"Waste of energy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of looks at it," replied Warner, "and I should say from the way it acted that it numbered at least three million men. I know that at times not less than ten thousand were aiming their rifles at my own poor and unworthy person. What a waste of energy for so many men to shoot at me all at once. I wish the Johnnies would go away ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that one-half was the maximum theoretical efficiency obtainable in electric transmission of power, and that one half of the current must be necessarily wasted or turned into heat. The lecturer could never be reconciled to a law necessitating such a waste of energy, and had maintained, without disputing the accuracy of Jacobi's law, that it had reference really to the condition of maximum work accomplished with a given machine, whereas its efficiency must ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... was paying hardly any attention to his brother's talk, and would have felt it waste of energy to reassert what he had said in the formal conclave. Weariness had come upon him after these days of grief and indignant tumult; he wanted to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... weapons, and was prepared to use them. This fellow carried Caratal's confidential papers for him, and was ready to protect either them or his master. The probability was that Caratal had taken him into his counsel, and that to remove Caratal without removing Gomez would be a mere waste of energy. It was necessary that they should be involved in a common fate, and our plans to that end were much facilitated by their request for a special train. On that special train you will understand that two out of the three ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were playing it in public—that is to say, with all possible energy and emotion. Some of the pianists now before the public do this, and it always makes me sorry for them, for I know what a needless waste of energy and vital force it is. An actor, studying his lines, does not need to continually shout them in order to learn how they should be interpreted. Neither does the lyric actress practise her roles with full ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... often attained, and never with spectacular effect. Ere long, however, Macgregor developed a puffiness around his left eye while Willie exhibited a swelling lip. Both soon were pouring out sweat. They fought with frantic enthusiasm and notable waste of energy. ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... been avoided. The history of all wars, moreover, should teach us that now and then there comes a time when to hold the olive-branch in one hand and the sword in the other, especially if the olive-branch is kept in the foreground and the sword in the background, involves not only a sad waste of energy, but is mistaken kindness to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... in a thousand times will one man convince another in an argument, and the benefits you get if you do convince the other fellow will not compensate you for the waste of energy expended on the other nine hundred and ninety-nine ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... explaining that he had made the implication by his use of the past tense, but gave up the idea as involving a waste of energy. "How old is this chap, ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... light really went out. I had looked at my watch just before this happened and wound it up, which, Bickley remarked, was superfluous and a waste of energy. It then marked 3.20 in the morning. We had wedged Bastin, who was now snoring comfortably, into his berth, with pillows, and managed to tie a cord over him—no, it was a large bath towel, fixing one end of it to the little rack over his ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... apply this rule, in time of war, to officers whose duties would never take them off the ground, and who would have to learn at schools already more than fully occupied with training pilots, seemed a waste of energy. There were, for instance, many trained engineers, in civil life, who were eminently capable of supervising the mechanical equipment, but who did not want to learn to fly, and could be made into indifferent pilots only at a great expense of time and labour, and at not a little risk. At first ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... profit, owing to the miscalculation of competitors who establish too many factories and glut the market; the waste of energy in the work of competition; the adulteration of goods induced by the desire to undersell; the enormous royalties which must be paid to a competitor who has secured some new invention—these and other causes necessitate some common action. By the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... something that I must even at the time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." He vanishes, and I dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must have led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... cellar? Not with the assurance of fifty years' contentment such as I now enjoy to follow upon it! With man's infinitely pathetic power of resignation, one sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the worst of it, makes out a case for the resolute optimist. Oh, but the waste of energy, of zeal, of youth! In another mood, I could shed tears over that spectacle of rare vitality condemned to sordid strife. The pity of it! And—if our conscience mean anything at all—the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... great danger of such waste of energy and means and duplication of results as will bring the work into popular disfavor and invite disintegration, for already there is a growing feeling that agricultural experiment is and will be subordinated to the ordinary college work in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard work and an unhappily married daughter—because ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... facilitate the access of air. All the mechanical arrangements employed for obtaining such a result have failed, because the friction introduced by the maneuvering parts also introduces a resistance greater than the motor can overcome. There is therefore a waste of energy due to the continuous flow of hydrogen; but the apparatus, for all that, constitutes none the less an original and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various |
