"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to cicatricial webs of the larynx may be cured by plastic operations that reform the cords, with a clean, sharp anterior commissure, which is a necessity for clear phonation. The laryngeal scissors and the long slender punch are often more useful for these ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... beauty by the electro-magnetic Aether. Then in the very centre of the Universe there 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 ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... watching the development, out of a speck of protoplasm, of one of the commonest animals: "Strange possibilities," he says, "lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and purposelike in their succession that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel the mass ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... organizations. Military type of society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and plastic political development of the English race. Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, and ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... measure of kindly 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 ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... actually used cigars in the pulpits, was affirmed on the authority of Mr. Truck himself, and, coupled with his present occupation, the point was deemed to be settled. Even Florio yielded, and his plastic mind soon saw a thousand beauties in the usage, that had hitherto escaped it. All the literati drew round the captain in a circle, to enjoy the spectacle, though the honest old mariner contrived to throw out such volumes of vapour as to keep them at a safe ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... prepared for oral delivery: (d) dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions; (c) musical compositions; (f) maps; (g) works of art; models or designs for works of art; (h) reproductions of a work of art; (i) drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character: (j) photographs; (k) prints and ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... not "GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings 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 sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... smart, Laberius' mimes were products of high art. 'Tis not enough to make your reader's face Wear a broad grin, though that too has its place: Terseness there wants, to make the thought ring clear, Nor with a crowd of words confuse the ear: There wants a plastic style, now grave, now light, Now such as bard or orator would write, And now the language of a well-bred man, Who masks his strength, and says not all he can: And pleasantry will often cut clean through Hard knots ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... was the third time the house had changed dice to try and break his winning streak, it was their privilege. The hard-eyed Casino man opened his wallet as he had done before and drew out a pair at random. Stripping off their plastic cover he threw them the length of the table to Jason. They came up a natural ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... harem, and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without—unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?—the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... without fixed place or steady line of study, happened one day to be taken by Granacci into the garden of the Medici at San Marco, which garden the magnificent Lorenzo, father of Pope Leo, and a man of the first intellectual distinction, had adorned with antique statues and other reliques of plastic art. When Michelangelo saw these things and felt their beauty, he no longer frequented Domenico's shop, nor did he go elsewhere, but, judging the Medicean gardens to be the best school, spent all his time and faculties in working there." ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... blandishment of flattering tongues, and the intoxication of fair women's eyes and sweet voices, the Governor was made to forget, for the time being, that he was the property, body, soul, and spirit, of the "Law and Order" party; and his soft and plastic nature was beguiled into signing a document constituting the army of defense of Lawrence a part of the Territorial Militia, and giving them authority, under his own hand and seal, to fight with teeth and toe-nails against the outside barbarians ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... paint with some cleverness on wood, cloth, parchment, ivory, and plastic material, as well as on gold and silver,—a sort of enamelling. They also retain a fair knowledge of effect in fresco, tracing the outline on the wet ground, and laying on the color in a thin glue; in some of their later work of this kind that I have seen, the idea of the designer is expressed ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... creatures, the forms derived immediately from Phoenicia, ultimately from Babylonia; they appear only in the great public cult, probably did not enter into the religious life of the people at large, and there is no evidence that they ever received divine worship.[2012] The Hebrews had no plastic art of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of the deity.[2013] The absence of images in ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... relative; indefinite, incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence relatively normal and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... essentially one of revelation, of being suddenly made to see and understand things which before had been dark or unknown. I realised that what I should now call the materialistic hypothesis would not help me to a solution. No "fanciful shapes of a plastic earth" were in my vision. My Ego, whatever it was or was to be, was, I perceived, a spirit and not a creature of flesh-and-blood, and also not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... knew Kagig, I who had sent Kagig a message, I who five minutes ago was on the verge of being hanged in the greasy noose that still swung above the ladder through the hole in the roof—I who therefore ought to be thoroughly plastic-minded and obedient to demands. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the weakness which had made her so plastic a creature in her father's hands had been an injustice to her husband; that it was not herself only she had been bound to consider in this matter. It was one thing to fling away her own chances of happiness; but it was another thing to jeopardise ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the condition of 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; light, order, harmony, purpose departed, and chaos restored; the issuings of life ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the home establishes habits while the child's mind is plastic, so the community stands in loco parentis to the future citizen, and surrounds him with safeguards while needed. Knowledge is needed, scientific investigation is fundamental, expert wisdom is indispensable, costly though it is, being the product of long research and rare brain ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... were younger, she was certainly not more simple. If the grey eyes were less shadowed, they were no less inscrutable. If the lips were softer, their serenity was as baffling as their sternness had been. If she seemed more plastic she was not less illusive. Nimble as were his mental processes, the professor was discomfited to find that hers ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... this charge brings about modifications as extensive as one pleases in the chemical properties of the atom. Thus the hypothesis will be removed from all discussion of a chemical order, since it will have been made plastic enough beforehand to adapt itself to all the known facts; and if we object that sodium cannot subsist in water because it instantaneously decomposes the latter, the answer is simply that the sodium ion does not decompose water as ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... 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 ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... tersely. Plasticity of behaviour in special accommodation to special circumstances is of survival value; it depends upon acquired characters; it is correlated with increase in size and complexity of the cerebrum; under natural selection therefore the larger and more complex cerebrum as the organ of plastic behaviour has been the outcome of natural selection. We have thus the biological foundations for a ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... God be thanked, that ye have obeyed from the heart that pattern of doctrine to which ye were delivered," writes the apostle (Rom. 6: 17). The pattern, as the context shows, is Christ dead and risen. If the church truly lives in the Spirit, he will keep her so plastic that she will obey this divine mold as the metal conforms to the die in which it is struck. If she yields to the sway of "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," she will be stereotyped according to the fashion of the world, and ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... She wooed the owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... mark. 'A father's wrath it is!' The other deities All in one voice exclaim'd; 'And, might the thing be named, Some other god would make Bolts better for our sake.' This Vulcan undertook. His rumbling forges shook, And glow'd with fervent heat, While Cyclops blew and beat. Forth, from the plastic flame Two sorts of bolts there came. Of these, one misses not: 'Tis by Olympus shot,— That is, the gods at large. The other, bearing wide, Hits mountain-top or side, Or makes a cloud its targe. And this it is alone Which leaves ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... M.H. Letteris, the distinguished poet; S.L. Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher. Into this circle of "shining ones" Levinsohn was introduced, and each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote himself to improving the educational system of his people and began to plan his work on Learning in ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... 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 ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a new power ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... grace. Grace with Watteau is not the antique grace—a rigid and solid charm, the perfection of the marble of a Galatea, the entirely plastic and the material glory of a Venus. Grace with Watteau is grace. It is that nothing that invests a woman with an attraction, a coquetry, a more than physical beauty. It is that subtile quality which seems the smile of a line, the soul of form, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... side-tracked or confused. A child of twelve or even ten is quite a different creature, often with clear if not articulate conceptions of the make-up of the physical and human world. He has something to measure against, some standards to cling to. But we are talking about children still in the early plastic stages of standards who will take the relationships we offer them through stories and build them into the ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... is desirable that the splint should take the shape of the part accurately, a plastic material may be employed. Perhaps the most convenient is poroplastic felt, which consists of strong felt saturated with resin. When heated before a fire or placed in boiling water, it becomes quite plastic and may be accurately moulded to any part, and on cooling it again becomes rigid. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum in modern Romantic art, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... really rats, those people. Not literally. They looked humanoid enough to enable plastic surgeons to disguise a human being as one of them, although it meant sacrificing the little fingers and little toes to imitate the four-digited Rats. The Rats were at a disadvantage there; they couldn't add any fingers. But the Rats had other advantages—they bred and fought like, well, ...
— The Measure of a Man • Randall Garrett
... gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but that was the best he could do, and ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... constipation and constipation nervous misery. It is inevitable that inflammation should determine this outcome since it induces spasmodic contraction of the muscular walls of the tube, lessening the bore or closing the portion of the canal invaded. Plastic infiltration takes place in the walls of the gut, thickening and binding them together; or, if the inflammation be of a simple catarrhal or atrophic nature, the plastic infiltration will more or less bind the circular muscular bands of the gut together in their abnormally contracted ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... faster! The roar became a whining hum. Then for Madeline sound ceased to be anything—she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall. It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight that she could not move. The green of desert plants along the road merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... scene where the book invited him to consult the wants of the Norwich festival and to write in the cantata style. In the first act, however, there is little to praise outside of the settings of the two Anacreonic odes and the song to the shell. There is much striving, but a paucity of plastic ideas. What might have been an unconstrained lyrical outpouring, the prologue, mere thundering in the index, because of the composer's mistaken impression that it ought to be tragic, and in the "Ercles ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... right! You see, it is ze expansion of coloured forms in space, combined with the co-penetration of plastic masses which forms what ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... moving over the oceans or through the skies in slender, blackened craft, creatures that could exist where no life could remain, metal and plastic figures that waged a war Man had conceived, but which he could not fight himself. Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... and tragic ingredients of the New Comedy, or Comedy in general. There is yet a third, however, which in itself is neither comic nor tragic, in short, not even poetic. I allude to its portrait-like truthfulness. The ideal and caricature, both in the plastic arts and in dramatic poetry, lay claim to no other truth than that which lies in their significance: their individual beings even are not intended to appear real. Tragedy moves in an ideal, and the Old Comedy ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... too little, less even than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Glasnevin; and yet what the deuce have they, dear souls, with their feet upon a soft carpet and their eyes upon the pages of Scott or Byron, to do with all the cotton or dimity that ever was printed? But let us not repine; that very plastic ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive Here, Ilithyia, the protecting goddess of child-bearing, Persephone, and Artemis, all these plastic art represents as goddesses of fate, weaving the thread of life, and, at the same time, protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. Only a few representations of spinning goddesses ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild, And in the region of their peaceful selves;—135 Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty Did both find helpers to their hearts' desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish,— Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,—140 Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, We find ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. Why, a Hindoo will drink at a sitting a tumbler of ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... so long Have held in thraldom many a mind, Sing to the deaf a ransom-song, Be eyes to those whose souls are blind; Teach those who mould the plastic mind To know that God hath never given A mission weightier, more refined, To angels round the courts of heaven, Than that of training human minds Committed unto human hands, In which the spirit e'er survives ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... curses and noise of smashing glass, such songs as never were sung in Carmelo before; an infernal clash of sound which mingled incongruously with the solemn mass of the surf. Chonita's eyes flashed. Even Estenega's face darkened: the traditions planted in plastic youth arose and rebelled ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... feel that our lines had fallen in anything but pleasant places. The flying years, with their changes and anxieties, like the constant dripping of water on a stone, have worn off the rough edges that wounded and worried during their progress, and only the sunny spots, burned in the plastic memory of ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... 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 ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... that 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. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... he certainly had all the appearance of a trapped criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat. Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work. Crepitude, K.C., Oxford's counsel, was in less joyous mood. Priam was Crepitude's own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously declined to open ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... which the pigment is made fluent and plastic are quite as important in their effects. They not only have to do with the business of drying, owing to the substances used as dryers, but they may have to do with the chemical action of one pigment ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... scenery has formed the background for more than one of his stories. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of poems, 'Intermezzo di Rime' (Interludes of Verse): "grand, plastic verse, of an impeccable prosody," as he maintained in their defense, but so daringly erotic that their appearance created no small scandal. Other poems followed at intervals, notably 'Il Canto Nuovo' (The New Song: Rome, 1882), 'Isotteo e la Chimera' (Isotteo and the Chimera: Rome, 1890), ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... agreed; "I haven't answered, have I? No, Mr. Booth, I've never posed for a portrait. It is a new experience for me. You will have to contend with a great deal of stupidity on my part. But I shall try to be plastic." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,—of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... ingenious and true; but 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, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her to caress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness as a matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return. His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is everything exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are actually changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind. Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as he wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting into dwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and please his eye. Even stubborn ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... thing, I don't know what, but she's like a country boy with a stirring ambition. It wouldn't surprise me to see her on Fifth Avenue one of these days. With these few burning words I commend them into your plastic hands. Don't let Sammy paint her, for God's sake. Oh yes, I worked 'em for a couple of canvases. What do you think. In this buoyant climate we all move. Yours ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... these 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
... roof is composed of hard shale, or occasionally of sandstone, more unyielding than the foundation, which often consists of clay. Even where the argillaceous substrata are hard at first, they soon become softened and reduced to a plastic state when exposed to the contact of air and water in the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... with the inch rule of the archaeologist. Nor yet did Eastlake confine himself to the external forms of art and nature; he then laid the foundation of that intimate knowledge of the arts, be they called formative, architectural, plastic, or pictorial, the able elucidation of which renders his writings so valuable. Thus, whilst all the technical skill of ancient colorists is found in his style of painting, all the principles on which Dutch and Venetian masters proceeded are found in his writings. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... reached the dirty, plastic front of the Elite Cafe. Once through the double portals, she pulled the respirator from her face. The air inside was dirty and smelly but it was breathable. People were eating noisily, boisterously, with all the lusty, unclean young life that was Venus. ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... distribution of animals in the past and the present, rested, according to his belief, upon an intellectual coherence and not upon a material connection. So, also, the variability, as well as the constancy, of organized beings, at once so plastic and so inflexible, seemed to him controlled by something more than the mechanism of self-adjusting forces. In this conviction he remained unshaken all his life, although the development theory came up for discussion ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... bookshelf, frowning now, considered, selected and rejected. Finally she settled on three slim books bound in russet leather, in glossy plastic, in faded cloth. She took a little purse from the table, put the cigarette case into it. Then, with a laugh, she took one cigarette and slipped it into a tiny pocket ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon
... it with the locomotive-engine. As the iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive from the stoker a supply of 'energy-producing ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... course, a great deal to say, and on such subjects he always writes with ease, grace, and delicacy of perception. We admit that we weary sometimes of the continual application to literature of epithets appropriate to plastic and pictorial art. The conception of the unity of the arts is certainly of great value, but in the present condition of criticism it seems to us that it would be more useful to emphasise the fact that each art has its separate method ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government,—a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic Nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like it," she repeated; "but afterward. There ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious mosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed. We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being continually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite curves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than to combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets flown ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth is a good example of this: but there are many others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse: but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a tendency—which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... and his plastic nature caused him to imitate to a certain extent, and almost unconsciously, the manners and customs of those around him. He became stoical, he pretended to an indifference which often he did not feel, and he never spoke of the friends who had disappeared so suddenly from his life, even ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... in operation water could not exist. Probably St. Augustine's interpretation is the correct one—the confused mass is called alternately earth and water, because though it was as yet neither one thing nor the other, it contained the elements of both. And the word "water" expressed its plastic character. ("De Genesi ad Literam" Liber ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... they obtain extensive modifications of the original stocks, and adapt them to the various purposes for which flowers and cereals, poultry, dogs and cattle are domesticated. This shows, at least, that living forms are plastic, and extensively modifiable in a comparatively ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation they received. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... aversion of a perfectly pure and holy love from that which does not correspond to itself. So, though sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in reality, they are one, and the 'anger' is but a mode in which the 'favour' manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and if thrown back upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the 'anger' which ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts. There is no more antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied to God than when ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... goal of civilization has been aesthetic; the yen for symmetry and balance; the love of beauty; the desire for harmony; the quest for excellence; the lure of magnificence; the search for truth. Out of these urges have arisen the pictorial and plastic arts, architecture, music, the dance, science, and philosophy, providing outlets, occupations and professions that have colored and shaped many ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... sport of seeming chance, The plastic shapes of circumstance, What might have been we fondly guess, If earlier born, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... days he hung between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... on the other hand, has an extremely long period of infancy, and as a result, the nervous system is so plastic that it may be moulded, fashioned and developed in almost any manner or direction, according to the will of parents and the nature of the environment. The child, consequently, may be educated. By education we mean the training and developing of desirable instincts and capacities and ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... wedge-shaped characters are found in their most primitive and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... look in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices. And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the only really dependable commodities in ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... confidently they might believe in the final success of their struggle, they could not fail to see the immense odds and fearful obstacles against which they would have to contend. The debauched masses who had been molded and kneaded by the plastic touch of slavery into such base uses, were the only possible material from which recruits could be drawn for a great party of the future, which should regenerate our politics and re-enthrone the love of liberty; and this should be remembered in estimating ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... just as the spirit of Bret Harte breathes through the poems and stories of Kipling. Bret Harte had a very pretty satirical vein which might easily have developed, have made him an author of satire rather than of sentiment. Who can say that the influence of Dickens, coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may ...
— Dickens in Camp • Bret Harte
... problems which remain perpetually interesting are those which deal with the influence of environment on races, and that of races on environment. What happens when the people are plastic and their circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, but not ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... required in perfect riveting is that the metal of the rivet while hot and plastic shall be made to flow into all the irregularities of the rivet holes in the boiler sheets; that the surplus metal be formed into heads as large as need be, and that the pressure used to produce these results should not be in excess of what the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... Kansas City. It is a Socialism reeking with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... impossibility of a moment's escape. In the case of a murderer who has been apprehended, tried, condemned and executed, the whole of the tragedy and its sequel would be, not only lived over in imagination but repeated automatically, in fact, and worked out in full detail in the plastic matter of the astral region. Probably few people have the imagination to comprehend what the murderer feels of apprehension and fear at his trial when his life is in the balance; or what he suffers while hiding from justice and making ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... thee, mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 165 Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... infancy to hear the language spoken correctly and so the use of the proper words and forms becomes a second nature to them. A child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there. Even a parrot can be taught the proper use of language. Repeat to a parrot.—"Two and two make four" and it never will say "two ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... example, delights the majority of educated 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 ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... structuralizations are not so definite. If they were, evolution would not have been possible for the living stream of energy which is utilized by mind-stuff cannot be confined if it would advance to more complex integrations. Hence the products of mind in evolution are more plastic—more subtle and more changing. They are to be found in the myths and the folk-lore of ancient peoples, the poetry, dramatic art, and the language of later races. From age to age however the strivings ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... sung, if only with one finger, which has done much to console me for the technical powers nature has so plentifully denied me. I offer the same solution to all others who are in my case, only suggesting that it would be wise of them, perhaps, to learn while they are yet plastic the use of all ten fingers. They will not thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment, but ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local history, ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the enlargement of this sense of romance which Oliver Goldsmith gave his time in that masterpiece in small, "The Vicar of Wakefield": his special contribution to the plastic variations connected with the growing pains of the Novel. Whether regarded as poet, essayist, dramatist or story-maker, Dr. Goldsmith is one of the best-loved figures of English letters, as Swift is one of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... only an incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, What is that real First ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... methods that suggest themselves to me. The first, which is rather crude though easy to carry out, consists in taking an actual cast of the end of the finger. A mould would be made by pressing the finger into some plastic material, such as fine modelling clay or hot sealing wax, and then, by pouring a warm solution of gelatine into the mould, and allowing it to cool and solidify, a cast would be produced which would ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind a fugitive, without the other's knowledge; Burke, ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... enough in Richard Edney to furnish materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the poem Philo ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... relatively small lunar gravitation to retain them, then the final catastrophe must have been as swift as it was inevitable. Accepting Darwin's hypothesis, that the moon was separated from the earth by tidal action while both were yet plastic or nebulous, we may reasonably conclude that it began its career with a good supply of both water and air, but did not possess sufficient mass to hold them permanently. Yet it may have retained them long enough for life to develop in many forms upon its surface; in fact, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... rage, which had hitherto been confined, burst into an uproar; and, having vented itself at first in opprobrious words, laughs, hisses, and gestures, betook itself at last to certain missile weapons; which, though from their plastic nature they threatened neither the loss of life or of limb, were however sufficiently dreadful to a well-dressed lady. Molly had too much spirit to bear this treatment tamely. Having therefore—but hold, as we are diffident of our own abilities, let us here invite ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the puzzle could be found, the answer to the question that was burning through his mind. Shells were made of steel and chemicals. The tools that made them were also made of steel. Not manganese. Not copper. Not electron relays, nor plastic, ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... groove suture proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being transfixed by ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... whom Ganganelli called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... was no resource left to me but to be born and follow, which I did as fast as possible; but that one false move could never be redeemed. I know there are shallow thinkers who love to prate of the supremacy of mind over matter,—who assert that circumstances are plastic as clay in the hands of the man who knows how to mould them. They clench their fists, and inflate their lungs, and quote Napoleon's proud boast,—"Circumstances! I make circumstances!" Vain babblers! Whither did this Napoleonic Idea lead? To a barren rock ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... and mosaics, and the Roman paintings, of which unfortunately very few specimens have come down to us, show that the further developments of this form were most manifold, and indeed they form in conjunction with the Roman achievements in plastic art the highest point that this form reached in its development, a point that the Renaissance, which followed hard upon it, did ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... position we have 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 ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... engaged in putting on the last coat of plaster to the walls of the abode of the Corn people, when Okoya suddenly came upon them. At a glance they saw that he had been on a hunt, and also that he had hunted in vain. Here was a welcome opportunity for jeering and mockery. They interrupted their plastic labour, and turned against him with such merciless allusions to his ill-success, that unable any longer to reply to their sarcasm Okoya threatened them, in jest of course, with his bow. Instead of desisting, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... screamed to a stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions bathed by the Spree as ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... fourth, in union with one of the others, is also a gas. In various combinations they form literally the dust of the earth, they make rock and water, vapor and air. In the hand of the Almighty, they are so many plastic elements, that form now a plant of the lowliest condition, now a magnificent oak, now a fish, and now a man. And the germ of each organized being bequeathes to its offspring the power to reproduce its likeness,—so that each succeeding generation is a repetition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... tale is to rob human beings of their childhood, that transition period in which breadth and richness are given to human life so that it may be full and plastic enough to permit the creation of those exacting efficiencies which increasing knowledge and responsibility compel. We cannot omit the adventures of fairyland from our educational program. They are too well adapted to the restless, active, and unrestrained ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... shelter to "Lay the book down, dear, and come to tea." For, to speak in better words than my own, "It is the books we read before middle life that do most to mould our characters and influence our lives; and this not only because our natures are then plastic and our opinions flexible, but also because, to produce lasting impression, it is necessary to give a great author time and meditation. The books that are with us in the leisure of youth, that we love for a time not only with the enthusiasm, but with something of the exclusiveness, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... 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 ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... 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 ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler |
