"Perpetual motion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such an appreciable change that she ultimately finds salvation in winding wool for a peeress, the only surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many respects a mere comedy of manners and characters—among the characters was a South African millionaire and his wife—was under the surface permeated ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... the mountains nothing moves at night. There even stones do not fall; there are no thunders of avalanches; no sudden and awful crash of an ice-fall. Even when the sun is hot and the mountains waken a little these motions seem accidents. And the perpetual motion of a glacier has something about it which is cruelly inevitable, bestial, diabolic. No, upon the mountains one is swung clear of one's fellow-creatures; one is adrift; it is another world; it gives fresh views of the warm ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... fitting the mind to grasp the idea of the Oneness of All. Each step is important, and renders the next higher one more easily attained. In this mental drill, it will be well to mentally picture the Universe in perpetual motion—everything is in motion—all matter is moving and changing its forms, and manifesting the Energy within it. Suns and worlds rush through space, their particles constantly changing and moving. Chemical composition and decomposition ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... it's another—cookin', washin', ironin', making butter and cheese, and 'tween spells cuttin' and sewin', and if she ain't doin' that, why, she's braidin' straw to sell to the store or knitting—she's the perpetual motion ready found, Mis' ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... remain unastonished. For see, if the compass lied and the sun did not keep its engagements, why should not objects lose their mutual attraction and why should not a few bushel baskets of force be annihilated? Even perpetual motion became possible, and I was in a frame of mind prone to purchase Keeley- Motor stock from the first enterprising agent that landed on the Snark's deck. And when I discovered that the earth really rotated on ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... (deep-mine water) as it is. There can't a drowned-out mine peep its head out but I'm thrust upon it. Well, well, it always was the trick of my countrymen to make a good thing too common. Better rust to death than be scoured to nothing by this perpetual motion." ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... child-like hands, which lay in relief among the folds of her black-satin dress, were withered in their whiteness, like the leaves of a frost-bitten lily. They were quivering, too; and now that she was alone, you might have seen that delicate head begin to vibrate with a slow, perpetual motion, which had been stopped a moment by the surprise which had fallen upon her. She sat with her eyes on the curtain, which shut the door from view. The trembling of her head extended to her whole body, and her small feet pattered freely on the carpet, ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... 'ridiculed,' and so on, like the early observers of palaeolithic axes, and similar prehistoric remains. This is true, of course, but, because some correct ideas were laughed at, it does not follow that whatever is laughed at is correct. The squarers of the circle, the discoverers of perpetual motion, the inquirers into the origin of language, have all been ridiculed, and ruled out of court, the two former classes, at least, justly enough. Now official science apparently regards all the long and universally rumoured abnormal occurrences as in the same ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of Lilias and Jane afforded unusual facility. There was, however, but a limited supply of heads willing to be fingered, and Maurice returned to the most abiding of his tastes, and in an empty room at the Old Court laboured assiduously to find the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fit!" "Katherine Minturn—pretty name, isn't it?" "Does anybody know anything more about her?" were some of the comments and queries that slipped from those supple instruments with a tendency towards perpetual motion, which, sometimes, are described as organs that are hung in the middle and wag at ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... he is a white polar bear. A number have hallucinations of sight, others of hearing. One repeats whatever is said to him, another repeats constantly words of the same sound, as door, floor. One is pursued by the sheriff, many by the devil. One has invented the perpetual motion and is soon to be rich; others have already acquired vast fortunes: scraps of paper, buttons and chips are to them, large amounts of money. Many pilfer continually and without any apparent motive, while others secrete every thing they can find, their own articles as well as those ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Royal Astronomical Society a Paper about deducing the mass of the Moon from observations of Venus: on Nov. 16th a Paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on a correction to the length of a ball-pendulum: and on Dec. 14th a Paper on certain conditions under which perpetual motion is possible.—The engravings for my Figure of the Earth in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana were dispatched at the end of the year. Some of the Paper (perhaps much) was written after my return from the Continent.—I began, but never finished, a Paper ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... is in the utilisation of waterfalls situated far from the busy mart and factory. Hardly any natural source of power presents so near an approach to constancy as the ocean billows. Shakespeare takes as his emblem of perpetual motion the dancing ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... have an affectionate friendship and for whose work a rueful and decidedly humorous appreciation. He analyzed with great sapience the psychological effect on the audience of Mr. Dundee's ring-system of perpetual motion. He described with great delight a punch that Mr. Dundee had landed on the very top of his head. In fact Mr. Dundee's publicity manager could do no better than to use parts of this ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... spent half an hour in listening to the astonishing oratory that was going on there. Although I had not done this for many, many years, there was so little change in the proceedings that I gained a new impression of perpetual motion. The same—or to all intents and purposes the same—leather lungs were still at it, either arraigning the Deity or commending His blessed benefactions. As invariably of old, a Hindu was present; but whether he was the Hindu of the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... thing I will concede is, that the Republicans and gold standard Democrats are certainly on their past statements entitled to the $1,000,000 offered by the United States patent office for the invention of a perpetual motion, would not they have a complete and perpetual motion in their bank issuing money with the Government completely separate from the banking business, for we see the bank issue would be made of paper, so we have the perpetual motion in this simple ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... TALKERS who are not even savants in the science of speech. Thus a philosopher is no longer a savant: he is a talker. Legislators and poets were once profound and sublime characters: now they are talkers. A talker is a sonorous bell, whom the least shock suffices to set in perpetual motion. With the talker, the flow of speech is always directly proportional to the poverty of thought. Talkers govern the world; they stun us, they bore us, they worry us, they suck our blood, and laugh at us. As for the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... C. H. McCormick's own "invention," which no one else can lay any claim to. Yet, strange as it may appear, he contended before the Board of Extensions in order to invalidate Hussey's Patent, that he invented a Reaping Machine nine years before! So has perpetual motion been invented a hundred times—in the estimation of the projectors; and by his own showing, and on oath, he sold but two machines up to 1842—one of them conditionally sold—being eleven years after the alleged invention, and even they had to be re-invented to make them work, or ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... intent on hospitable thoughts and providing something agreeable in the shape of an entertainment for every night. Every moment of the day, too, of every day was filled up. It seemed to Mrs. Ketchum that "those English people," as she called them, were never idle, and had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... continued state of change. The waste of the body produced in muscular action, perspiration, and various secretions, is made up for by the constant supply of nutritive matter to the blood by the absorbents, and by the action of the heart the blood is preserved in perpetual motion through every part of the body. In the lungs, or bronchia, the venous blood is exposed to the influence of air and undergoes a remarkable change, being converted into arterial blood. The obvious chemical alteration of ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... whatever—a certain equivalent quantity of energy must have been expended. When, therefore, we see any work being performed, we may always look for the source of energy to which the machine owes its efficiency. In fact, it is the old story illustrated, that perpetual motion is impossible. A mechanical device, however ingenious may be the construction, or however accurate the workmanship, can never possess what is called perpetual motion. It is needless to enter into details of any proposed contrivance of wheels, of pumps, of pulleys; it is sufficient to say that ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... Oh! meditators on perpetual motion, how many vain projects of similar character you have devised! Go and join the seekers ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... contrary, many times a week Miss Lavinia administered a tongue-lashing that suggested perpetual motion. ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... to which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... USE OF LEVER.—This lack of knowledge of first principles, has bred and is now breeding, so-called perpetual motion inventors (?) all over the civilized world. It is surprising how many men, to say nothing of boys, actually believe that power can be made without the expenditure of something ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... mind, he misses the point altogether; for original construction by an intelligent mind is given in the premises. If he means that the machine cannot originate the power that operates it, this is conceded by all except believers in perpetual motion, and it equally misses the point; for the operating power is given in the case of the watch, and implied in that of the reproductive telescope. But if he means that matter cannot be made to do the work of mind ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... in the various grouping and grace of their innumerable poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the "leaves of the tall poplar"; and it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Duncan Lisle apace to-night; scenes in the last few years shifted with surprising rapidity; everywhere Ellice was the centre-piece, her fair, pleasant face beaming from its framework of brown curls, that were almost ever in perpetual motion from the frequent toss of ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... must have received their forms, undergone a change of figure, by the continual collision of bodies. In a material world the acting powers must be material: in a whole every part of which is essentially in motion, there is no occasion for a power distinguished from itself; the whole must be in perpetual motion by its own peculiar energy. The general motion, as we have elsewhere proved, has its birth from the individual motion, which beings ever active must uninterruptedly communicate to each other. Thus every cause produces its effect; this effect in its turn becomes ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... had going the usual number of students' stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter,— stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude, it was reserved for Q.[1] to make the happy hit and to explain it to the rest ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... can coast forever along level ground. Ships at sea can shut off steam and coast clear across the ocean. No machinery needs oiling. The clothes on your body feel smoother and softer than the finest silk. Perpetual motion is an established fact instead of an absolute impossibility; everything that is not going against gravity will keep right on moving forever or until ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... alive, she would bear testimony to the early and constant uniformity of my sentiments. It will, indeed, be replied that I am not a competent judge; that pleasure is incompatible with pain, that joy is excluded from sickness; and that the felicity of a school-boy consists in the perpetual motion of thoughtless and playful agility, in which I was never qualified to excel. My name, it is most true, could never be enrolled among the sprightly race, the idle progeny of Eton or Westminster, who delight to cleave the water with pliant arm, to urge ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock |
