"Pliability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know your sentiments, and I am happy to find them so correct. It is as you think; Colonel Egerton appears to refer nothing to principle: even the more generous feelings I am afraid are corrupted in him, from too low intercourse with the surface of society. There is by far too much pliability about him for principle of any kind, unless indeed it be a principle to please, no matter how. No one, who has deeply seated opinions of right and wrong, will ever abandon them, even in the courtesies of polite intercourse: they may be silent but never acquiescent: in short, ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... falls will be made of Manilla or such other pliable rope as may be directed from time to time by the Bureau of Ordnance. It is prohibited to blacken them or to diminish their pliability. Three-inch rope will be found large enough for the heaviest, and from 2-1/2 to 2-1/4 inch for the ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... textile art, as in all other useful arts, is fundamentally, although not exclusively, the resultant or expression of function, but at the same time it is further than in other shaping arts from expressing the whole of function. Such is the pliability of a large portion of textile products—as, for example, nets, garments, and hangings—that the shapes assumed are variable, and, therefore, when not distended or for some purpose folded or draped, the articles are without esthetic value or interest. The more rigid objects, in common with the individuals ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... the very feelings, benumbed and congealed as they may hitherto have been, were suddenly dissolving under some happier influence, and that,—with the external sign—the weakness and pliability of childhood—we were magically regaining its singleness of feeling, and its ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... by the great simplicity which characterises it. The first stage is getting the liquid mass of glass about to be operated upon into a thorough state of toughness and pliability: one should be able to pull it like rosin or sealing-wax. The colouring of the mass is done while it is still in the furnace, by adding various chemicals, the principal of which are arsenic, saltpetre, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... better under a climate warmer than ours. With fruit-trees, it is well known that certain varieties, for instance of the peach, stand forcing in a hot-house better than others; and this shows {311} either pliability of organisation or some constitutional difference. The same individual cherry-tree, when forced, has been observed during successive years gradually to change its period of vegetation.[790] Few ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... populous races. The case of the American Indians, who gradually disappear before the white race, should not mislead us, as it is readily accounted for by the peculiar character of that race. The negro exhibits by nature a pliability, a readiness to accommodate himself to circumstances, a proneness to imitate those among whom he lives,—characteristics which are entirely foreign to the Indian, while they facilitate in every way the increase of the negro. I infer, therefore, from all these circumstances ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence, doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner towards me was freezingly non-committal—worthy ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... holding the uncut base of each length in one hand, runs the straw between his fingers and the sharp edged ruler-like piece of bamboo held in the other. This is done several times and results in the removal of considerable moisture, the prevention of wrinkling, and greater pliability of the straw. ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller |
