"Plasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... several arts, we have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer avails. The daughters know the far better time they ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... the conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, and for the same reason. All birds and mammals which take ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... easiest born before the mother is twenty-five years of age, and that from that time on a first child is born with rapidly increasing difficulty. The pelvis, like all the bony-joint structures of the body, loses plasticity with years, and plasticity is the prime need for childbearing. Similarly with the uterus, which is of course a muscular organ, but possesses an elastic force that diminishes as the woman ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... done with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits, to be a mode of life like another—certainly better than some, and particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he had really come for—this inward ache was not wholly dispelled ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... presents the beginning of what I propose to call plasticity curves. When these three curves are completed on the basis of experiments with five dancers of each sex for each of the ages indicated on the base line of the figure, they will indicate what general changes ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... a fresh difficulty. The Japanese face is exceedingly expressive. When a native of the Island Empire smiles or scowls, exhibits surprise or fear, he apparently does these things with his whole soul. Such facial plasticity provides far more effective concealment of real emotions than the phlegmatic indifference of the Briton, who, in the words of Emerson, requires "pitchforks or the cry ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... enjoyment, was never wholly absent during the darkest periods of the Middle Ages. This inspiration uttered itself in Latin; for we have little reason to believe that the modern languages had yet attained plasticity enough for the expression of that specific note which belongs to the Renaissance—the note of humanity conscious of its Graeco-Roman pagan past. This Latin, meanwhile, which it employed was fabricated by the Church and used ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... MM. de Beaumont, Fournet, and Durocher. They refer to M. Gaudin's experiments on the fusion of quartz, which show that silex, as it cools, has the property of remaining in a viscous state, whereas alumina never does. This "gelatinous flint" is supposed to retain a considerable degree of plasticity long after the granitic mixture has acquired a low temperature. Occasionally we find the quartz and feldspar mutually imprinting their forms on each other, affording evidence of the simultaneous crystallisation of both. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... far-reaching in its implications than that special group of generalizations which states the biological function of a prolonged infancy in man. Interpreting this period, of helplessness and dependence as one of plasticity and opportunity, it has shown that the greater power of man in adjusting himself to the complex conditions of life is due to his educability, which in turn is the outcome of his lengthened childhood. This "doctrine ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comic whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that she's really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she's a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... does not trust itself to form, that his sister is "quicker unto good" from the hallowed symbol through which she receives a divine truth. Many who flatter themselves that they have outgrown the need of a human embodiment of the Father's love have only induced a plasticity of mind which prevents the life from taking shape in any positive affirmation. "It is a strong help to me," writes a Congregational minister, "to find a man, standing on the extreme verge of liberal theology, holding so firmly, so tenaciously, to the one true religion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the differences in the skeletons which I have observed. It is impossible not to be struck with the high degree of variability or plasticity of many of the bones. We see how erroneous the often-repeated statement is, that only the crests of the bones which give attachment to muscles vary in shape, and that only parts of slight importance {124} become modified ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... praise; for it is the very putting off a man's identity that establishes his weakness. All real force of character excludes dualism. Every eminent, every able man has a certain integrity in his nature that rejects this plasticity. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in a cistern would in a moment find the one open pipe among a dozen closed ones, and proceed to empty itself through that. If the wish be merely an indefinite one for his general good, the elemental essence in its wonderful plasticity will respond exactly to that less distinct idea also, and the creature formed will expend its force in the direction of whatever action for the man's advantage comes most readily to hand. Of course in all cases the amount of such force it ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen's failure to make his hold on her heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... at which she had asked Leonard Everard to meet her. It is true that as the time grew closer her nerve was less marked. And just before it she was a girl—and nothing more; with all girl's diffidence, a girl's self-distrust, a girl's abnegation, a girl's plasticity. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... was too much a man of iron for that. His soul had lost the plasticity of imagination. But he could not forget Breault's lips as they had seemed to grin up at him. There was a reason for it. On his last trip down, Breault had said to him, with that ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... early character was plasticity and fickleness. I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as gross ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... eighteenth-century essay or than Peele and Greene were for the acted drama. Perhaps it is a consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered to be characteristic of ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... be made sufficiently fluid to mix with the mineral aggregates that may be used in the road surface. Upon cooling, the bituminous materials return to the previous state and impart a certain amount of plasticity to the mixture, at the same time serving as a binding or cementing agent, which is sufficiently stable for many classes of ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg |
