"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... necessarily heroic measures is not so great as might be expected, and can be further diminished by plastic operations, which should be undertaken before ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent—or ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... number of the original wounds are inflicted. If the interfering has been often repeated it may be followed by another condition, which has been considered in our remarks upon other affections. It is a plastic exudation or thickening of the parts, which are commonly said to have become "callous," and the effect of it is to destroy the regularity of the outlines of the joint to an extent which constitutes a serious blemish, which will be permanent, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... that the plastic and not un-virtuous nature of the young man was directed towards a definite object. The elements out of which he was made, although somewhat diluted, were active enough to make him uncomfortable, so long as they remained ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... who has ever written verse but must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, any how, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this delicate ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Andromaque. I shall never forget the first performance, in which Mounet-Sully obtained a delirious triumph. Oh, how fine he was, Mounet-Sully, in his role of Orestes! His entrance, his fury, his madness, and the plastic beauty of this ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... signal moral and spiritual benefit to the people generally. Here was a large band of boys and girls taken out of native society, cut off from idolatrous training and associations, and made over in the most plastic season of their lives to be moulded by those whose supreme aim would be to strengthen and elevate their character, and prepare them for a happy, useful, and honourable career. It was hoped that when these children thus trained grew to manhood and womanhood, they would go out among their ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... exalted thoughts, shaped into words in the "Confessions":[106] "Formerly I felt little affection for Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was dominant within me, and I could not pardon the Jewish lawgiver for his intolerance of images, and every sort of plastic representation. I failed to see that despite his hostile attitude to art, Moses was himself a great artist, gifted with the true artist's spirit. Only in him, as in his Egyptian neighbors, the artistic instinct was exercised ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... doors of communication between them, or by erecting covered passages. Storehouses, kitchens and other accessory buildings, may be constructed in the same manner, and a degree of convenience gained which would be attempted in vain with a less plastic material. These houses are durable, the wind has little effect on them, and they resist the thaw until the sun acquires very ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... a suitable pause not too far from the second planet—the planet of the shaggy beasts. They put out a plastic balloon with a Dabney field generator inside it. It would float in emptiness indefinitely. The field would hold for not less than twenty years. It would serve as a beacon, a highway, a railroad track through space for other ships planning to visit the third world now ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... seeming chance, The plastic shapes of circumstance, What might have been we fondly guess, If earlier born, or ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... almost always a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, coupled with habits of diligence; in the soldier made from the street Arab of Paris there were always inconceivable intelligence, rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity; in the adventurers come, like himself, from higher grades of society, and burying a broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there were continually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, that had run to seed and brought forth ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... (1791-1833) show how powerfully the new leaven had acted. But Weber was not the only foreigner at this time who helped to shape the destiny of French music. The spell of Rossini was too potent for the plastic Gauls to resist, and to his influence may be traced the most salient features of the school of opera comique which is best represented by Auber. Herold, though divided between the camps of Germany and Italy, had individuality enough to write music ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... of these two islands could stand for the capes on this—" He pulled a second map, this on transparent plastic, to fit over the first. The capes marked on the much larger body of land did slip over the modern islands with a surprising fit. The once large island, shattered and broken, could have produced the groups of atolls and ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... known, both in London and in Italy, a certain Colonel Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those natures—sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge life—which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a strict Anglicanism ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, both in ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... which tries to bridge over this deep chasm, and nowhere else did it gain such profound significance as here, where the contrast between the world and pity was developed in a more pregnant, more precise, more plastic form than in any other nation. It is very significant for that reason that almost all the great Spanish poets took refuge in priesthood in the second half of their lives. It is a unique phenomenon that from this refuge, and after conquering life by ideal means, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... in thought for a moment, and then reached into the belt pouch at her side and pulled out a square of electro-engraved plastic. She handed ...
— Heist Job on Thizar • Gordon Randall Garrett
... germ of the bird, so soon as it acquires consistency at the beginning of incubation, we can distinguish an upper smooth continuous surface and a lower more granular surface. The blastoderm separates thereupon into two distinct layers, of which the lower develops into the plastic body-parts of the embryo, the upper into the animal parts; the lower shows clearly a further division into two closely connected subsidiary layers—the mucous layer and the vessel-layer; the original upper layer also shows a division into two, which form respectively ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... is a real, great talent. For instance, in the story "In the Steppe" it is expressed with extraordinary vigour, and I actually felt a pang of envy that it was not I who had written it. You are an artist, a clever man, you feel superbly, you are plastic—that is, when you describe a thing you see it and you touch it with your hands. That is real art. There is my opinion for you, and I am very glad I can express it to you. I am, I repeat, very glad, and if we could meet and talk for an hour or two you would be convinced ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.—The ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they were ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dwells that Supreme Being whom we call God, who is at once the one real fountain and source of all the light and life of the Universe itself. For it is His universal Spirit that moulds and fashions the plastic matter into the many forms which it assumes, and uses the various modes of motion, as heat, light, electricity and magnetism, as instruments to build up and erect in all their beauty and harmony the innumerable systems that flood immensity ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... plastic period of your lives, with the world before you, and the mightier world within to mould as you will; and you can be almost anything you like, I do not mean in regard to externals, or intellectual capacities, for these are only ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or genius." ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... nature to the deity, included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall, seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator; Pantheism with its one Spirits plastic stress; and Science with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its trinal God: I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} a riddle), although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other objections ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... national energies—of intellect not less than of heart, of skill, not less than of capital—to the great purposes of the war. This was the necessary result of our free institutions; of our untrammelled pursuits; the mobility of our means and agencies of production; and the plastic character of all our creations. The amount of thought expended on this subject has been prodigious and incalculable. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to enumerate the ten thousand inventions and devices of all kinds which have been presented for the purpose of increasing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to mould and fashion Life's plastic newness into grace To make the boyish heart heroic, And light with thought ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... than the peaks of Scotland or Wales. The thick formations of millstone grit and limestone that rest upon the shale have generally avoided crumpling or distortion, and thus give the mountain views the appearance of having had all the upper surfaces rolled flat when they were in a plastic condition. Denudation and the action of ice in the glacial epochs have worn through the hard upper stratum, and formed the long and narrow dales; and in Littondale, Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and many other parts, one ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... singer, to the development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... so strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... unheard), on a full-flowing tide of language where the waves of the verse, following one another in a swift succession of ever-rising power, crash down at last with a roar. It is a strange kind of poetry: not that of imaginative vision, of plastic beauty, of subtle feeling; but that of intellectual excitement and spiritual strength. It is the poetry of Malherbe multiplied a thousandfold in vigour and in genius, and expressed in the form most appropriate to it—the dramatic Alexandrine verse. The stuff out of which it is woven, made up, not ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... established, beyond the possibility of refutation, that botanical species are only "a higher and more permanent class of varieties." He extended the same view to animals, and believed that single species of each genus were originally created in a highly plastic condition, and that these have produced, chiefly by intercrossing, but also by ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... eternity, we must build with eternities; whence, the vanity of the cry for any thing alike durable and new; and the folly of the reproach—Your granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills. For we are not gods and creators; and the controversialists have debated, whether indeed the All-Plastic Power itself can do more than mold. In all the universe is but one original; and the very suns must to their source for their fire; and we Prometheuses must to them for ours; which, when had, only perpetual Vestal tending ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... forsaking his ideas on detergents, suggested we make black plastic discs, like poker chips but thinner and as cheap as possible, to scatter on a snowy sidewalk where they would pick up extra heat from the sun and melt the snow more rapidly. Afterward one would sweep up ...
— Junior Achievement • William Lee
... his estimate of Maggie; that Maggie's inclination toward criminal adventure, her supreme self-confidence, all her bravado, were but the superficial though strong tendencies developed by her unfortunate environment; that within that cynical, worldly shell there were the vital and plastic ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... determining influences must be spoken of now. The third lies in the fact that the English language was still plastic. It had not fallen into such hard forms that its words were narrow or restricted. The truth is that from the point of view of pure literature the Bible is better in English than it is in Greek or Hebrew. That is, the English of the King James version as English is better than the Greek of the ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... itself in the Gentile Church is not the whole infinitely rich abundance of early Christian views and perceptions. That presupposition is simply a proclamation of the one God and of Christ transferred to Greek soil, fixed merely in its leading features and otherwise very plastic, accompanied by a message regarding the future, and demands for a holy life. At the same time the Old Testament and the early Christian Palestinian writings with the rich abundance of their contents, did certainly exercise a silent mission in the earliest communities, till by the creation ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... usual and a reservation at the Tycho Hotel in Phoenix. You'll go there and, on your first evening, retire early. Alone, I need hardly add. We'll be waiting for you in your room. There'll be a very carefully prepared duplicate—surgical disguise, plastic fingerprinting tips, fully educated in your habits, tastes, and mannerisms. He'll stay behind and carry out your vacation while we smuggle you away. A similar exchange will be affected when you return, you'll be told exactly how your double spent the ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... was of medium height, fairly stout, and with a good-natured look. His head (very similar to those found in many Italian paintings of the sixteenth century), without being beautiful in the plastic sense of the word, gave an impression of great strength of character, power and intelligence. Short hair stood up straight on the high, well-developed forehead. A straight nose stopped short, as if cut off suddenly above the upper lip which was covered with a black mustache; ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... phases of its secret. Its reverence for organization appears in the practice of embalming. The bodies of men and of animals seemed to it to be divine. Even vegetable organization had something sacred in it: "O holy nation," said the Roman satirist, "whose gods grow in gardens!" That plastic force of nature which appears in organic life and growth made up, in various forms, as we shall see in the proper place, the Egyptian Pantheon. The life-force of nature became divided into the three groups of gods, the highest of which represented its ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... methods of preventing case-hardening, one being to paint the surface with a special compound prepared for this purpose. In some cases a coating of plastic asbestos is used while in others thin sheet asbestos is wired around the part ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... considering a stage of spiritual life at which the psychical nature has been cleansed and purified. Formerly, it reflected in its plastic substance the images of the earthy; purified now, it reflects the image of the heavenly, giving the spiritual intelligence a visible form. The Self, beholding that visible form, in which its spiritual intelligence has, as it were, taken palpable ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very easy to manage. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our china manufactures ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure of the man who ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... escalators. Harkaman would have said more, but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic truncheons. The Space Viking set ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... world and a gentleman, Mr. Effingham had looked forward to this passage with a good deal of concern, on account of his daughter, while he shrank with the sensitiveness of his habits from the necessity of exposing one of her delicacy and plastic simplicity to the intercourse of a ship. Accompanied by Mademoiselle Viefville, watched over by Nanny, and guarded by himself and his kinsman, he had lost some of his apprehensions on the subject during the three probationary days, and now ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... a plastic human creature, and is thoroughly domesticated and thoroughly anglicized. The same cannot be said of the Indian, for instance, between whom and us there can never exist any fellowship, any community of feeling or interest; or is there any doubt but the Chinaman will always remain ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself for the interest of it, that, the stuff of the Wards, their homely grace, was all New England—so far at least as New England wasn't Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best Boston" families. Such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not the value, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... content the venison that formed their breakfast. Over the vast forest a brilliant sun was rising and here the leaves and grass were not burned much by summer heat. It looked fresh and green, and the wind sang pleasantly through its cool shadows. It appealed to Robert. With his plastic nature he was all for the town when he was in town, and now in the forest he was all for ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... (1) Language (vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, semasiology). Handwriting. (2) Arts: A. Plastic arts (conditions of production, conceptions, methods, works). B. Arts of expression, music, dance, literature. (3) Sciences (conditions of production, methods, results). (4) Philosophy and Morals (conceptions, precepts, actual practice). ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... my tortured nerves, the doctor refused to return my clothes. For a semblance of warmth I was forced to depend upon ordinary undergarments and an extraordinary imagination. The heavy felt druggets were about as plastic as blotting paper and I derived little comfort from them until I hit upon the idea of rending them into strips. These strips I would weave into a crude Rip Van Winkle kind of suit; and so intricate was the warp and woof that on several occasions an attendant had to cut me out of these sartorial ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the late plastic mass of living form that had flowed into shape at the will and law of the music. Broken into individuals, the common transfusing spirit withdrawn, they stood drenched, cold, and benumbed, with clinging garments; ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... by Osmond's artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy's innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, who ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... seen her—and yet—unlike. For a brief bitter moment his instincts revolted at this familiar yielding up in his fair countrywomen of all that was distinctively original in them to alien tastes and habits, and he resented the plastic yet characterless mobility which made Yerba's Parisian dress and European manner fit her so charmingly and yet express so little. For a brief critical moment he remembered the placid, unchanging simplicity of German, and the inflexible ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... clay, but despite microscope and telescope, chemical analysis, and vivisection, they can go no further than the whirring of the Potter's wheel, and the Potter is nowhere revealed. The moulding Creative hand and the plastic clay are still as distinct, as when the gauntlet was first flung down by proud ambitious constructive science. Animal and vegetable organisms have been analyzed, and 'the idea of adaptation developed into the conception ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... colleges are more concerned with passing on the standards of an older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter without ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... not call the labours of the biographer final. So great a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic form, and send through them, with less of interruption, the currents of Faraday's life. 'He was too good a man,' writes his present biographer, 'for me to estimate rightly, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Canadien already far advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the parliament of Canada as a radical, free-thinking, ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a great mistake to think that Chaucer shaped our language from crude materials. His influence was conservative, not plastic. The popularity of his works tended to crystalize and thus to perpetuate the forms of the East Midland dialect, but that dialect was ready to his hand before he began to write. The speech of London ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... foreign matters, leaving merely the cellular tissue, which, it is found, does not differ in substance from the cell tissue obtained after treating rags. In either case this cellular tissue, through the treatment to which the raw material is subjected, becomes perfectly plastic or moldable, and while the paper made from one differs slightly in certain characteristics from the paper made from the other, they are nevertheless very similar, and it might be safe to predict that further perfecting of processes will eventually ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... beauteous hand! that dost my heart subdue, And in a little space my life confine; Hand where their skill and utmost efforts join Nature and Heaven, their plastic powers to show! Sweet fingers, seeming pearls of orient hue, To my wounds only cruel, fingers fine! Love, who towards me kindness doth design, For once permits ye naked to our view. Thou glove most dear, most elegant ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn't going to turn you into too much of a ritualist," he said to Mark. "It's splendid of course that you should have an opportunity so young of proving your ability to get round people in the right way. But let it be the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... though with an intention most obviously false. He coughed—a cough of pure deception. Not only were his eyes averted from mine, but they were glassed to an uncanny degree. The fingers wrought piteously at the now plastic roll. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... him while their natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... throw away Thy robe that flows discordantly! With nature only match thy form, With nature match thy plastic image. Loosen thy girdle! Cross Thy hands upon thy heart! Thy hair is purple ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... rocked back and forth on his feet as Krayton had done. Before nightfall The Computer would be a useless and overheated mass of plastic and metal! ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... elasticity, a third state, geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable or fragile bodies, which break without being deformed. It is already known that the period of altered elasticity for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... his books aside—he kept them in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them—and launched into his sea dreams, Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in the busiest part ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Really, of course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards. She hadn't done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year. But she had the illusion that she wasn't doing anything now; that she was just a passive plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the driving power of the director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if the chairs ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... was back on the street. He was dressed in rags. Beneath them he was holding his needlebeam, and in his free hand was a begging cup. The old man had worked lavishly with a pinkish-yellow plastic. Barrent's face was now monstrously swollen at the forehead, and his nose was flat and spread out almost to the cheekbones. The shape of his face had been altered, and the ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... is, apart from its training and education during the life of the individual, must start with the realization that man is a human animal. As a human being he is strikingly set off by his upright posture and his large and flexible hand. But chiefly he is distinguished by his plastic brain, upon which depends his capacity to perform the complex mental activities—from administering a railroad to solving problems in calculus—which constitute man's ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, Walden has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage. The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. Walden is Thoreau's most vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... On the other hand, although some distinguished chemists deny or exalt the nutritive properties of bran, agriculturists, taking practical observation as proof, attribute to that portion of the grain a physiological action which has nothing in common with plastic alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated by Mr. Poggiale, is passed ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the plastic age, my ancestor was observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in the streets, without sharing his own crust with him. Indeed, his practice on ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Englishmen: it had no charm for Sir Charles, and he was not afraid to say so. But his liberty of appreciation owed something also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never been at a public school—thus missing, in the plastic years of a sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class—made it easier for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions with his own eyes, and not through ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... feeling in one's make-up is, perhaps, the greatest single remedy against a too static condition of ideas. Feeling seems to have a double function in making one open and plastic. A kindly attitude toward new ideas is necessary before they can be viewed long enough to have their value tested. We must be positively friendly, or willing to see worth, before we can see it. Sympathy thus secures a hearing for new ideas. It was because the Jews lacked ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now—what if all these processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not the props, but the hindrances, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body—your face and hands and voice—compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or a pen or ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... on her way, undeluded by specious promises of easier methods, inuring her students to toil as the price of success; not rigid and motionless, but plastic and adapting herself to the necessities of different minds; yet never confounding things that differ, nor vainly hoping on a narrow basis of culture to rear the superstructure of the broadest attainment and character, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... wilfully blind to consequences. On the face of it he was playing a fool's part; he knew it; the truth is simply that he could not have done other than as he did. Consciously he believed himself to be merely testing the girl; subconsciously he was plastic in the grip of an emotion stronger than he,—moist clay upon the ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... subject. Under the flickering gas light in the hall (they were still suspicious of the effect of electricity on Mr. Culpeper's eyes) her face looked grimly determined, as if an indomitable purpose had moulded every feature and traced every line in some thin plastic substance. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... croup, extra teeth to the existing teeth, and even two similarly formed bodies are attached by some point common to both, as the navels, breastbones, backs, etc. (Pl. XIX, figs. 1, 2, 3.) This shows that both have been derived from the same primitive layer of the embryo, which possessed the plastic power of building up a given structure or set of organs. An inclosed ovum, on the other hand, has no such identity or similarity of structure to the part with which it is connected, showing an evident primary independence of both life and the power of building tissues and organs. The power of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... sample poppies to the H.E.W. offices. They were in vacuum-sealed plastic envelopes, because I knew that once my virus spores got loose in the atmosphere, they'd spread all over the world like radioactive dust, or faster. I hoped to see the Commissioner of Narcotics, Myron P. Bishop, but His Magnificence was harder to reach than the whole College of Cardinals. ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... fit God's hand as tools, and thrill with his wisdom and creative processes, a body fitted for God's spirit as well as the steel is fitted to your hand. From this world take opacity, gravity, darkness, bring in more mind, love, and God, and then we will have heaven. An immanent God makes a plastic world. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Wesley had lived, he would have been no doubt an active agent in the holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his temper, but it did not fail ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... keep their ideas as treasures—they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... we have to do essentially with what, relying upon previous studies of the principles of art and of the motives that are at work in society that produce the phenomena of intemperance we may call the intoxication motive. That this intoxication motive is a plastic force, a mood containing desires and impulses that may be satisfied in a variety of ways, since as a sum of desires it is no longer specific and instinctive, is the main implication of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness of the purpose of the individual and of the spirit of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... we were young, and our other parent being, though a kind father, much absorbed in affairs of various kinds, as an active magistrate and landlord, there was no one to check the unwholesome stream of tradition with which our plastic minds were inundated in the company of nurses and servants. As years went on, however, the old ghostly tales partially lost their effects, and our undisciplined minds were turned more towards balls, dress, and partners, and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... of the room, for she continued her progress toward it several steps before realizing the presence of a visitor. She was a year or so younger than the girl who had admitted him, fairer and obviously more plastic, more expressive, more perishable, a great deal more insistently feminine; though it was to be seen that they were sisters. This one had eyes almost as dark as the other's, but these were not cool; they were sweet, unrestful, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... entirely the product of circumstance and environment, he held that it was not possible to begin too early in implanting right habits and forming character. Poverty and crime, he believed, were results of errors in the various systems of education and government. So plastic was child nature, that society would be able to mould itself "into the very image of rational wishes and desires." That "the infants of any one class in the world may be readily formed into men of any other class," was ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... I was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... Williams's stay in Canada was the discovery that his little daughter, Eunice, had been taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But this was only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a plastic little creature, and she soon adopted not only the religion, but also the manners and customs of the Indians among whom she had fallen. In fact and feeling she became a daughter of the Indians, and there among them she married, on arriving at womanhood, ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... original verses in his memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with a venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the aristocratic society of the late eighteenth ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... invited to meet the author of Vice Versa, "which Mr. Lang thinks"—as I wrote to my mother—"the best thing of its kind since Dickens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for the folly of the over-production—and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood—of yesterday. To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... outrageous tumult outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted out of its rear, wobbling from side to side for reasons best known to itself. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... the pose strained? It's an example of eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic, fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... it, is one of the chief characteristics of modern as distinguished from ancient art. It is this which makes the Elizabethan drama so different from the Greek. It is this again which already separates the works of Duccio and Giotto from the plastic arts of Antiquity. Painting lends itself willingly to the consideration of minor episodes, and for that reason is almost as well fitted to be in touch with modern life as the novel itself. Such a treatment ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... lies beneath it moves with it—down to the polished surface of the earth's frame, laid bare; no blade of grass grows so slowly as it moves, no meteor of the air is so irresistible. Its substant ice curls freely, moulds, and breaks itself like water,—breaks in waves, plastic like honey, crested lightly with a frozen spray; it winds tenderly about the rocky shore, and the granite, disintegrated into crumbs, flows on with it. All this so quietly that busy, officious little Man ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... We now know that there can be no cavities more than a few miles below the crust of a planet, simply because, under the enormous pressures which would exist, the most solid matter would be perfectly plastic. But while Whewell's general objection to the theory that Jupiter or Saturn is in the same condition as our earth thus acquires new force, the particular explanation which he gave of the planet's small density is ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... for the most part plastic as clay. The sisters were the potters. No ruling sovereign possesses a tithe of the absolute authority that was theirs. They literally held the powers of life and death. Unquestioned and god-like they moved serenely to and fro about ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the hands of the mob, and who told the excited populace that unless Boston was careful "our children's heads will be broken by cannon-balls." The plastic, critical hours of his youth were spent in Harvard College and in the law office of Judge Story. Never interested in philosophy and metaphysics, he was surpassed by few as a master of the humanities, general literature, and the story of the rise and progress ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of her success: her method is plastic like the minds she works on. Coue's material—the adult mind—is more stable. It demands a clear-cut, distinct method, and leaves less room for adaptation; but the aim of Mlle. Kauffmant is to fill the child within and enwrap it without ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... artistic sensibility pervading every form of life like the nervous structure of the huge frame—a sensibility so delicate, alert and universal that it seemed to leave no room for obtuseness or error. In such a medium the faculty of plastic expression must develop as unconsciously as any organ in its normal surroundings; to be "artistic" must cease to be an attitude and become a natural function. To Claudia the significance of the whole vast revelation was centred in the light it shed on one tiny spot of consciousness—the value of ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... endeavoured to establish be disputed or not, the absolute correspondence between the Moral and the Physical is, at any rate, the essential ground of the Plastic arts; which could not else exist, since through Form alone they have to convey, not only thought and emotion, but distinct and permanent character. For our own part, we cannot but consider their success in this as having settled ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... razor and went through the little door leading to the living quarters. The partition was crystal clear plastic so I could see him pulling himself along by the hand rail toward the bookcase. I knew he would presently find himself something to read ...
— The Minus Woman • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... men who are reared in Wall Street, who from their youth are familiarized with its processes, and who are well set in the plastic age to consider human life as an auspicious opportunity for getting possession of something that does not belong to them, are fatally blunted in their sensibilities; the ethical quality in them is battered out—or at least battered; they come to regard the human ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... ask,—Is it my ingenuity that has imposed upon these structures the conclusion I have drawn from them?—have I so combined them in my thought that they have become to me a plastic form, out of which I draw a Crinoid, an Ophiuran, a Star-Fish, a Sea-Urchin, or a Holothurian at will? or is this structural idea inherent in them all, so that every observer who has a true insight into their organization ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... warrior, scholar, poet, and yet the slave of one idea and its dying forms! Thought and form are wax beneath my plastic fingers! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have pursued the argument in relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given proving how, in Science, an advance of one division presently advances ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... called to an unusual method of burial by an ancient race of Indians in that vicinity. In numerous instances burial places were discovered where the bodies had been placed with the face up and covered with a coating of plastic clay about an inch thick. A pile of wood was then placed on top and fired, which consumed the body and baked the clay, which retained the impression of the body. This was ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow |
