"Innovator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not only a religious innovator, but a writer of much excellent English. Contemporary with him or slightly later were a number of writers who used the native language and created permanent works of literature. The Vision of Piers Plowman is ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... [Exit BRUTUS.]; in whose name myself Attach thee as a traitorous innovator, A foe to the public weal. Obey, I charge thee, And follow ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown—it has to be demonstrated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... national of all sentiments in France is vanity. The wounded vanity of the many induced a thirst for Equality; though, as the most ardent innovator will some day discover, Equality is an impossibility. The Royalists pricked the Liberals in the most sensitive spots, and this happened specially in the provinces, where either party accused the other of unspeakable atrocities. In those ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... motion, strongest in continuance; but good, as a forced motion, strongest at first. Surely every medicine is an innovation; and he that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things which have long gone together, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... "Tycoons" who in Yedo ruled from 1603 to 1868. Nothing new was permitted, and any attempt at modification, enlargement, or improvement was not only frowned and hissed down as impious innovation, but usually brought upon the daring innovator the ban of the censor, imprisonment, banishment, or death by enforced suicide.[10] In Yedo, the centre of Chinese learning, and in other parts of the country, there were, indeed, thinkers whose philosophy did not always tally with ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... rhythms and duration. Little by little the emotions, the natural expression of which is music, could no longer be restricted to these dance forms and rhythms; and gradually the latter were modified by each daring innovator in turn. This "daring" of human beings, in breaking through the trammels of the dance in order to express what lay within their souls in the language that properly belonged to it, would seem almost ludicrous to us, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... relates in comic form the adventures of Odysseus and Silenus in the monster's company. Further, the tendency of tragedy was inevitably towards comedy. The extant work of Aeschylus and Sophocles is not without comic touches; but the trend is clearer in Euripides who was an innovator in this as in many other matters. Laughter and tears are neighbours; a happy ending is not tragic; loosely connected scenes are the essence of Old Comedy, and loosely written tragic dialogue (common in Euripides' later work) ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... name. The Press, the Pulpit, and the Lyceum, with rare and brave exceptions, met the formidable array of Facts with which the work bristled, by sciolistic criticisms, bigoted denunciations, or timid, faint praise. Conservatives in Politics and Religion exhibited him as a dangerous innovator, a social iconoclast, the would-be destroyer of all that was sacred in Institutions and in Religion. Theologians branded him as immoral and atheistic, and poured upon him a torrent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... Alfred de Vigny was a true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word: he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France. Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... the Athenian literati; but, when they entered into conversation with him, some of them were disposed to ridicule him as an idle talker, whilst others seemed inclined to denounce him as a dangerous innovator. "Certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him; and some said—What will this babbler say? other some—He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection." ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... I also believe it is ill to try experiments in states, unless the need be urgent, and unless it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the love of change that urgeth the reformation. Is not time the greatest innovator?—is he not always changing? It hath been said that, as in nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place; so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm. Steel sharpens steel; so one glory perfecteth another: and I ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Frigid Gripus Knapper—directed his under-sheriff not to give white gloves on the occasion of a maiden assize at Carlisle, and also through the mouth of his subordinate, declined to pay the officers of the circuit certain customary fees. To put the innovator to shame, Sir William Gascoigne, the judge before whom the case was laid, observed in open court, "Though I can compel an immediate payment, it being a demand of right, and not a mere gift, yet I will set him an example by gifts which I might refuse, but will not, because they ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... an education. At the age of thirty-three he took his seat on the school-bench at Barcelona. In 1526 he entered the University at Alcala. He was here looked upon as a dangerous innovator, and was imprisoned six weeks, by order of the Inquisition, for preaching without authority, since he was not in holy orders. After his release he attended the University of Salamanca, but he finally took his ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... tale is told at a million hearth-fires, the probabilities are small, indeed, that any innovation at one hearth-fire, however ingenious, will work its way into and modify the narration at all the rest. There is no printing-press to make the thoughts of one man the thoughts of thousands. While the innovator is modifying ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... even those who knew this fact also recognised that he had shown such enormous ability in adapting the principles of his Semitic master to modern English conditions that he was entitled to be regarded quite as much as an innovator as a disciple. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... he, smiling "and I am willing to know it. But the leaven of truth is one thing, and the powder train of the innovator is another." ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... was not an innovator—he simply expressed what the many wished to hear—he was caught in the current of the time: he was part and parcel of the Renaissance. And he was a loyal Churchman. None of his diatribes were against the Church itself—he wished to benefit the Church by freeing it from the faults ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabaeus and his brethren arise to assert the honor of the ancient law and to defend the temple of their forefathers with as ardent a spirit as can inspire any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of ancient ages? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that, when once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the ordinary course they can alone be reestablished. Republican spirit ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had been ordered by the authorities to remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... justification for assuming that the Church at Rome probably had Adoptionist proclivities is the undeniable fact that early in the second century Hermas held this view, and there is no evidence that he was an innovator. ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... at this period that the Assembly ordered the removal of Voltaire's remains to the Pantheon: philosophy thus avenged itself on the anathemas that had been thundered forth, even against the ashes of the great innovator. The body of Voltaire, on his death, in Paris, A.D. 1778, had been furtively removed by his nephew at night, and interred in the church of the abbey of Sellieres in Champagne; and when the nation sold this abbey, the cities of Troyes and Romilly mutually ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... unstained with the same sin. Let us remember, that the fault may be partly our own, as well as his. Let us remember, that the sin of not even every unwarrantable innovation, is exclusively imputable to the innovator himself. For, as Lord Bacon says, "A froward retention of customs is ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... mosaicists were brought from Constantinople, who covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of the Eastern splendour. The first innovator was, I believe, Giunta of Pisa, the second Cimabue, the third Giotto; the last only being a man of power enough to effect a complete revolution in the artistic ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... personage came upon the scene when it was agreed that Luther should appear before the Legate at Augsburg. Cardinal Cajetan was the weightiest divine of the Court of Rome, and a man of original mind, who was denounced in his order as a dangerous innovator, and whose writings could not be reprinted without large omissions. He is commemorated, in political literature, among the advocates of tyrannicide. He was more dexterous than Prierias, although he also refused a revision of current ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... to us—about the inevitable incompatibility of law and gospel. Both of them had seats in the Executive Council, and, under the then-existing state of things, were official but irresponsible advisers of the Crown's representative. More than one would-be innovator of those days had been made to feel the weight of their hands, without in the least knowing, or even suspecting, whence the blow proceeded. They were the head and front of the junto of oligarchs who formed the Vehmgericht known as the Family Compact, and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... was to regenerate European culture. In the first period of his relationship with Wagner, he thought that he had found the man who was prepared to lead in this direction. For a long while he regarded his master as the Saviour of Germany, as the innovator and renovator who was going to arrest the decadent current of his time and lead men to a greatness which had died with antiquity. And so thoroughly did he understand his duties as a disciple, so wholly was he devoted ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... is unrestraint ("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... she thought was the only opinion entitled to consideration. The old Scotch and Irish merchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusable by success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standard of society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up the bog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was no better than ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend |
