"Pliancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... especially as exhibited in his most characteristic work, Don Juan,—it will be found that even the strength and impressiveness of his poetry is sometimes not a little injured by the capricious and desultory flights into which this pliancy of wing allures him. It must be felt, indeed, by all readers of that work, and particularly by those who, being gifted with but a small portion of such ductility themselves, are unable to keep pace with his changes, that the suddenness with which he passes from one strain of sentiment to another,—from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that some people thought it a very mean thing. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, it is making a very mean use of a man's powers. But to be a good mimick, requires great powers; great acuteness of observation, great retention of what is observed, and great pliancy of organs, to represent what is observed. I remember a lady of quality in this town, Lady —— ——, who was a wonderful mimick, and used to make me laugh immoderately. I have heard she is now gone mad.' BOSWELL. 'It is amazing how a mimick ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness, vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the "Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... warm convexity. Only he has the fine tact and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses. The best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor. Goethe says that only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a thing before them in a completed, rounded form. Writing is a fine art, and one of the finest; ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... and apparently expected the laity to continue in the observance of such rites as were in use. To-day in China and Japan the good layman is little more than one who pays more attention to Buddhism than to other faiths. This charitable pliancy had much to do with the victories of Buddhism in the Far East, where it had to struggle against strong prejudices and could hardly have made its way if it had been intolerant of local deities. But in India we see the disadvantages of the omission to make the laity members ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really execrated and condemned. As the abused victim, starving and ragged, treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a Pere Goriot. The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies and good things: we could hardly indicate another imported ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... particularly against him; his face not being like that of a convicted pickpocket, nor his gait resembling that of a fox who has lost his tail; yet he never believed himself adapted for the appointment, being aware that he had no aptitude for the doing of dirty work, if called to do it, nor pliancy which would enable him to submit to scurvy treatment, whether he did dirty work or not—requisites, at the time of which he is speaking, indispensable in every British official; requisites, by-the-bye, which his friend, the Radical, possessed in a high degree; but though he bore no ill-will ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... campaign was also a feasible scheme. But the worst thing that we could possibly do, was, to steer the zigzag course; for by so doing we were certain not only to cause constant vexations to America, but, by our half measures and partial pliancy, also to drive Mr. Wilson even further and further into the inflexible attitude of a policy of prestige. Unfortunately, however, it was precisely this zigzag course that we adopted; and thus, in addition to destroying the prospects which my policy ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... her stupidly. For all my day-dreams of the week that I had been away I was not prepared for her. And indeed she had altered. The strain of fear and incessant watchfulness was removed, and with the lessening of that tension had come a pliancy of look and gesture, a richness of tone that found me unprepared. I made but a poor figure. It was as well that work clamored at me, and that I had to turn away ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... achieves; the woman who encourages, applauds, and—from a distance—inspires: the combination is common enough; but Miss Nightingale was neither an Aspasia nor an Egeria. In her case it is almost true to say that the roles were reversed; the qualities of pliancy and sympathy fell to the man, those of command ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... than other sacerdotal corporations—shown hostility to new ideas and then chiefly when such ideas (like those of Buddhism) implied that the rites by which they gained their living were worthless. Otherwise they showed great pliancy and receptivity, for they combined Vedic rites and mythology with such systems as the Sankhya and Advaita philosophies, both of which really render superfluous everything which is usually called ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot |
