Whinney had referred until we reached the beach. High above us I could hear the anguished cry of the mother fatu-liva vainly seeking her ravished home and potential family. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... partly in displacing the shattered masses. The proportion of useful work obtainable has been variously estimated at from 14 to 33 per cent. of the theoretical maximum potential." ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... the engagement is allowed, it is the custom to admit the gentleman into the intimate society of his newly-adopted relatives; he is looked upon as something more than a potential member of the family; he is implicitly trusted in ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... of floating debt, owing to: 1. Political instability, requiring large outlays for soldiery, for bribery of potential revolutionists, and for suppression of actual revolutions. 2. Corruption of officials. 3. "Asignaciones" or pensions to mollify enemies and to reward friends of the existing regime. (b) Usurious interest computations, on account of: 1. "Bonus" in principal, 2. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... overhead. The cottontail, stimulated by seeing and/or hearing the hawk, ran faster, moving in circles until it disappeared from view five minutes later. When last observed the cottontail was 1,700 feet from its home range and was headed in the opposite direction. It had passed several potential shelters but had not attempted to use them, presumably because it was not familiar with the area. Although for several months afterward traps were operated in the cottontail's home range area and in the area where it escaped, the animal ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes
... 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
... around the lower floor of the secret room again, scanning shelves that were crowded with scores of curious objects, sacred relics, properties to aid in the manipulation of the idol and other unidentifiable things—looking for a potential weapon. If the girl had to die—and he—it would be better to go out and meet his enemies, taking some of them with him in ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State in May 1980, President Carter became concerned about the impacts of a similar event of low probability but high damage potential, namely a catastrophic earthquake in California, and the state of readiness to cope with the impacts of ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various
... The potential parts of a virtue are the virtues connected with it, which are directed to certain secondary acts or matters, not having, as it were, the whole power of the principal virtue. In this way the parts of prudence are good counsel, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... they've been put out through guilt by association, or because they were born into a family already in that condition. Nothing like that happened to me. From early childhood I was trained by parents and teachers to discipline the projective potential of my mind into the System. Like every other paraNormal, I received my education by tapping Central for contact with information centers and other minds. But I was a fluke." His dark blue eyes twinkled. "Biological units are never so standardized that all of them fall under any system ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... 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 fragmentary, but unauthorised and unrevised. To arrest the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... capable organ than the large brain 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 to ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... interests were potential rather than real; its trade, the result of its strategic position rather than of the interests and the capacity of its population. Normally and naturally the Turk should be a middleman, a distributor rather than a producer. He was placed in ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... recollected, save in a phrase that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks and crockery and ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... must be what is called "food for powder;" and if one be too solicitous about this worthless pabulum, nothing great can be accomplished. So Camors passed as one of the most scrupulous of this goodly company; and his word was as potential in the region of "the rings," as it was in the more elevated sphere of the clubs and of ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... she is not fused into a common substance with the rest of the 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 of insubordination ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... themselves; by courtesy I specifically do NOT mean the habit of mind which contents itself with drilling children in "Good-mornings" and in hat-liftings. I mean the attitude of mind which recognizes in the youngest, commonest child, the potential dignity, majesty, and mystery of the developed human soul. Genuine reverence for the humanity of the "other fellow" marks a definite degree of courtesy in the intercourse of adults, does it not? And the same quality of respect, tempered by the demands of a wise control, is exactly ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... were under perfect control. With invisible, atomic rays Omega made all do his bidding. For countless centuries man had mastered the atom, divided it, harnessed its electrons. Following the discoveries of the great French scientist, Becquerel, man had learned that the potential energy of all atoms—especially that of radium—is almost limitless. And as the disintegration of the atom carries an electrical discharge, man had learned to control this energy. Omega's machines, utilizing ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... bracket, separate from the rest of the instrument, and INSULATED from it; that is to say, electricity cannot escape from them to the instrument. The ink may, therefore, be electrified to an exalted state, or high POTENTIAL as it is called, while the body of the instrument, including the paper and metal writing-tablet, are in connection with the earth, and at low potential, or none at all, for the potential of the earth is in ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... himself by filling with gold to as high as a man could reach, the room in which he was confined. That offer it was that seems to have fully opened the eyes of Pizarro and his followers to the enormous potential wealth of the country; and when, through their treacherous murder of Atahualpa, they had to a considerable extent cut off from themselves the supply of further enormous contributions, they naturally began to hunt about for the source of the wealth that ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... moment, indeed, that we distinctly conceive that the House of Commons is mainly and above all things an elective assembly, we at once perceive that party is of its essence. The House of Commons lives in a state of perpetual potential choice; at any moment it can choose a ruler and dismiss a ruler. And therefore party is inherent in it, is bone of its bone, and breath ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... 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
... Being human, they had their points of personal weakness, just as any newly appointed ensign or second lieutenant also has weak spots in his armor, and sometimes views them in such false proportion that he doubts his own potential for ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk, following honest trades—millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral. It was on August 12, 1678, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Office! It is the censorium of the Empire; it is the seat of thought; it is the abode of moral responsibility! What battles, what famines, what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts of change have sprung into life here! Every pigeon-hole contains a potential revolution; every office-box cradles the embryo of a war or dearth. What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this little thunder-cloud office transmit to far-away provinces lying beyond rising and setting suns! Ah! Vanity, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... gesticulation so forcible and voice so loud that neither of the disputants could hear a word that the other said. Possibly the very great difference in temperature between the external air in contact with their skin and the blood coursing through their veins, had given rise to magnetic currents as potential in their effects as a superabundant supply of oxygen. At all events, the language they soon began to employ in the enforcement of their arguments fairly made the Frenchman's hair ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... any event-particle E can be expressed in terms of two functions which I call the potential and the 'associate-potential' at E. The potential is practically what is meant by the ordinary gravitation potential, when we express ourselves in terms of the Euclidean space in reference to which the attracting mass is at rest. The associate-potential ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... 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 ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger tips, it seemed as if I were 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 letter gives ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 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, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... untrustworthy eyes—at least untrustworthy for women, though women had never profited by the warning. He dressed in excellent taste, almost conspicuously, and the gay and expensive details of his toilet suggested a man given over to liveliness. As a matter of fact, this liveliness was potential rather than actual. Mr. Crossley was always intending to resume the giddy ways of the years before he became a great man, but was always so far behind in the important things to be done and done at once that he was forced to ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... 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
... if the bomb-thrower, actual or potential, is greater as scoundrel or fool. Suppose his aim is to compel concession by terror. Can not the brute observe at each of his exploits a tightening of "the reins of power?" Through the necessity of guarding against him the mildest ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... summer evening quite spoiled, with no caress to remember, and with a potential rival who possessed both the years and the inches he lacked, coming up ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... long-run, and certainly for the Prussian Nation straightway, life or death depends on the Army: Friedrich Wilhelm's head, in an inarticulate manner, was full of this just notion; and all his life was spent in organizing it to a practical fact. The more of potential battle, the more of life is in us: a MAXIMUM of potential battle, therefore; and let it be the OPTIMUM in quality! How Friedrich Wilhelm cared, day and night, with all his heart and all his soul, to bring his Army to the supreme pitch, we have ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... no girl of mine should marry a Dutchman." It was a dominant thought of Mr. Belcovitch's, and it rose spontaneously to his lips at this joyful moment. Next to a Christian, a Dutch Jew stood lowest in the gradation of potential sons-in-law. Spanish Jews, earliest arrivals by way of Holland, after the Restoration, are a class apart, and look down on the later imported Ashkenazim, embracing both Poles and Dutchmen in their impartial contempt. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in the next compartment did indeed hear a little of it but they 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 ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the potential danger of the situation was sufficient to prevent Jerry and Slim from taking a full eight hours of much-needed sleep, while Lieutenant Mackinson, Joe and three other officers whom the captain had taken into his confidence in the matter, followed out ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... 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. My own portrait is in those archives ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... face upon which the story of his woes appears is the soul; in so far as it is open to receive those superior gifts, for the which it has a potential aptitude, without the fulness of perfection and act which waits for the dew of heaven. Thus was it well said: Anima mea sicut terra sine aqua tibi; and again: Os meum operui; and again: Spiritum, quia mandata tua desiderabam. Then "pride which knows ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... happen if he, the great hyped-up superman, found that the Nipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What would happen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast hand and showed Colonel Mannheim and all his watching technicians that they had ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his inspiring 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... lovely, after all, and that loveliness was a great capital. Emily admired and revered it so, and evidently never dreamed of doubting its omnipotence. She used to talk as if any girl who was a beauty was a potential duchess. In fact, this was a thing she quite ingenuously believed. She had not lived in a world where marriage was a thing of romance, and, for that matter, neither had Agatha. It was nice if a girl liked the man who married her, but if he was a well-behaved, agreeable person, ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... historical understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition. Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the ardor of ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... any. There was no fear, either, of his being interfered with in the bonanza he 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 built from Caraquet, and—since Macartney arrived—was milling stuff ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... the creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the mathematical point, &c. for the 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
... of Hinduism, this doctrine also has been considerably distorted in the process of appropriation; so that "faith" in the worship of Vishnu's incarnations, to-day, is more potential as an act than is "faith" in Christianity. For, in Hinduism, it matters not on what god or ritual the Bhakthan places his faith, it has power to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... sitting down, he covered his eyes with one hand and strove to rouse himself from the odd, half-fainting sensation which possessed him. How glorious now was the music that poured like a torrent from the hidden organ-loft! How full of searching and potential proclamation!—the proclamation of an eternal, unguessed mystery, for which no merely human speech might ever find fit utterance! Some divine declaration of God's absolute omnipresence,— or of Heaven's sure nearness,—touched the heart of Felix ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the bulk of the Negro race in practical subjection and bondage. The solidifying of the South had already made the South not only practically independent within the Union, but the overshadowing power, potential enough to make, and unmake, the rulers and policies of the Democratic Party, and ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the soul of the new movement in religion, was the potential nobility of human nature—a nobility to be made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... hear those great guns without a 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 a perfect ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... herself examining the family album inquisitively, but beyond a big-browed and quite undistorted baby nursing a kitten, there did not seem anything remotely potential, and she smiled at herself as she thought of the difficulty of evolving bibs into briar pipes and developing Greek folios ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... incident it must not be imagined that wealth and position are bad things. Health is potential power. Wealth is an engine that can be used for good if you are an engineer; but to be tied to the flywheel of an engine is rather unfortunate. Had my friend been big enough to rise supreme over horses with docked tails, to subjugate ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... piddling records. They did nothing productive, but they had to be retained. Actually, he had to admit, they were a necessity under present conditions. War was always a possibility and the enemy was building up his potential. He might strike at any time, and he'd certainly not send advance notification. If he did strike, the warning teams would perform their brief mission, alerting the active, working members of the defense groups. Then, they ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd suffer in potential profits. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... 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
... briefly of the talk between him and Peggy Simms, and described the general symptoms of the skipper's strange malady. It was nine o'clock, an hour to the meeting. He went down to his own room and sat on the bunk, smoking, trying to piece up the puzzle. If Carlsen was a potential murderer, if he intended to let Simms die, why should he want to marry the girl? He thought he solved ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... to the present day, he has been largely associated, in mind and person, with all the acts and progress, professional and political, of my life. I feel his loss intensely; and I feel it with more regret, because I know that on this occasion his voice would have been potential in our counsels, and would have been united with all of us who labor most earnestly for the preservation of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... narrow surroundings, both physical and mental and even moral; he enters a larger and larger world. The religious expressions of his nature in the local provincial and even national stages of his life cannot satisfy his larger potential life. Only the religion of humanity can do this. And this is the religion of Jesus. The white light of religion, no less than that of scientific truth, has no local or national coloring. Perfect truth is universal, eternal, unchangeable. Occidental or Oriental colorations ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... together whose future work can begin to compare, in far-reaching consequences, in possibilities for usefulness, with that of such an audience. There is no other company of people of equal number within whose keeping there is more of potential weal or woe for coming generations. And these things are true because university students of to-day are the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... the inter-convertibility of forces—light, heat, electricity,—taking place constantly everywhere, often on a stupendous scale, require bewildering calculations by an ever-present God. No energy, not even potential energy, can be lost in converting one force into another. It must ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... 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! The hour approaches ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... parties' and copyright owners' legitimate concerns. Reliance parties have invested capital and labor in the lawful exploitation of public domain property; the sudden restoration of copyright divests them of these investments. Without some provision addressing this potential loss, there could be challenges based on the "taking'' clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, it is important that the United States restore copyright protection in certain foreign works. The United States arguably failed to conform its ...
— Supplementary Copyright Statutes • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... possess a soul; that this "cell-soul" also consists of a sum of sensations, perceptions, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul differ from these only in degree. In like manner there is present in the egg-cell (as potential energy) a hereditary cell-soul, out of which man, like every ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... the New York City street railway franchises, either appropriated or unappropriated, the Broadway line was considered the most profitable. So valuable were its present and potential prospects estimated that in 1852 Thomas E. Davies and his associates had offered, in return for the franchise, to carry passengers for a three-cent fare and to pay the city a million-dollar bonus. Other eager ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... conviction. A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought or was going ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That morality is the essence ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which, measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a more ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... succeeding, his own chances of inaugurating the new state as its chief figure were not good. And by leaving the coalition abruptly before union was accomplished he had put himself entirely out of the running. In a group of able men which included several potential prime ministers Macdonald had advanced to the first place by reason of gifts precisely suited to the demands of the hour. Lord Monck's choice was therefore justified. Nor was the resolve to abolish ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... scheme has all been carried out. What was a watery desolation has been converted into a potential paradise. Faust is a great feudal lord, with a boundless domain and a fleet of ships that bring him the riches of far-away lands. But thus far he has simply been amusing himself on a grand scale. He has thought always mainly of himself. He has courted experience, among other things ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Without apparently heeding this potential ceremony, Ruth remained leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault above was serene and tranquil, with ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Christian incense-bearer." But "the poem is a heathen poem, just 'fumigated' here and there by its editor." There is a vast difference between "fumigating" a heathen work and adapting it to blessedly changed belief, seeing in old story the potential vessel of Christian thought and Christian teaching. To fumigate with incense is one thing—to use that incense in the work of dedication and consecration is another. For instance, the old story of the "Quest of the Graal," best known to modern ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... greeted Kate with potential friendship in their faces, and she could not keep back her feeling of involuntary surprise at the absence of anything like suspicion. Down in Silvertree if a new woman had come into a boarding-house, they would have wondered why. Here they seemed ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... had probably been constructed by a poet, for it was quite superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact. According to the map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depot, Court-House, Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions, which composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati. But the map was meant chiefly for ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... tells us that man learns to know himself last of all. He did not realize that your true-born libertine never knows it. Whatever Folly's life may have been, and he thought he had no illusions on that score, he seized upon her question as proving that she still held the potential bloom of youth and a ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... the "vitalists," who thus half-sneeringly speaks of those who believe that the vital forces of the universe are among the highest potential factors expressed therein, is one who, for the last decade and a half, has mostly lived in the ephemeromorphic world, and who, in diving into the "beginnings of life," has so far lost his way that the all-glorious end of it is as much an inexplicable mystery to him ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his own companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father's table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale and sickened ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... told you to take your seat, and left him in the corner. Remember that you are a stranger in the place, and they take more notice of what you do, so you must be careful. Now let's have our conjugations. Give me the verb 'to be,' potential mood, past ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a burglar to the backbone but not a murderer at heart. He deserved the fate that came to him as little as any who in modern times have met with a like one." Those who are in the fighting line are always the most generous about their adversaries. Parrock as a potential target for Peace's revolver, may have erred on the side of generosity, but there is some truth in what ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... command—we probably would anyway, sooner or later. But it's the waste of a good ship. You know as well as I do that it stands to reason combat can't be run as a game of blind man's bluff. And that's just what Frendon will make it. If you're going to make proper use of your military potential it takes brains, like our ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald
... that Harvard matter; provided it don't go into the Newspapers, all is right. Thank you a thousand times for that thrice-kind potential welcome, and flinging wide open your doors and your hearts to me at Concord. The gleam of it is like sunshine in a subterranean place. Ah me, Ah me! May God be with ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... should be made during either the first or second game of the rubber. During the rubber game, however, the doubler should be more conservative, and should "take in" his rubber unless satisfied that the double will produce 300, with a potential possibility ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... nothing save Leonardo's studies. The whole of a man's life and character are set forth in his two drawings of his friend Pirckheimer, a strange blend of the philosopher and the hog. And the tragedy is that the lower nature won; in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522 the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... this power, and the President exercises it. We know, Sir, that, without the aid of that precedent, his acts could never have received the sanction of this body, even at a time when his voice was somewhat more potential here than it now is, or, as I trust, ever again will be. Does the President, then, reject the authority of all precedent except what it is suitable to his own purpose to use? And does he use, without stint or ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the marriage by capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institution could become, what it has become, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the nobler days ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... reference to certain matters which Hamilton is not discussing; but he hardly ever attempts to trace the history of Hamilton's own view, or the train of thought by which it suggested itself to his mind. And the result of this is, that Mr. Mill's interpretations are generally in the potential mood. He wastes a good deal of conjecture in discovering what Hamilton might have meant, when a little attention in the right quarter would have ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... digestion and for the completion of the bills and measures founded upon it. At the next session of congress this select committee will become a standing committee of the Senate, and then we shall have that which appears to be the most potential and at the same time the most dangerous element in politics to-day, agitation, agitation, agitation. It seems that the legislators of the United States Government are not to be allowed to pass in quiet judgment ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... danger of acquiring a 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 ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... of education. They are therefore what is known as "selected lives": if these women are forced to remain celibate as a condition of their employment, it is a distinct loss to the nation of a specially selected class of potential mothers. In these days, when the declining birthrate is causing some concern to our statesmen, it would surely be worth their while to consider how far they are themselves contributing to the condition of affairs which they deplore, by maintaining this rigid regulation for the sake ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected 'potential' energy, pre- existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of 'helium' as the radiation's outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to be true, because, altho it extends our old ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... useless persons to Paradise and thus cheering the lives of the friends they leave on earth. Assured of this, as we are, all inactivity is unbearable to us. At the present moment we are, so to say, unemployed philanthropists; we are but a potential and passive blessing to our fellow-creatures, though we burn to be doing good to all! I appeal to my friend, Count Gambardella, here. Is this not ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... spot, I observe, one is liable to return to the antique outlook; to see the beauty of fields and rivers, yet only when subsidiary to man's personal convenience; to appreciate a fair landscape—with a shrewd worldly sense of its potential uses. "The garden that I love," said an Italian once to me, "contains good vegetables." This utilitarian flavour of the south has become very intelligible to me during the last few days. I, too, am thinking less of calceolarias ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... perceive the potential political power of women voters, he first declared, as a "private citizen," that suffrage was all right for the women of his home state, New Jersey, but that it was altogether wrong to ask him as President to ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... human, subjective reality of it, dependent upon the temperament of the observer. There is the universal potential reality of it, existing in the objective mystery. And finally there is the ideal reality of it, objective and absolute as far as we are concerned, in the vision that I have called "the vision of the immortals." If it be asked why, in all these ultimate problems, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of the Northmen in the north of Europe and the northern Atlantic were so detached from the knowledge of the south and came to a pause so early in time that notwithstanding their potential value they contributed practically nothing to the general geographical knowledge of Europe. Nor did Christian, Jewish, or Arabic accounts of Eastern lands written by travellers of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries become widely known or influential. [Footnote: Ibid., II., chaps, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... about the soot myself," said the baronet, with that dispassionateness which belongs to the potential mood. "Nothing is more healthy. And if one's business lay there, Gadsmere would be a paradise. It makes quite a feature in Scrogg's history of the county, with the little tower and the fine piece of water—the prettiest ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... mica is put between tin foils, it heats excessively; and the fall of potential over the air films separating the mica and foil is great enough to cause disruptive discharge to the surface of the mica. There appears to be a luminous layer of minute sparks under the foils, and there is a strong ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... long E for an English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people's impressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to be understood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the facts I do not profess to be certain of ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... all claims. Whence he got the money has never been discovered to this day, which is a curious circumstance, seeing that the deficiency was rather over five thousand pounds; but the important fact is that he did get it and that he paid up all that he owed. So that he was only a potential defaulter, so to speak; and, discreditable as the affair undoubtedly was, it does not seem to have any direct ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... capacity for work." Capacity is receptive; ability, potential. A sponge has capacity for water; the hand, ability to squeeze ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... before he passed from the "what Knows". Christianity is a religion which is only secondarily a doctrine addressed to the "what Knows". It is, first of all, a religion whose fountain-head is a Personality in whom all that is spiritually potential in man, was realized, and in responding to whom the soul of man is quickened and regenerated. And the Church, through the centuries, has been kept alive, not by the letter of the New Testament, for the letter killeth, but by a succession of quickened and regenerated spirits, "the noble ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Persian, Turkish and Arabian women on the island, wives of the more potential men. It was no secret that they had been purchased from avaricious masters on the mainland, in Bagdad and Damascus and the Persian gulf ports—sapphires passing in exchange. Marriages were performed by the local priests. There were no divorces. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Revenue, a Household of his own; and finally a Wife, as he had requested: a Sachsen-Gotha Princess; who, peerless Wilhelmma being unattainable, was welcome to Prince Fred. She is in the family-way, this summer 1737, a very young lady still; result thought to be due—When? Result being potential Heir to the British Nation, there ought to have been good calculation of the time when! But apparently nobody had well turned his attention that way. Or if Fred and Spouse had, as is presumable, Fred had given ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... knowledge to be made by the teacher. College examinations usually test for multiplicity of facts acquired, rather than for power developed. College teaching usually does not perceive that the mind is a reacting machine containing a vast amount of pent-up potential energy which is ready to react upon any presentation; that development takes place only as this self-activity expresses itself; that education is evolutionary rather than involutionary. Teaching is, therefore, a process ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... connection with ethics. The ethical problem is not the existence of evil, but the emergence of good; not, that is, why do men do wrong, but why do they do right. That life should cease to be is not at all wonderful, but that with so many potential dangers around the organism, the actions of living beings should become so automatically adapted to their surroundings as to shun the actions which destroy life, and perform such actions as maintain it—at least, to such an extent as secures ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... Slave Trade" of the world, signed by the representatives of the "Powers" at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, and repeated at the Congress of Paris at the end of the Napoleonic wars, was potential enough to abate but not to end this most inhuman and ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... London. It must not be forgotten, of course, that the New York Express Company would, if necessary, have carried the goods much further for the same charge of forty cents a package. The limit of distance I do not know: it is probably something like twenty miles. But a potential ell does not reconcile me to paying an exorbitant price for the actual inch which is all I have any use for. This method of simplification—fixing the minimum payment on the basis of the maximum bulk, weight, and distance—seems to me essentially irrational. In some cases, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... have been very strange! To this unmentionable Duke of Mecklenburg she has left one Daughter, a Princess Elizabeth-Catherine, who will be called Princess ANNE, one day: whose fortunes in the world may turn out to be tragical. Potential heiress of all the Russias, that little Elizabeth or Anne. Heiress by her wily aunt, Anne of Courland,—Anne with the swollen cheek, whom Moritz, capable of many things, and of being MARECHAL DE SAXE by and by, could not manage to fall in love with there; and who has now just ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... reason adduced does not show that matter is not created, but that it is not created without form; for though everything created is actual, still it is not pure act. Hence it is necessary that even what is potential in it should be created, if all that belongs to its being ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... that reality is embodied in nature, which depends on a supreme intelligence, and may be realized in other intelligences, or thought-centres, such as the human mind. In other words, according to Aristotle, truth is actual in the world and potential in all minds, which may by experience put on its forms. Thus the individualism of the Sophists and the despotism of Plato are overcome, while an important place is made for experience, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... than from admiration of the fix he is in. It has been used, this patriotism, to aid the wealthy interests, which are all-powerful here; and it will continue to be a ball in the tennis of party politics. But it is real; it will remain, potential of good, among all the forces ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... margin of the other. He turned from the door and went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder against its brass doors, Colville managed to lull his enemy, while he studied the figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... self-perpetuating, self-extending. And, dreadfully destitute as this country is, the Priesthood of the People can command the means of educating that People, which nobody without their cooeperation can accomplish. Let the Catholic Bishops unite in an earnest and potential call for teachers, and they can summon thousands and tens of thousands of capable and qualified persons from convents, from seminaries, from cloisters, from drawing-rooms, even from foreign lands if need be, to devote their time and efforts to the work without earthly ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... animosity are generated because business men have not yet learned the great value of having the right kind of person to receive visitors. To the strangers who come—and among the idlers and swindlers and beggars who assail every successful business house are potential good friends and customers—this person represents the firm,—is, for the time being, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... genotypes the potential of the temporal region to respond to selective demands varied ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... man of his years, not ignorant of the science of self-defence, and when rudely or ruffianly insulted, could repay the indignity, with interest, at a moment's notice; his lungs were vigorous, he could blow the French horn with most poetic and potential blast, and with no mean degree of skill, and as for preaching he made nothing of it; it used to be said that, with the assistance of a dexterous parish clerk, he could get through the whole morning service, sermon and all, in five and thirty minutes; he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... demonic elusiveness and he could no longer carry his liquor 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 ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... the Soviet officials did not realize the potential of the new craft was apparently correct," the President said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian radar. The disabled ship had had some trouble with its drive mechanism; it would never have deliberately ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... U. S. Military Intelligence established a Section of Plant Protection which had thirty-three district offices during the war and gave attention to thirty-five thousand industrial plants engaged in production of war materials. Protective lighting was early recognized by this section as a very potential agency for defense, and extensive use was made of it. For example, Edmund Leigh, chief of the section, in discussing the value ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... was possible. The psyche, whose inventory of powers is copied symbolically in the elementary types, knows, even if only darkly at first, the possible unfolding of the powers. These unfoldings are originally not actual but potential. [See ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... 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 ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... evening hour 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 for ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... be apparently quenched, if it is not guarded, and if the life the man leads is unfavorable to its expansion, as it generally is; but, on the other hand, our conviction is that human beings can develop their potential spiritual powers; that, if they do, no phenomenon will be impossible for their liberated wills, and that they will perform what, in the eyes of the uninitiated, will be much more wondrous than the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... of!) the power to keep the people ignorant upon matters vital to us all? To distort, to lie? The sheer necessity of getting certain truths told, which these powerful but hidden fellows refused to tell, was a force working at high potential and almost compelling the production of Free Papers side by side with the big Official ones. That is why you nearly always find the Free Press directed by men of intelligence and cultivation—of exceptional intelligence ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... system was followed by the introduction of the alternating system, using high potential primaries with the converters at each house, reducing, as a rule, from 1,000 down to either 50 or 100 volts. I am not familiar with the early alternating work, and had not at my disposal sufficient time in preparing my notes to go at any length into an investigation of this branch of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... being entirely unnavigable at all times of the year. Raging floods in the wet season, and mere driblets in the dry, they are at present denied to the most powerful or shallowest of river steamboats. The prospects of the Orange river as a potential waterway are in any case practically destroyed by a great bar which blocks approach to the estuary from ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... issues we have placed before our readers are not confined within the imaginary lines of the parochial unit or the boundaries of jurisdiction. They will not be met with rightly and successfully, if the Church as a unit does not agree on a uniform plan of action. For, to prevent a deplorable waste of potential powers, of misdirected energies and of overlapping work, to forward the great cause of the Church and realize its Catholic aspirations, to present a united front to common dangers, the union and co-operation ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... I drank deep the bliss of being young, The strife and sweet potential flux of things I sought Youth's ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... of his margin of unemployment is more than balanced by his successful introduction of women's labour: and he means that War, in addition to the actual profits of his Trade, shall give him the enormous potential advantage of ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... features in the Gospel biography. For this reason, S. Paul speaks as we have seen[211] of the birth of the Christ in the disciple, and of His evolution and His full stature therein. Every man is a potential Christ, and the unfolding of the Christ-life in a man follows the outline of the Gospel story in its striking incidents, which we have seen to be ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... gallimaufry of decadents, criminals, and potential rebels had become in a few hours his absorbing desire. And in this short time he had almost frayed the smooth edges of the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock, which intervenes between the finger of the man who pulls the trigger and the cartridge. If that change is brought about, the potential energy of the powder passes suddenly into actual energy, and does the work of propelling the bullet. The powder, therefore, may be appropriately called work-stuff, not only because it is stuff which is easily made to yield work in the physical sense, but because a good deal of work ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... existence is a complicated one and involves that of the origin of kinship terms. If we take a crucial case of kinship terminology, we find that a child applies the same term to its actual mother as to all the women whom its father might have married, to its potential mothers in fact. If therefore we have to choose between the gradual extension of the terms from the single family to the group or their original application to a group, this instance seems decisive in ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... it's flatly impossible, you understand. If a female of some animal or other, carrying a freshly-fertilized zygote, and her species happened to have all the necessary potential characteristics, and a flood of ionizing radiation went through the zygote at exactly the right time, and it managed to hit just the right genes in just the right way ... well I'm sure you can see the odds against it are tremendous. I wouldn't even want to guess at the order ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... entirety", but we lack as yet the means to study it as a whole. Older by long ages than Babel's fabulous Tower, and covering a continuous area from Eastern Arabia to the Maghrab al-Aksa (western Mauritania), from Chaldaea in the North to southern Zanzibar, it numbers of potential vocabulary 1,200,000 words all of which may be, if they are not, used, and while they specify the finest shades of meaning, not a few of them, technically termed "Zidd," bear significations diametrically opposite, e.g., "Maula" lord, slave; and "'Ajuz" with 88 different ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... considerations of right not less than of policy; and that while the courageous and self-reliant spirit of our people prompts them to hardy enterprises, and they occasionally yield to the temptation of taking part in the troubles of countries near at hand, where they know how potential their influence, moral and material, must be, the American Government has uniformly and steadily resisted all attempts of individuals in the United States to undertake armed aggression ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front immediately. There seemed to be no possibility which there was not some one there to think ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... appeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember that men have always been better than their conditions, and that otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who are above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal, without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy. They are purely ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... begin endeavouring to frustrate what at the time of her first interference was the merest flirtation between a Romeo who was tied to a desk all day, and a Juliet who was constantly coming into contact with other potential Romeos—plenty of them. Our own private opinion is that if the Montagus and Capulets had tried to bury the hatchet at a public betrothal of the two young people, the latter would have quarrelled on the spot. Setting their family circles ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... fortunate than this Robert or this Margaret and will have far more to say in the world, to think of them—how many they are. I am not sentimentalising. When an Elementary Schoolmaster spreads himself and tells me he looks upon every child entering his school as a potential Lord Chancellor, I answer that, as I expect, so I should hope, to die before seeing the world a Woolsack. Jack cannot ordinarily be as good as his master; if he were, he would be a great deal better. You have given Robert a vote, however, and soon you will have to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean. Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius should have sane ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... whether they talked or not. They might have talked themselves hoarse, when it came to that, without changing his opinions or his attitude toward them. He had started out the most unsuspecting of men, and now he was making up for it by suspecting Foster and Mert of being robbers and hypocrites and potential murderers. He could readily imagine them shooting him in the back of the head while he drove, if that would suit their purpose, or if they thought that he ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... convulsed with bitter personal disputes between Jesuit and Jansenist, fighting even to mutual persecution upon points either beyond or beneath the human intellect. A third party stood by, unseen, occasionally stimulating each, but equally despising both, a potential fiend, sneering at the blind zealotry and miserable rage that were doing its unsuspected will. Rome, that boasts of her freedom from schism should blot the 18th ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, Or, rather, how into their eggs Blunder potential wings and legs 180 With will to move them and decide Whether in air or lymph to glide. Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing That Something Else set all agoing? Farther and farther back we push From Moses and his burning ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... over for herself many years since. Her interest now was in her sons' possible marriages, and it was a little painful to her that Henrietta should be so much excited about what had never after all been more than a potential love affair. To tell the truth, she thought it a trifle petty and not worthy the dignity of one on the verge of old age. She wanted to be sympathetic, and she was too kind to say anything that would wound, but Henrietta could see that Evelyn did ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... period of great territorial acquisition by the American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth. By the rational compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... early May. Many other talks 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 from the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison |
