"Inventiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and so called after one of the troops of the Fatimite Caliphs. The name "Yamaniyah" is probably due to the story-teller's inventiveness. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... through study and experiment, to abolish child-labor, to promote public education, to encourage science art or American inventiveness? ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... there's no inventiveness, no brains in your head, oh, no!" rallied Griffith. "Wait till you make ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... owing to the prolonged efforts of Mr. Romfrey and Cecil Baskelett to get fun out of him, at the cost of considerable inventiveness, that the electoral Address of the candidate, signing himself 'R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp,' to the borough of Bevisham, did not issue from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... opening where Prometheus is nailed to the Scythian rock, and the close where the earthquake engulfs the rock, the hero and the chorus, action in the ordinary sense is ipso facto impossible. This is just the opportunity for the poet's bold inventiveness and fine imagination. The tortured sufferer is visited by the Oceanic Nymphs, who float in, borne by an (imaginary) winged car, to console; Oceanus (riding a griffin, doubtless also imaginary) follows, kind but timid, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of Great Britain in the history of the good causes of Europe, as M. Thiers believes in the supremacy of France, or Mazzini believed in that of Italy. The thought of the prodigious industry, the inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... become not only a constant irritation to each other, but intolerable bores at court. In "Hymenaei," "The Masque of Queens," "Love Freed from Ignorance," "Lovers made Men," "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," and many more will be found Jonson's aptitude, his taste, his poetry and inventiveness in these by-forms of the drama; while in "The Masque of Christmas," and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" especially, is discoverable that power of broad comedy which, at court as well as in the city, was not the least element of ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... endure the siege with patience; but it did not prevent his getting very tired, or from talking at every moment of returning to Paris—so that if the messengers and the spies had failed, his Eminence, notwithstanding all his inventiveness, would have found ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his capacity for induing he skin and the soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... individual of the tramp variety, as one of the finest "King-Newf'un'lan'—Bull Breed." His appetite and his vices were in proportion to his descriptions, but he had no virtues that we could discover. With a boy's lack of inventiveness we called him "Tiger" although anything less ferocious than he would be hard to find. He was more like a sheep in spirit than anything else. But Charles thought he saw signs of promise in that pup, and in spite of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to admire a certain masterly inventiveness and courage in your plan, but is convinced it will cost more than you estimate, and cannot be made at the same time ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... League demonstration was not prepared with any particular care or organization, the Irish people being still, even in the matter of political demonstration, in a state of childish immaturity. It turned out to be better so, for the spontaneous inventiveness of the moment suggested a programme far more dramatic and picturesque than could have occurred to the mind of the most ingenious political stage-manager. The platform had been erected on the spot where the cabin had stood which the son of the Gombeen man had overthrown ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... Rudolph Musgrave, drowsily pleased by his own inventiveness, that Patricia was glad this afternoon was so hot that no one was abroad except the small boy at the corner house, who sat upon the bottom porch-step, and, as children so often do, appeared intently to appraise the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in the Hungry Forties and Great Britain would be able to nourish only about 20,000,000 people as she did in 1845. National capital and the comforts and conveniences which it supplies to all are at least as much the result of thrift, inventiveness, enterprise, and wise ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... And inventiveness is only one of his gifts, while his virtues are those of Sir Galahad, King Arthur, Marcus Aurelius, Abraham Lincoln, and a ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was the cry. "If necessary, we can quit the earth as the Athenians fled from Athens before the advancing host of Xerxes, and like them, take refuge upon our ships—these new ships of space, with which American inventiveness ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... careers. The wilderness ever opened a gate of escape to the poor, the discontented, and the oppressed. If social conditions tended to crystallize in the east, beyond the Alleghenies there was freedom. Grappling with new problems, under these conditions, the society that spread into this region developed inventiveness and resourcefulness; the restraints of custom were broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions were produced. Mr. Bryce has well declared that "the West is the most American part of ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... these events, if for no other reason, because it fell to his lot, when appointed adviser to the general Belisarius, to be an eye-witness of practically all the events to be described. It was his conviction that while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history. In accordance with this principle he has not concealed the failures of even his most intimate acquaintances, but has written down with complete accuracy everything which befell those concerned, whether it happened ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... power, the power of life and death in the district. He was still a young man, and, owing to the generosity of his behavior, Mme. de Dey was unable as yet to estimate him truly. But, in despite of the danger of matching herself against Norman cunning, she used all the craft and inventiveness that Nature has bestowed on women to play off the rival suitors one against another. She hoped, by gaining time, to emerge safe and sound from her difficulties at last; for at that time Royalists in the provinces flattered themselves ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... but to plans for getting rid of them; and to this disposition or habit,—too rare among men of genius, men of a much higher class than mere sentimentalists, but whose sensibility is out of proportion with their inventiveness or activity,—we are to attribute no small influence in the fortunate conduct of his subsequent life. With such a turn of mind, Schiller, now that he was at length master of his own movements, could not long be at a loss for plans or tasks. Once ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific development fully ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... of all these means at work in the trial to raise the people from the condition in which they had been so many ages sunk and immovable, there has been of late years the unpretending but important ministration of an incessant multifarious inventiveness in making almost every sort of information offer itself in brief, familiar, and attractive forms, adapted to youth or to adult ignorance; so that knowledge, which was formerly a thing to be searched and ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the genial influence of the Jubilee has produced an incredible abundance of fibs, myths, and fables. They have for their subject the early days of our Gracious Sovereign, and round that central theme they play with every variety of picturesque inventiveness. Nor has invention alone been at work. Research has been equally busy. Miss Wynn's description, admirable in its simplicity, of the manner in which the girl queen received the news of her accession was given to the world by Abraham Hayward in Diaries of a Lady of Quality ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost every case surpassing their achievement on the lines they had laid down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... musico-dramatic art; indeed, I much doubt whether he realized its possibilities. In his Tristan days he knew how to avoid explanations on the stage; nothing in Tristan needs explanation; in the Mastersingers and the Ring his resources—his inventiveness and technical mastery of music—were unbounded, and an intractable incident he simply smothered in splendid music. Here, the bargaining of Daland and Vanderdecken is a very intractable incident, and in trying to make the best of it ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and none of the Jewish tombs to this day bear epitaphs. What a mass of posthumous hypocrisy would the world be spared if the Hebron custom were prevalent everywhere! But it is obvious that the method lends itself to inventiveness, and as the tombs are unnamed, local guides tell you anything they choose about them, and you do not believe them even when they are speaking ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... creation, and has enabled him both to evade dangers and to use natural forces for his greater security. Though he is the youngest of all created forms, and by no means the best equipped for life, he has been able to go ahead in a way denied to all other animals; his inventiveness has been largely developed by his terrors; and the result has been that whereas all other animals still preserve, as a condition of life, their ceaseless attitude of suspicion and fear, man has been enabled by organisation to establish communities ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... composition of the Deluge gives us some idea of what the cartoon of Pisa may have been like. There never was a collection of naked figures so many and so beautiful. One is filled with sorrow at the idea of their being drowned. They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Queen said; "ah, I perfect exquisite torture, for you have proven recreant, you have forgotten the maid Ysabeau,—Le Desir du Cuer, was it not, my Gregory, that you were wont to call her, as nowadays this Rosamund is the desire of your heart. You lack inventiveness." ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... countries where men are so contented to be dull! There is little speculation or animation or intelligence or interest among us, and people who desire such an atmosphere are held to be fanciful, eccentric, and artistic. It was not always so with our race. In Elizabethan times we had all the inventiveness, the love of adventure, the pride of dominance that we have now; but there was then a great interest in things of the mind as well, a lively taste for ideas, a love of beautiful things and thoughts. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... man at his work. They show him as an organizer of armies and alliances, a wily diplomatist, an intrepid soldier, an efficient administrator, a strategist of inspired audacity, a tactician of endless resources, an engineer of infinite inventiveness, an unerring judge of men. But he never boasts, except in speeches to hearten discouraged troops. He does not vilify or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that the sparrow with his bow and arrow has actually been seen to kill Cock Robin, and the beetle with his thread and needle engaged in making the shroud? Birds show the taste and skill of their kind in building their nests, but rarely any individual ingenuity and inventiveness. The nest referred to is on a plane entirely outside of Nature and her processes. It belongs to a different order of things, the order of mechanical contrivances, and was of course "made up," probably from a real oriole's nest, and the writer who vouches for its genuineness ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... great flame, all of which he directed upon the ships that lay at anchor in the path of the fire, and he consumed them all. Marcellus, therefore, despairing of capturing the city on account of the inventiveness of Archimedes thought to take it by famine after a regular investment. This duty he assigned to Pulcher while he himself turned his attention to those who had participated in the revolt of Syracuse. Any who yielded were granted ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... be at no loss to discover the effects of the combined influences here stated. The ordinary phrases of our country-people denote an alert judgment,—as, "I reckon," "I calculate," "I guess." The inventiveness which characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson dissolves England in the alembic of his brain, and makes a thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... come to a human being is to be born on a farm and reared in the country. Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred. The country boy is constantly thrown upon his own resources, forced to think for himself, and this calls out his ingenuity and inventiveness. He develops better all-round judgment and a more level head than the city boy. His muscles are harder, his flesh firmer, and his brain-fiber partakes of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... part of Diderot's works that has enjoyed a certain measure of general popularity. Mr. Carlyle describes them with emphatic enthusiasm: "What with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture over again for us, so that we too see it, and can judge it; what with their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants nothing but a hand, they are with some few exceptions in the German tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading."[18] I only love painting in poetry, Madame Necker said to Diderot, and it is into poetry that ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... motif into ornament or decoration calls for the use of all the principles thus far established, plus familiarity with the medium to be used and the inventiveness that comes only with some experience. If the reader lacks this experience and is interested in undertaking to devise ornament or decoration with pen, pencil, or brush, he is advised to consult some one or more of the books on the subject which ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... of exceptional purity; he will write a number of dry and very accurate memoranda, will make some dozen conscientious translations, but he won't do anything striking. To do that one must have imagination, inventiveness, the gift of insight, and Pyotr Ignatyevitch has nothing of the kind. In short, he is not a master in science, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... But here, in the same way, my ambition is greater than my power; my philosophical perception is superior to my speculative gift. I have not the energy of my opinions; I have far greater width than inventiveness of thought, and, from timidity, I have allowed the critical intelligence in me to swallow up the creative genius. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... English or Scotch-Irish stock; and no other breeds of white men have ever shown such capacity as these two for dealing with inferior races and new countries. Their virtues were courage, energy, alertness, inventiveness, generosity, honesty, truth-speaking; their commonest faults were violence, combativeness, lax ways in business, intemperance, narrowness of mind. They hated foreigners and Indians, and were ready to fight any one who behaved like an enemy or a critic; they held in honor women, their ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... gained, however, by racking his brain for something that wasn't there, and Buck soon gave up the attempt. He could only trust to luck and his own inventiveness, and hope that Lynch's delightfully unconscious easing of ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... was a prodigy of inventiveness, and drew his lines with so firm a hand that the Chouannerie, which broke out after his death, lasted ten years and only went to pieces against Napoleon, organised a rising, almost from Seine to Loire, for the spring of 1793. Indeed it ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Note the inventiveness of women, most of which goes to waste because they lack the wonderful constructive ability of men. Women invented spinning. They could never have harnessed the lightning to their wheels. Women established ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... to describe what one means by imagination, but I think it is more than inventiveness, or fancy. I remember discussing the question with John Addington Symonds and, to give him a hasty illustration of what I meant, I said I thought naming a Highland regiment 'The Black Watch' showed a HIGH degree of imagination. He was pleased with this; and as a personal testimonial I may ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... artists. I certainly was not one of them. I admired their work and envied them, but I lacked the artistic patience and the dexterity essential to workmanship of a high order. Much to my chagrin, I was a born bungler. But then I possessed physical strength, nervous vitality, method, and inventiveness—all the elements that go to make ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... {lossage} seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for equipment failures than ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... "The quicker they broke, the less objection I'd have to 'em. It's a wonder the modern child has a trace of resource or inventiveness left in him. Teach him to construct, not to destroy, then you've done something ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... I do think an American child could teach ours at home a lot about inventiveness, independence, and democracy—just as I think ours might teach him something ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... "toy-book" texts of the eighteenth century. These little books generally had a crude woodcut and one stanza of text on a page. It can be seen how easily this story lends itself to illustration. Each stanza is a chapter, and the story-teller could continue as long as his inventiveness held out. In one edition there are ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... engineers, steady-going and often prosperous farmers, and strong, quick, intelligent labourers. Of the "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control" needful to make a sound race they have an encouraging share. Of artistic, poetic, or scientific talent, of wit, originality, or inventiveness, there is yet but little sign. In writing they show facility often, distinction never; in speech fluency and force of argument, and even, sometimes, lucidity, but not a flash of the loftier eloquence. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... in the development of Renaissance architecture may be roughly marked.[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward to the reign ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... opportunity of expounding how he would change everything! after his own fashion, if the power were in his hands. "Russia," he said, "has fallen behind Europe; we must catch her up. It is maintained that we are young—that's nonsense. Moreover we have no inventiveness: Homakov himself admits that we have not even invented mouse-traps. Consequently, whether we will or no, we must borrow from others. We are sick, Lermontov says—I agree with him. But we are sick from having only half become Europeans, we must take a hair of the dog that bit us ("le ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... period, yet that in the later era they are among the greatest helps and benefits, and that as soon as governments by discussion have become strong enough to secure a stable existence, and as soon as they have broken the fixed rule of old custom, and have awakened the dormant inventiveness of men, then, for the first time, almost every part of human nature begins to spring forward, and begins to contribute its quota even to the narrowest, even to 'verifiable' progress. And this is the true reason of all those panegyrics on liberty which are often so measured in ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... inimitable print (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known and celebrated March to Finchley, as the best comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was written), let a person look till he be saturated, and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) into a room and set them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy sets and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... know anything more appalling than this soul-crushing unreasoning obedience which Mrs. Lippett so insistently fostered? It's the orphan asylum attitude toward life, and somehow I must crush it out. Initiative, responsibility, curiosity, inventiveness, fight—oh dear! I wish the doctor had a serum for injecting all these useful virtues into an ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... of statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness, on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to achieve what leadership brings into the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... require as much inventiveness as a cotillon; the text alludes to fastening the bride's tresses across her mouth giving her the semblance of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... "yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game of fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning?... Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... filling up or rounding off his narratives with the aid of chivalrous love or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of scholastic discourse or devices of personal or general allegory. He commands, where necessary, a rhetorician's readiness of illustration, and a masque-writer's inventiveness, as to machinery; he can even (in the "House of Fame") conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent phantasmagory of his own, and continue it with a fulness proving that his fancy would not be at a loss for supplying even more materials than ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... question of education. He pointed out that English society was now becoming highly organized; that the new manufacturing life had completely changed the simple conditions of an earlier agricultural society; that in the narrow round of manufacturing duties and town life people tended to lose their inventiveness and to stagnate; and that the individual degeneracy which set in in a more highly organized type of society became a social danger of large magnitude. Hence, he argued (R. 295), it was a matter of state interest that "the inferior ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... purposes and ideals currently functioning in any community. Three elements are present in each human society: man, nature and the social structure. Human culture at any point in its history is the social structure: the aggregate of existing culture traits, the products of man's ingenuity, inventiveness and experimentation, ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... is an example of the patient waiting as much as the ingenuity of the Imp of the Perverse, but in pure ingenuity he is without a rival in mere human inventiveness. It certainly was a resourceful Frenchman who translated "hit or miss" as "frappe ou mademoiselle," and it was inspired ignorance on the part of a student assistant in a college library who listed "Sur l'Administration de M. Necker, par Lui Meme" under "Meme, Lui," as if it were ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... southern exposure toward Hewers and makes Hewers feel identified with him. He has what might be called an eastern exposure toward men of genius, understands the inventive temperament, has the kind of personality that evokes inventiveness ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... perhaps his highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the 'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne, 'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... as to national inventiveness and versatility in the production of new and surprising means of war or in development of methods that in any way contribute to a successful ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... them—for they won't think they can, any more than they dare control propagation. They will reverently call their propagation and plagues "acts of God." When they get tired of reverence and stop their plagues, it will be too soon. Their inventiveness will be—as usual—ahead of their wisdom; and they will unfortunately end the good effects of plagues (as a check) before they are advanced enough to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... snuff-taking and malicious, is like Voltaire, who nevertheless must know, if he happens to think of it, that not yet in the Twentieth Century, not for all its speed mania, has any one come near to equalling the speed of a prose tale by Voltaire. "Candide" is a full book. It is filled with mockery, with inventiveness, with things as concrete as things to eat and coins, it has time for the neatest intellectual clickings, it is never hurried, and it moves with the most amazing rapidity. It has the rapidity of high spirits playing a game. The ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... light; but the treatment, broad and beautifully simple so as to be reconcilable with the lettering which accompanied it, is well within conventional lines. That the character of the technical treatment is such as to place no tax on the mechanical inventiveness of the processman is ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... described as gifted with "a quick, delicate, refined, extemporal wit;" and Richard Tarleton, of "a wondrous, plentiful, pleasant, extemporal wit." From this it would almost seem that these comedians owed their fame and advancement to their skill and inventiveness in the matter of gagging. No doubt these early actors bore some relation to the jesters who were established members of noble households, and of whom impromptu jokes and witticisms were looked for upon all occasions. Moreover, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Douglas believed profoundly in the dignity of labor; not even his Southern associations lessened his genuine admiration for the magnificent industrial achievements of the Northern mechanic and craftsman. He shared, too, the conviction of his Northern constituents, that the inventiveness, resourcefulness, and bold initiative of the American workman was the outcome of free institutions, which permitted and encouraged free and bold thinking. The American laborer was not brought up to believe it "a crime to think in opposition ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... secure them against getting wet. As only one or two men occupy a hut, to accommodate so large a party many of them have to be constructed. It is amusing to see how some men, proud of their superior powers of inventiveness, and possessing the knack of making pleasant what would otherwise be uncomfortable, plume themselves before their brethren, and turn them to derision: and it appears the more ridiculous, as they all are as stark naked as an unclothed ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... utilizes everything within the national system which may be applied to a military purpose toward the increase of training and fighting efficiency. Much of our potential strength lies in our industrial structure, our progress in science, our inventiveness and our educational resources. Toward the end that all of these assets will be given maximum use, and every good idea which can be converted to a military purpose will be in readiness to serve the nation when war comes, there must be a continuing meeting of minds between military leadership and ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... that he objected to was a consolidation of the two forces. Incapacity to turn an unexpected or an unwelcome situation to account was one of the duke's most deeply ingrained characteristics. He showed no inventiveness or resourcefulness. He held his own army at a distance from the English, much to the invader's chagrin, who was forced to march unaided over regions rendered inhospitable by Louis's stern orders, and outside of cities ready to hold him at bay. "If you do not put yourself in a state of security, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... apparently but a mere episode in the childhood of a nine-year-old boy; while it is really the tragedy of a whole life in its tempting glimpses into a past environment and ominous forebodings of the future—all contracted into the space of four or five pages. Chekhov is lavish with his inventiveness. Apparently, it cost him no ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness—a galloping rise and fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by these equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... floundered helplessly for a moment; and fell back again upon an imagination for the time being stimulated to an abnormal degree of inventiveness: ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... as contrasted with the crowd, lies neither in virtue nor in wickedness but in originality. It is idle to credit minorities with all the good without ascribing to them most, at least, of the evils due to that rarest of all human qualities—inventiveness. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park |
