"Inventive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inclined plane. The timber was then brought by the elephants, without any interference on the part of the keepers or natives, who remained looking on, was pushed by the elephants with their foreheads up the inclined plane, and the truck was loaded. Here then is an instance in which the inventive instinct of the animal—if that term may be used—was superior to the humbler reasoning powers of the men who ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... especially logical problem was often touched upon in the Middle Ages, by the nominalists, realists, and conceptualists, in their disputes. With Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of inventive methods. Kant called attention to a priori syntheses. The absolute idealists despised the Aristotelian logic. The followers of Herbart, bound to Aristotle, on the other hand, set in relief those judgments which they called narrative, which are of a character altogether different ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... twenty-franc gold-piece into his little pocket, and went away to seek his fortune in Louisiana: the son never heard of him more. The lady-president of a charitable society, Mademoiselle Marx, took pity on the abandoned child: she fed him on bones and occasionally beat him. She was an ingenious and inventive creature, and made her own cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is for ever demonstrating the merits of his implement. Soon, discovering that he was thankless and unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest clerk, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... inventive in the spirit world. The inventor, by his fertile brain, constructs an article which the majority desire to possess, and for that article they give him an equivalent. It may be a picture or it may be ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... students and collectors anxious to obtain inscriptions. Traders in forgeries supplied what the diggers could not produce. Classical art became a fetish.[124] The noble qualities of antiquity were blighted by the imitators, whose inventive powers were atrophied, while their skill and knowledge left nothing to be desired. Excluding the Cosmati, Rome was the mother of no period or movement of art excepting the Rococo. As for Donatello himself, he was but slightly influenced by classical motives. ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book— Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore, And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deem'd, to little good, But came to Oxford and his ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... loveliness is the B flat major prelude, No. 21. It is superior in content and execution to most of the nocturnes. In feeling it belongs to that form. The melody is enchanting. The accompaniment figure shows inventive genius. Klindworth employs a short appoggiatura, Kullak the long, in the second bar. Judge of what is true editorial sciolism when I tell you that Riemann—who evidently believes in a rigid melodic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... mankind; respect for its authority was not more apparent at its ancient than it is at its present limits; new and inexhaustible sources of general prosperity have been opened; the effects of distance have been averted by the inventive genius of our people, developed and fostered by the spirit of our institutions; and the enlarged variety and amount of interests, productions, and pursuits have strengthened the chain of mutual dependence and formed a circle of mutual benefits too apparent ever ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... equally wonderful with that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity. All that I before wished was, not to admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them; whereas, in the serious part of his drama, he has generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characters are equally true, various, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... where rivers never flow, Where constant suns repel approaching snow, How Nature's various and inventive hand Can pour unheard-of moisture o'er the land! immortal plants she bids on rocks arise, And from the dropping branches streams supplies, The thirsty native sucks the falling shower, Nor asks for juicy fruit or blooming flower; But haply doubts when travellers maintain, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... idiosyncrasies. Even when we find, as we do find, similar, and almost identical, designs in neighbouring churchyards, or in the same churchyard, it is safer to conjecture that a meaner sculptor has copied the earlier work than that the first designer would weaken his inventive character by a replication. The following, which cannot be described as less than a distortion of a worthier model, is to be found in many places, and in such abundance as to suggest a ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... every way worthy the highest honors of the Institute. She is a sublime conception, most successfully realized,—an effort of genius skilfully executed,—a grand unique combination, honorable to the country, as creditable to all engaged upon her. Nothing in the history of mechanics surpasses the inventive genius of Captain Ericsson, unless it be the moral daring of Captain Stockton, in the adoption of so many novelties at one time." We may add that in the Princeton was exhibited the first successful application of screw-propulsion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... laid in writing before Elizabeth. Mr. Spedding is inclined to agree, on account of the extraordinary resemblance he traces between it and the Guiana expedition of 1617-18. The parallel is imaginary, as is the supposition that Gilbert's bold and inventive intellect needed inspiration from any one. But undoubtedly, had the Queen's wary counsellors given their sanction, Ralegh would have been among the adventurers. The next year he accepted a command in the expedition Gilbert was equipping for 'Norimbega,' in search, it was said, for the North-West ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... herself with a truly Machiavellian ingenuity, devising all sorts of insults irritations and annoyances, and adding to the venom of her tongue the inventive cunning of a Malayan witch doctor. The Appleboys' flower-pots mysteriously fell off the piazza, their thole-pins disappeared, their milk bottles vanished, Mr. Appleboy's fish lines acquired a habit of derangement equaled only by barbed-wire entanglements, and his clams went bad! But ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... These are means; but back of these lies the grand molding influence of men's life. It is Employment. A man's business does more to make him than every thing else. It hardens his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition, makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part. No man feels himself a man who is not doing a man's ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... about the same old line of talk, for he was more voluble than inventive, and never varied it much. It served just as well as a new lecture for every occasion, for the memory of suckers is even ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... especially in Scotland and on the Welsh border. Many of the most picturesque bridges in Britain, which every tourist has admired, often without inquiring or thinking of the hand that planned them, were designed by his inventive brain. The exquisite stone arch which links the two banks of the lesser Scotch Dee in its gorge at Tongueland is one of the most picturesque; for Telford was a bit of an artist at heart, and, unlike too many modern railway constructors, he always endeavoured to make ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... treatment of it which are scarcely to be met with in any other German writer, save perhaps Goethe. Forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety in rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicity in construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard to fluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectly pure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms—these are the qualities that have to be enumerated, and even ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... being culture-bound, and work of a profitable nature for the moment at a low ebb, Aunt M'riar had fallen back on some arrears of stocking-darning. Dolly was engaged on the object to which she gave lifelong attention, that of keeping her doll asleep. I do not fancy that Dolly was very inventive; but then, you may be, at three-and-a-half, seductive without being inventive. Besides, this monotonous fiction of the need of her doll for sleep was only a scenario for another incident—the fear of disturbance by a pleace'n with two ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... possesses some form of inventive genius. Tom Swift is a bright, ingenious boy and his inventions and adventures make the most ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... they had gained that end—so that it was no longer a question of peace, but a question of conquest. If the refusal took place with the former view, it was presumably mistaken; compared with the gain of Sicily every other concession was of little moment, and looking to the determination and the inventive genius of Hamilcar, it was very rash to stake the securing of the principal gain on the attainment of secondary objects. If on the other hand the party opposed to the peace regarded the complete political annihilation of Carthage as the only end ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of all admired, as a proof of the industry, address, and inventive genius of the Hindoos, was to see the largest of these elephants stand with his four feet on a post fixed into the earth, and standing out of it above two feet, playing and beating time with his trunk to the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... consider some detail of work, chased him into the shop to turn over the old debris of the stock. At one time he showed the alarming symptom of brooding over his wife's death. Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly scared. But she was not inventive. It was left to Alvina to suggest: "Why doesn't father let the shop, and some of ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... of this master, who next to Ruisdael, is confessedly at the head of landscape painters of the Dutch School, will be best appreciated by comparing him with his rival. In two most important qualities—fertility of inventive genius, and poetry of feeling—he is decidedly inferior: the range of his subjects being far narrower. His most frequent scenes are villages surrounded by trees, such as are frequently met with in the districts of Guelderland, with winding pathways leading from house to house. A water-mill occasionally ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... was a poser, a fraud, a liar; the highest type of liar; the day-dreaming, well-read, genuinely inventive, highly imaginative, loving-it-for-its-own-sake liar. But to Skiddy every word he said was Gospel-true. He never doubted the captain for an instant. Life grew richer to him, stranger and more wonderful. It was like a personal distinction—a medal, or the thanks of ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... declaring, that if he had committed a fault in drawing out the plan of the expedition, he was ready to answer for it. He made this declaration in such a cold, self-satisfied tone, that it drew down upon his head the most bitter inventive from members of the opposition. Barre, Luttrell, Burke, Townshend, and Fox, all, in their turns, assailed the haughty secretary, and revelled in descriptions of the loss and disgrace which we had sustained—necessarily, from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the milking, was of an inventive as well as an impatient turn of mind, and he devised a simple plan to stop the switching. He fastened a brick to the cow's tail, then set blithely about his work assured of unusual comfort while the rest of us looked ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... why we prefer the logic of those men who, declaiming against the invasion of exotic merchandise, have, at least, the courage to declaim as well against the excess of production due to the inventive power of the ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... so," says he. "Well then, why don't you find me a substitute? Suffering Cicero, has that inventive brain of yours ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... regarded as the most promising inventions which had been displayed in international exhibitions then recently held. From that time until the present it has been his constant duty and practice to take note of the advance of inventive science as applied to industrial improvement—to watch it as an organic growth, not only from a philosophical, but also from a practical, point of view. The advance towards the actual adoption of any great industrial invention is generally a more or less collective movement; and, in the course of ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... blemishes and imperfections of this poet, we must acknowledge his extraordinary merits. In composition he is, in general, elegant and correct; and where the subject is capable of connection with sentiment, his inventive ingenuity never fails to extract from it the essence of delight and surprise. His fancy is prolific of beautiful images, and his (505) judgment expert in arranging them to the greatest advantage. He bestows panegyric with inimitable grace, and satirises with equal dexterity. In ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... gesture, diction, the several conventions according to which ideas and emotions are habitually conveyed to your comprehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immediately outside the realm of conventions. Their language, their medium of communication, is as new as what it expresses. They are inventive as well as intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened because in this way, the warp as well as the woof of their art being expressive and original, the artistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same model, M. Rodin's result is in like manner expressly ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... do to help you?" called Mr. Swift. "Shall I run and shut off the power?" for in the shop where Tom did most of his inventive work there was a powerful dynamo, and it was on one of the wires extending from it, that brought current into the house, that ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... from Media. Yet they never availed themselves of these resources, which must have led to great improvements in their architecture, and almost entirely reserved the use of stone for ornamental purposes. This would tend to show, at all events, that the Assyrians were not distinguished for inventive genius. They had wandered northward from the lowlands, where they had dwelt for centuries as a portion of the Chaldean nation. When they separated from it and went off to found cities for themselves, they took with them certain ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... he had been the pride of his family, as a youth, its hope of fame and fortune; he was clever, handsome, inventive, original, everything that society and his kind admired, but he criminally fooled them and their expectation, and they ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... was not a bit spoiled by all this flattery and homage. He worked all the harder; resolved to achieve yet greater triumphs in science than he had yet done. An opportunity soon arose to turn his knowledge and inventive powers to account in a very important way. For a long time the English public had every now and then been horrified by the terrible explosions which took place in the coal mines. These explosions resulted often in an appalling loss of human life. Their ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... there is no alternative; and the British sailor is, with all his faults, an ingenious fellow, not altogether devoid of the inventive faculty, and possessed of a pretty turn for adaptation; give him but the idea and he will generally find the ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... keeping with my impressions of the man. There was nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him. He bore the marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and open-handed generosity, and despite the son's great pen-craft, and inventive power, would have forgiven my saying that sometimes I have had a doubt whether the father was not, after all, the greater man of the two, though certainly not, like the hero of In Memoriam, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... it produced one of the bright spots in my experiences in France. That eloquent secretary represents a type who will tell the public about anything he thinks it wants to know about the "horrible details" of war in France, and facts do not baffle his inventive genius. ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... With all the inventive genius of Europe applied in this war, the heat ray or any other revolutionary means of killing which would make guns and rifles powerless has not been developed. It is still a question of throwing or shooting projectiles accurately at your opponent, only where once it was javelin, or spear, or ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... like his brother took to science, and in 1844 settled in England, naturalising in 1859; was manager of the English branch of the Siemens Brothers firm, and did much to develop electric lighting and traction (Portrush Electric Tramway); his inventive genius was productive of a heat-economising furnace, a water-meter, pyrometer, bathometer, &c.; took an active part in various scientific societies; was President of the British Association (1882), and received a knighthood ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... children proceeded on their journey. Jenny soon felt thirsty. Orso, in whom had awakened his Indian inventive faculties, began to pluck cactus fruits. They were in abundance, and grew together with the flowers on the same leaves. In plucking them they pricked their fingers with the sharp points, but the fruit was luscious. Their sweet and acid flavor ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... for raising sugar, for the reason that the cane has to be planted every year, and every third year the frost puts in an appearance just a little before the sugar. Now, while I think personally that the tariff on sugar has stimulated the inventive genius of the country to find other ways of producing that which is universally needed; and while I believe that it will not be long until we shall produce every pound of sugar that we consume, and produce it cheaper than we buy it now, I am satisfied that in time and at no ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the pieuvre, and all other evils are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even romance—in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if you like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever order you please—the deaths of Cleopatra and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and must fabricate a plausible story to account for what he knew nothing about—a part that the greatest of sages would find it difficult to perform. The young, however, whom sages well may envy, seldom fail in lifting their inventive faculties to the level of their spirits, and two minutes of Hippias's angry complaints against the friend he serenely inquired for, gave Ripton ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... writes nothing on the subject. History records not a single instance of a gold-mine bubble in Thrace, or a silver ditto in Africa. Apart from this, have we, the descendants of those honest Phoenicians, any of their inventive skill and bold initiative? They taught other nations the art of ship-building; we can not as much as learn from other nations the art of building a gig. They transmitted to the people of the West a knowledge of mathematics, weights, and measures; we can not as much as weigh or ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... making my will." Monsieur Crapaud was too wise to express any astonishment; and his master began to hunt for a tidy-looking stone (paper and cambric were both at an end). They were all rough and dirty; but necessity had made the Viscount inventive, and he took a couple and rubbed them together till he had polished both. Then he pulled out the little pencil, and for the next half hour wrote busily. When it was done he lay down, and read it to his friend. This was Monsieur the Viscount's ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... of the medium through which they saw her. They repeated to one another, between jest and earnest, all the wild stories that were in vogue; nor, I presume, did they hesitate to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the moment might suggest, to heighten ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Tom had begun his inventive work when, some years before this story opens, he had bargained for Mr. Damon's motorcycle, after that machine had shot its owner into a tree. Mr. Damon was, naturally, perhaps, much disgusted, and sold the affair cheap. Tom repaired it, made some improvements, and, in the first ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... a later age. But we are informed in Genesis that, among some families of mankind, not only useful, but ornamental, arts were taught before Noah's flood![90] and, without instituting an inquiry how soon the inventive and mechanical faculties of mankind were more or less developed in various countries, we may venture to assume that, before the historical period, before navigation had conveyed the higher arts of civilisation to distant shores, the aboriginal races, generally, were not ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... one of the most interesting one can read of in the history of the Polar regions. Badly equipped as they were, they had to have recourse, like Robinson Crusoe, to their inventive faculties. The most extraordinary contrivances were devised in the course of the winter, and when spring came the three men stepped out of their hole, well and hearty, ready ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... precisely what I should have said. As I am not an inventive liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... incidentally; and this expulsion of the idea from himself, so that it acquires a life and movement of its own, and can be contemplated by the artist from the outside, is the very distinction between deeply creative and merely inventive genius. Poe's was of the latter sort. He possessed a wild, arbitrary imagination, that sometimes leaped frantically high; but his impressiveness is always that of a nightmare, always completely morbid. What we know of Poe's life leads inevitably to the conclusion ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... impossible. I have seen, as we most of us have, work done by such men in some out-of-the-way hamlet—where to-day even few strangers ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own doors; in such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so careful, and so inventive, that nothing in its way could go further. And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a third party to the brain ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... authorities of Grenoble assembled at the residence of the Prefect. There each individual explained ably, but especially, said Fourier, with much detail, the difficulties which he perceived. As regards the means of vanquishing them, the authorities seemed to be much less inventive. Confidence in administrative eloquence was not yet worn out at that epoch; it was resolved accordingly to have recourse to proclamations. The commanding officer and the Prefect presented each a project. The assembly was discussing ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... can I account for the whimsical subintelligiturs of our numerous harmonists—for the curiously inferred facts, the inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental and supplemental history which, in the utter silence of all historians and absence of all historical documents, they bring to light by mere force of logic? ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... largely due to the experimental character of the exploration and development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... shouldn't run such risks, my dear young lady; you really shouldn't! Now I remember a young lady whom I used to know—" And thereupon Mr. Hobhouse launched into an improbable anecdote which tried his inventive powers considerably. However, he was able to make it, and the comments thereupon lasted till they ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... theatre continued long in this contracted state, without scenes, without dresses, without an orchestra, the court displayed scenical and dramatic exhibitions with such costly magnificence, such inventive fancy, and such miraculous art, that we may doubt if the combined genius of Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Lawes, or Ferobosco, at an era most favourable to the arts of imagination, has been equalled by the modern ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... all the stories. It came from Charley Crimmins. He was able to testify with conviction that the giant bull was no figment of Indian's imagination or lumberman's inventive humor. For it was he whose ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... of this subject can, for a moment, contend that all the legends and traditions of the order are, to the very letter, historical facts. All that can be claimed for them is, that in some there is simply a substratum of history, the edifice constructed on this foundation being purely inventive, to serve us a medium for inculcating some religious truth; in others, nothing more than an idea to which the legend or myth is indebted for its existence, and of which it is, as a symbol, the exponent; ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... exhibits another contest of the tuneful shepherds: and, surely, it is not without some reproach to his inventive power, that of ten pastorals Virgil has written two upon the same plan. One of the shepherds now gains an acknowledged victory, but without any apparent superiority, and the reader, when he sees the prize adjudged, is not able to discover how it ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... knobbiest and scaliest member of the finny tribe. Sir, we tried to skin this animal and failed. Then we scraped him, and the moving question arose, What about fire? Luckily the landlady had left a lamp on the stairs. My inventive faculties were bestirred. The LAMP! No sooner said than the fish was placed on the fire-shovel, and we then took turns to move the shovel backwards and forwards over the lamp. Regardless of that woman's loud inquiries ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... marvellous implements for painting, and in his perseverence in developing a still more marvellous one. He lacked constantly the something necessary and local which gives to certain very inferior painters the inexpressible superiority of a savor of soil. It could not be said that he was not inventive and new, yet one experienced on seeing no matter which one of his paintings that he was a creature of culture and of acquisition. The scattered studies in the atelier first of all displayed the influence ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... mounted the stilts of foreign travel that his paces became so enormous. Perhaps, after all, a rude poetic and artistic faculty possessed the man. He might have been a humbler phase of the "mute, inglorious Milton." Perhaps his narrations required the privileges and allowances due to the inventive arts generally. Certain it was that, in common with other artists, he required an atmosphere of sympathy and confidence in which to develop himself fully; and, when left alone with children, his mind ran such riot, that the bounds between ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... does our sex wholly engross this honour; ladies have had their share of the glory; one of them, of the royal blood of France, whom it were a profanation but to name here, surprises the age at once by the transcendent and inventive genius in her writings and the admirable graces of her style. Imitate those great examples if you can; for my part I cannot. Everyone, you know, cannot go to Corinth. When Solomon built the temple, all could not give ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... them with greater prosperity than has ever before been known. The removal of the monopoly of slave labor is a pledge that those regions will be peopled by a numerous and enterprising population, which will vie with any in the Union in compactness, inventive ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... risk of being called conceited I will also state that we boys consider that the stage management was a triumph of inventive art; we worked like beavers for two days, and the results were marvellous, 'if I do say ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... purpose; but he was of an indomitable temper, and had strong faith in that maxim of his race, which may be transcribed thus:—"If one effort fail you, try another." To carry out this principle, then, did Finch draw from the cunning inventive of his brain a plan which he could not doubt for a moment would be successful. The reader may blush while we record the fact, of Finch, deeming a partner necessary to the gaining his purpose, finding a willing accomplice in one of Montague's ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... improvement has been made since its first invention. It is inadequate as a transmitter, and as early as 1876, Professor Bell exhibited other means than electromagnetic action for producing the varying currents as a consequence of diaphragm motion. Much other inventive effort was addressed to this problem, the aim of all being to send out ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... the tutor, and off he would go in his own peculiar way. Almost every word was introduced by a harmless swear, the droll thing being that my brother simply took it as a matter of course, and never laughed unless some unusually inventive oath combination was interjected; if the pupil confined himself to ordinary swearing, there was no interruption; he was allowed to rattle along in his own voluble way, letting fly vigorously at the inventor of "larnin'." The result was that Joss learned to read and write ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far into the reign of King Charles; but, ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... reminded of it was not satisfactory. Of Fakredeen she spoke much and frequently. She expressed with frankness, even with warmth, her natural and deep regard for him, the interest she took in his career, and the high opinion she entertained of his powers; but she lamented his inventive restlessness, which often arrested action, and intimated how much he might profit by the counsels of a friend more distinguished for ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... was better conceived or more faithfully carried out. Here was scope for inventive genius and many were the devices used to bluff the Turk. We schooled him in getting used to long periods of silence. At first he was pretty jumpy and could not understand the change, when the men who had always given him two for one now received his fire without retaliating. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... most inventive mind; for, as soon as they reached their own little bay, he once more astonished Fritz—who was glad enough to get so far, but puzzled as to how he would ever arrive at the hut, knowing that the lad would never be able ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... time after this, our captain received an intimation from the Admiralty, as did other captains, that flogging was as much as possible to be avoided, and other punishments substituted. On this, Jerry, who was possessed of an inventive turn of mind, set himself to work to devise such as would to a certainty be so hated by the men that they would answer the purpose of maintaining discipline fully as much as flogging. The ship's cook was a one-legged ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... endures. Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the foundation of America's great shoe industry. Machinery had already been applied to shoe manufacture, but only to a limited extent; under the pressure of war conditions, however, American inventive skill found ways of performing mechanically almost all the operations that had formerly been done by hand. The McKay sewing machine, one of the greatest of our inventions, which was perfected in the second year of the war, did as much perhaps ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... Anecdotes. Of these strange Anecdotes, a part may be true, because probable—and a part true, because improbable. Procopius must have known the former, and the latter he could scarcely invent. Note: The malice of court scandal is proverbially inventive; and of such scandal the "Anecdota" ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... flood of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all America of that day thought a genius ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... feeds, and trains it in good habits, and when her darling is asleep, her prayers finish the day. She may not have read much about education, but her sympathy with the child suggests means of doing her duty. Love has made her inventive; she discovers means of amusement, for play; she talks and sings, sometimes in poetry and sometimes in prose. From mothers in his circle of relations and friends, Froebel has learned what a mother can do, and although he had ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of the battle is he mentioned, save by name only, as having been present with his troop in Monmouth's army. The fiery and vindictive part assigned to him by Scott rests on the authority of the most amazing tissue of absurdities ever woven out of the inventive fancy of a ballad-monger.[34] He had no kinsman's death to avenge, and he was too good a soldier to directly disobey his chief's orders, however little they may have ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... their brother Wang-li they took no farewell, inasmuch as he was absorbed in a chess problem. Before separating, they agreed to meet on the same spot after thirty years, with the treasure which they doubted not to have acquired by the exercise of their inventive faculties in foreign lands. They further covenanted that if either had missed his reward the other should ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... combinations out of the material of the past. It forms new combinations of ideas, emotions and their accompanying impulses to muscular activity, the elements of mental "complexes." It recombines these elements into new and original mental pictures, the creations of the inventive mind. ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... into full play. Each of them falls under the sway of "Dame Fashion"—for there are the latest things, even on the upper Amazon. Screaming colours are favoured; a red skirt with green stars was considered at one time the height of fashion, until an inventive woman discovered that yellow dots could also be worked in. In addition to these dresses, the women will squander money on elegant patent-leather French slippers (with which they generally neglect to wear stockings), and use silk handkerchiefs perfumed with the finest Parisian eau de Cologne, bought ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... and in a larger degree the mind, becomes a sepulchre for the soul. All the attention given to education, to refinement and culture, to the develop ment of gifts—for instance, such as music or inventive science—to the practice of self-restraint and the pursuit of morality, is so much attention to the casket that will perish, to the neglect of the eternal jewel that is enclosed. It may be possible to present a kindly, honest, law-abiding, agreeable life to our neighbours; ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... had a letter from her sister and messages from the children for her, so that he would stay with Mrs. Phillips till she returned, and sat down before the window looking steadily out to catch the first sight of her. Not having her mother's inventive turn, she was at a loss how to get rid of him. Brandon must not see Mrs. Peck, and Elsie must be warned to say nothing about her to him. She sat in torture for some time, and at last in despair she asked him in an awkward embarrassed way to be good enough to go for a nosegay for her, that she ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry. Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in England ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the teaching of how to direct energy for the universal good. It lays hold of a child and, out of his destructive instincts—the instinct to bang, and pull, and tear to pieces—it develops creative power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet and the early pothooks, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... out of his presence he was wretched; when with them he left them no peace; he would fling at them paper darts, almost strangle them with an impromptu lasso, demolish their playhouse, decapitate their dolls, and do all the mischief his really inventive ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... evolve even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now—clever and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies, and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and include all that it contains—in a word, all things in any way related to it. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... it were a standing disgrace to these States—I say it were a disgrace to any nation, distinguish'd above others by the variety and vastness of its territories, its materials, its inventive activity, and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar above others also in its original styles in literature and art, and its own supply of intellectual and esthetic masterpieces, archetypal, and consistent with itself. I know not a land except ours that has ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... fair, The laughing of whose eye Is in man's heart renew'd virginity; Who yet sick longing breeds For marriage which exceeds The inventive guess of Love to satisfy With hope of utter binding, and of loosing endless dear despair? What gleams about her shine, More transient than delight and more divine! If she does something but a little sweet, As gaze towards the glass to set her hair, See how his soul falls humbled at her feet! ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... upon me now—as at most times—of wandering about in my old wild way, to think. I could no more resist this on Sunday or yesterday than a man can dispense with food, or a horse can help himself from being driven. I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, make its own demands upon me, and sometimes, for months together, put everything else away from me. If I had not known long ago that ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... slacken the fairy-flight. One old game treads on the heels of another—twenty within the hour—and many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when the moon drops behind the mountain, and the small green-robed People of Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For She—the Silver-Tongued—is ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... established her suzerainty, was tributary to the Orient in this respect. The Orient was her superior in the extent and precision of its technical knowledge as well as in the inventive genius and ability of its workmen. The Caesars were great builders but frequently employed foreign help. Trajan's principal architect, a magnificent builder, was a Syrian, Apollodorus ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... throwing back civilization for many years; and have made of the country that was the freest, happiest, proudest, richest, and most progressive but two short years ago, a vast temple of mourning, doubt, anxiety and privation; our manufactories of all but war material nearly paralyzed; the inventive spirit which was forever developing new resources destroyed, and our flag, that carried respect everywhere, now mocked by enemies who think its glory tarnished, and that its power is soon to become a mere tradition ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocracies—it may be, worshipped ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... directed to a ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future. As a matter of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken cum grano salis. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall talk’ ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... merry company suddenly and quietly evanished because they thought that their guests might be tired. I can give you no notion of the pure, irresponsible frolic of it—of the almost affectionate kindness, the gay and inventive hospitality that so delicately controlled the whole affair—any more than I can describe a certain quiet half-hour in the dusk just before we left, when the company gathered to say good-bye, while young couples walked in the street, and the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... shot on my part. I argued that he must be an English-speaking man. The smart and inventive turn of the modern Yank has made him a specialist in ingenious devices, straight or crooked. Unpickable locks and invincible lock-pickers, burglar-proof safes and safe-specializing burglars, come equally from the States. So I tried a very simple test. As we talked ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... brightened the sunshine of many a happy, and cheered the gloom of many a desponding breast, whose works have been companions to the solitary and a cordial in the sick man's chamber, and whose natural pathos and thoughtful humor, flowing from a genius as healthy as it is inventive, have drawn more closely the ties which bind man to his brother man, and have given us a new sense of the wickedness of injustice, the deformity of selfishness, the beauty of self-sacrifice, the dignity of humble virtue, and the strength of that love which is found in "huts where ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... provided they had some one to defray the cost, and, taking the other under the arm, he said to him, 'Come, gossip, we may perhaps find some fool who will pay the reckoning for us both.' Now behind them was an apothecary's man, an artful and inventive fellow, whom this advocate ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... valley, to make it possible to go from the Belvedere to the Palace under loggie, and also to go from the Palace to the Belvedere in the same way, and likewise, by means of various flights of steps, to ascend to the level of the Belvedere. Whereupon Bramante, who had very good judgment and an inventive genius in such matters, distributed two ranges of columns along the lowest part; first, a very beautiful Doric loggia, similar to the Colosseum of the Savelli (although, in place of half-columns, he used pilasters), and all built of travertine; and over this a second range of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... Kant ever criticized withal, is not the proper vital soul in man; is not the creative and productive faculty in intellect at all, but is merely the tool of that which, in philosophers no less than in poets, is the proper inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases it: Schlegel's word is fantasie. Remember that in more cases than academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... by moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... these sketches should be mainly to collect a variety of ideas which may brighten the mind when there is occasion to use its inventive faculties. Suggestive hints are wanted; rarely will it be possible, or wise, to repeat anything exactly as you see it. These sketches, if made with care, and from what Constable used to call "breeding subjects," will give your fancy a very necessary point of vantage, ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... closest reasoner, if he is not inventive, may find himself at a loss. What is the result? Instead of making us discover proofs, they are dictated to us; instead of teaching us to reason, our ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... could not be held together without means of easy communication between distant provinces, and their fine hard roads ramifying from Rome to the remote corners of Gaul or Dacia, testify to their wisdom and enterprise in this respect. When Great Britain in the eighteenth century, full of inventive skill, reared men who by means of improved roads, well-bred horses and fine vehicles raised the rate of travel to ten miles an hour from end to end of the kingdom, a great deal of complacent satisfaction was indulged in over the advantages likely to result from such rapid travelling. ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... fitting funeral cortege could have been devised than the one which, on August 25, 1890, conveyed to Sweden, to their last resting-place, the remains of the great engineer, John Ericsson, whose inventive genius had clad the wooden navies of the world in armor of impenetrable iron and steel. Little had he dreamt when, in 1839, at the age of thirty-six (he was born at Vermland, Sweden, on July 31, 1803) he came to the United States in one of the old wooden ships of that ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... welcome to him!'—'And as to what concerns your secret mission and your discovered conspiracy,' said I to the Austrian ambassador, 'I am sorry that you cannot here give birth to the dear children of your inventive head; go with them to our midwife, Minister Golopkin, and hasten a little, for I see in your face that you are already in the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... new instruments. There are the flame projectors, which throw fire to a distance of approximately a hundred feet. The Germans were the first to use these, but they were excelled in this respect by the inventive genius of the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... many authors of popular fiction have either failed altogether in the production of acceptable photoplays or have had almost as many rejections as, if not more than, the average novice in short-story writing. That there is much truth in this cannot be denied; but that a trained and inventive fiction writer—particularly a writer of plot- or action-stories—after having once learned the mechanics of photoplay construction, should fail of success in photoplay writing is, obviously, not at all necessary. A discussion of this point should help to impress ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... England lack to make her a second Rome?' Her people have physical strength, animal courage, that self-dependence of freemen which enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally without officers, every man for his own hand. She has inventive genius, enormous wealth; and if, as is said, her soldiers lack at present the self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is ridiculous to suppose that that quality could long be wanting in the men of a nation which is at this moment the foremost in the work of emigration ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... ringer, more familiarly known as the fifteen ball, and the white ball itself, thereby adding somewhat to the minus side of his string—"talking about inventions, I had a curious experience last August. It was an experience which was not only interesting from an inventive point of view, but it had likewise a moral, which, will become more or less obvious as ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... came about that in every country a great and growing body of energetic and inventive men was busied either for offensive or defensive ends, in elaborating the apparatus of war, until the accumulating tensions should reach the breaking-point. Each power sought to keep its preparations secret, to hold new weapons in ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... empires was that of France, with 5,000,000 square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of only 39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As France had, a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to the backward peoples of Africa and the East; and was finding in the pride ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir |
