"Potential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the next day, and again the next day after that, and delivered two lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction. He talked with an air of being extremely lucid about the "ether" and "tubes of force," and "gravitational potential," and things like that, and I sat in my other folding-chair and said, "Yes," "Go on," "I follow you," to keep him going. It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he ever suspected how much I did not understand him. There were moments when I doubted whether I was well ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... dead; for her ways and Peter's have been very strange! To this unmentionable Duke of Mecklenburg she has left one Daughter, a Princess Elizabeth-Catherine, who will be called Princess ANNE, one day: whose fortunes in the world may turn out to be tragical. Potential heiress of all the Russias, that little Elizabeth or Anne. Heiress by her wily aunt, Anne of Courland,—Anne with the swollen cheek, whom Moritz, capable of many things, and of being MARECHAL DE SAXE by and by, could not manage to fall in love with there; and ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... mind that controlled his own. Perhaps the physical state of his nerves made him less able to cope with the half-bullying, but thoroughly good-humoured imperiousness of Ferrers. Every day this stranger became more and more potential with Maltravers. Ferrers, who was an utter egotist, never asked his new friend to give him his confidence; he never cared three straws about other people's secrets, unless useful to some purpose of his own. But he talked with so much zest about ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hath, in his effect, a voice potential/As double as the duke's] [Warburton had given a source in Dioscorides and Theocritus for "double"] This note has been much censured by Mr. Upton, who denies, that the quotation is in Dioscorides, and disputes, not without reason, the interpretation ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... speak the clearest grandest word of guidance which he can utter intelligible to his creatures. For us, that word must simply be the gathering of all the expressions of his visible works into an infinite human face, lighted up by an infinite human soul behind it, namely, that potential essence of man, if I may use a word of my own, which was in the beginning with God. If God should thus hear the cry of the noblest of his creatures, for such are all they who do cry after him, and in very deed show them ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... race and nation. In proportion as man develops, he grows out of his narrow surroundings, both physical and mental and even moral; he enters a larger and larger world. The religious expressions of his nature in the local provincial and even national stages of his life cannot satisfy his larger potential life. Only the religion of humanity can do this. And this is the religion of Jesus. The white light of religion, no less than that of scientific truth, has no local or national coloring. Perfect truth is universal, eternal, unchangeable. Occidental or Oriental ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... venture to speak of these people from what I have seen, fully aware that plenty of more potential pens, held by persons who have lived longer among them, and penetrated their country to a greater extent than I shall ever be able to do, have given their ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... latter considered as art is wholly inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native, thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe, the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece of moral apparatus is therefore worthy ...
— Progress and History • Various
... whence America derives so vast a proportion of her actual and potential wealth, in the beds of coal which have been formed from the vegetation of that period, we find abundant evidence of the existence of terrestrial animals. They have been described, not only by European ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... ailerons, "We'll make it. Freddy isn't any heavier than you are, Max. Besides, this sailplane is a workhorse. I sacrificed gliding angle for weight carrying potential." ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of view of the present day. According to Descartes it is the sum of actual motions, which remains constant; according to Leibnitz, the sum of the active forces; while, according to the modern theory, it is the sum of the active and the latent or potential forces—a distinction, moreover, of which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Ezekiel instantly recognized Demorest. With his usual instincts he was naturally pleased to observe that he looked older and more careworn. The softer, sensuous climate had perhaps imparted a heaviness to his figure and a deliberation to his manner that was quite unlike his own potential energy. ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... of its hierarchical inferiority, matter is often presented as the second, or correlatum, and form as the first, or relatum. This difference in rank is so strongly marked, that these two correlations are likewise conceived in a different form—that of the potential and the actual. Matter is the potential, imperfect, roughly outlined element which is not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so. Form is the actual, the energy, the entelechy which actualises the potential ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little enough to do with the country. And the result is that the supreme songs of the twentieth century have remained unsung, to eat out the hearts of their potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... sitting down, he covered his eyes with one hand and strove to rouse himself from the odd, half-fainting sensation which possessed him. How glorious now was the music that poured like a torrent from the hidden organ-loft! How full of searching and potential proclamation!—the proclamation of an eternal, unguessed mystery, for which no merely human speech might ever find fit utterance! Some divine declaration of God's absolute omnipresence,— or of Heaven's sure nearness,—touched the heart of Felix Bonpre, as he sat like an enchanted dreamer ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... introduction; the poet is his own best interpreter; but it may be added, in anticipation of adventitious criticism of the limitations of these examples, that the capacity of the present volume and the absence abroad of some potential contributors account for the non-inclusion of certain writers who otherwise would ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... inaugurating the new state as its chief figure were not good. And by leaving the coalition abruptly before union was accomplished he had put himself entirely out of the running. In a group of able men which included several potential prime ministers Macdonald had advanced to the first place by reason of gifts precisely suited to the demands of the hour. Lord Monck's choice was therefore justified. Nor was the resolve to abolish the awkward and indefensible system of a dual ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... my mind the creatures gruesome and terrible which surrounded the Chinaman—the scorpions, the bacteria, the noxious things which were the weapons wherewith he visited death upon whomsoever opposed the establishment of a potential Yellow Empire. But no one of them could account for the imprints upon the dust ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... strange reminiscences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence—the fancy of the Platonists—the old heresy of Origen. It was in this mood that ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... satellite, its potential value, and what they expected to get out of it. Roger listened without comment. When Loring had finished, Shinny told him about the ship and its condition. When Shinny ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... was the lauded hero of stories of thrift and enterprise. Throughout his hard-working life he had been irresistibly impelled to action by an absolute genius of commerce, expressing itself at the outset by the exhibition of courage in mere exchange and barter. An alert power to perceive the potential value of things and the possible malleability of men and circumstances, had stood him in marvellous good stead. He had bought at low prices things which in the eyes of the less discerning were worthless, but, having obtained possession of such things, the less discerning ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent. He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had known him—intermittently—for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others. But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... hour drew near which I had set for my call on the first of the potential mothers assigned me by the Eugenic Staff, I re-read the rules for ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... conquests, and settlements of the Northmen in the north of Europe and the northern Atlantic were so detached from the knowledge of the south and came to a pause so early in time that notwithstanding their potential value they contributed practically nothing to the general geographical knowledge of Europe. Nor did Christian, Jewish, or Arabic accounts of Eastern lands written by travellers of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries become widely known or influential. [Footnote: ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I call POTENTIAL USE-VALUE; the latter, KINETIC USE-VALUE. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... man who told me these things was for several years an outlaw in the Southwest and a follower of the pursuit he so frankly describes. His description of the modus operandi should prove interesting, his counsel of value to the potential passenger in some future "hold-up," while his estimate of the pleasures of train robbing will hardly induce any one to adopt it as a profession. I give the story in almost exactly his own ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... atomic rays Omega made all do his bidding. For countless centuries man had mastered the atom, divided it, harnessed its electrons. Following the discoveries of the great French scientist, Becquerel, man had learned that the potential energy of all atoms—especially that of radium—is almost limitless. And as the disintegration of the atom carries an electrical discharge, man had learned to control this energy. Omega's machines, utilizing ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... phenomena manifest themselves. Though the developer of light, heat, and power, the battery itself is neither luminous, hot, nor magnetic. "To explain the effects of the sun, therefore, there is not the least reason to infer that it is itself luminous, or even warm. Potential action generated in a dark, cold body, may produce great heat and light, at a distance from the seat of activity; and what is thus wrought artificially in a small way may surely be done naturally in a tremendous fashion by the grand forces of ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... at all in the perfection "manifested" by God; they are all "centres," for God is a sphere, whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, but they have not developed consciousness which is as yet only potential in them. Like cuttings of willow which reproduce the mother-tree, these points, veritable portions of God, are capable of germinating, growing up, and becoming "I's," self-conscious beings, intelligent and endowed with ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the whole building. As I staggered to my feet, I saw the four pictures hanging against the wall swing outwardly from it on their cords, and my door swing back against the wall. At the same moment, acted upon by the same potential impulse, the door of the end room in the hall, opposite the stairs, also swung open. In that brief moment I had a glimpse of the interior of the room, of two figures, a man and a woman, the latter clinging to her companion in abject terror. It was only for an instant, for a second thrill ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning, when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North, and this, with the growing scarcity ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The heroic man,—and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential hero?—has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an age when ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... began to perceive the potential political power of women voters, he first declared, as a "private citizen," that suffrage was all right for the women of his home state, New Jersey, but that it was altogether wrong to ask him as President to assist in bringing it about for all the women of the nation. He also interested ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Ocelots to electromag liners, to bear them to the great event. Goodies by the thousand were stamped out to hawk to the faithful: Badges, banners, bumper stickers, wallet cards, purse-sized pix of Sowles, star-and-cross medallions and lapel pins.... The potential proceeds of the Rally alone ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... as a conclusion to this chapter, that a great, new, and potential industry is springing up in our midst, one which will prove to be equally if not more important and far-reaching than the British shipbuilding industry, and one which will employ thousands of skilled engineers and ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... Soviet officials did not realize the potential of the new craft was apparently correct," the President said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian radar. The disabled ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... meant to us?" some graceless Coalitionist promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply from Sir ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a story of that sort—well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... the right of the free States to agitate the question inhered in the principle of majority rule—the white population of the free States being almost double that of the slave States, "and the voice of this overwhelming majority should be potential." He repelled in strong language the wrongfulness of allowing the South to multiply the votes of those freemen by the master's right to count three for every five slaves, "because it is absurd and anti-republican to suffer property ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... pursued his search; yet somehow his attention now was given but languidly to potential means of exit which the faces of the cliffs might afford. Something seemed irresistibly to draw it to the ground. Ha! that was it. Again that horrid gleam of whitened bones. Another skeleton lay before him—and look, another, and another, at short distances apart. All ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... of lines for which there was no economic justification whatever. Trusting shareholders were induced to invest on the unfortunately wrong assumption that the government had assured itself of the need {171} and the potential profit of the line before endorsing it by a subsidy.[1] In the western provinces a parallel policy of aiding local lines was adopted in 1884, except that land instead of cash was offered, ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... definiteness of this understanding of what constitutes naval strength, Great Britain's navy until recently has remained a great potential force, becoming dynamic for only a few hours at Jutland, after which it returned to that mysterious northern base whence it seems to dominate the seas. Because of the potentiality of these hidden ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... mine, Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock, As at my feet the abyss is cloven then, With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire; That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock, My fearful powers retire, No longer strong, Reversing the shook ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, which I had totally forgotten. Suddenly I felt something like compassion lest the music might never sound from off the death-pale paper." In other words, Lohengrin, though finished in every detail, was merely potential music. To make it anything more, the aid of singers ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of distinct species as many now listed in scientific books, it only shows that our lists are sadly at fault, and that they are not all species that are called species. These experiments merely indicate that the parent form possesses more potential characters than it can give expression to in a single individual form, some of them being necessarily latent or hidden, and that when these latent ones show themselves they must do so at the expense of others which become latent or hidden in their turn. This vital elasticity, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... unions are very rich and powerful, and so able to defy the masters that many of the smaller manufacturers, unable to resist, "are removing their works to other countries where the workmen's organizations are not so potential." And in all other countries, according to the stage of their economic and political development, like figures obtain. And Europe, today, confesses that her greatest social problem is the labor problem, and that it is the one most closely engrossing ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... without interest for him. How stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but it wasn't—comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were principally ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... his position didn't appall him. Somehow, it had just the opposite effect. Perhaps it was because his strength had come back, and had brought with it the buoyancy that is natural to health. He could sense the vitality that surrounded him, poised, potential, waiting only the proper attitude on his part to become an active force. Something tremendous had happened to him, to make him feel like that. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... 1880, the stoker of the yacht Livadia, which was lying in the Thames, near London, was ordered to adjust one of the Jablochkoff candles. He accidently touched the terminals of the lamp, and instantly fell down dead. The difference of potential at the lamp terminals was only fifty volts, but it was admitted at the time that the wires must have been in contact with the iron plate upon which the stoker stood, and that alternating currents of higher voltages from the main source caused the death, because with fifty ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... knew his history look upon Mr. Koussevitzky's joyous, unrestrained gymnastics with tolerant eyes. They realize that, for years, he was forced to hide his fine figure and athletic prowess from thousands of potential admirers. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... will be but the elementary common sense of the situation for all the Allies to plan tariffs, exclusions, special laws against German shipping and shareholders and immigrants for so long a period as every German remains a potential servant of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... particles are used with different tenses. The subjunctive, having but one form, in a sentence where there are two verbs is used as the second verb.[92] So by the use of the auxiliary particles the verb can form the infinitive and potential mood. The Mpongwe verb carries four tenses,—present, past or historical, perfect past, and future. Upon the principle of alliteration the perfect past tense, representing an action as completed, is formed from the present tense by prefixing a, and by changing a-final into i: for example, t[)o]nda, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... open to the Camp Commandant, when it became likely that H.Q. would move, to go sick, to retire from business, or else, locking, his front- door, shutting his shutters, disconnecting his telephone and confining to their billets all potential bearers of urgent messages, to isolate himself from the throbbing world around him. Being a soldier himself, however, he was undone by his own innate lust for overcoming difficulties. He was seen hovering about, as good as asking for the instructions he most dreaded. And he got them, short and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... himself altogether a topping gentleman. He is now to be seen more frequently in the skittle-ground, clasping a half-gallon, instead of a quart of beer. He decides authoritatively upon foul and fair play, and his voice is potential on almost all matters in debate at the Two Jolly Sawyers, near Lambeth Walk, just at the top ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... in face of dangers which threaten both alike. Thus South Africa has an acute friction arising from the rubbing of one nationality on another. She has also her racial problems; the more closely they are examined the more do their potential dangers seem to grow. Boer and Briton may differ in speech, habit, and outlook, but both agree that there is an impassable frontier between them and the native races of Africa and Asia. They do not even camouflage the racial barricade which they have erected; they ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... which Le Jeune and his Jesuit brethren had as yet been unable to solve their doubts. Were the Indian sorcerers mere impostors, or were they in actual league with the Devil? That the fiends who possess this land of darkness make their power felt by action direct and potential upon the persons of its wretched inhabitants there is, argues Le Jeune, good reason to conclude; since it is a matter of grave notoriety, that the fiends who infest Brazil are accustomed cruelly to beat and otherwise ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... philosophers whom I have read admit that God's intellect is entirely actual, and not at all potential; as they also admit that God's intellect, and God's will, and God's essence are identical, it follows that, if God had had a different actual intellect and a different will, his essence would also have been different; and thus, as I concluded at first, if things had been brought into being ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... asserted as a fact, but as a command—James is ordered to make it a fact. These different uses and forms of the verb constitute the modification which we call Mode. The first verb is in the Indicative Mode; the second in the Potential Mode; the third in the Subjunctive Mode; the fourth in ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... would involve such prodigious and concentrated short term release of high temperature energy that it is necessary to consider a variety of potential environmental effects. ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... appeal to Catholics to save the papal government by the only possible remedy, and to rescue the Roman people from falling under what the author deemed a tyranny like that of the Convention. He had acquired his politics in the atmosphere of 1847, from the potential liberality of men like Radowitz, who declared that he would postpone every political or national interest to that of the Church, Capponi, the last Italian federalist, and Tocqueville, the minister who occupied Rome. His object was not ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... territorial equilibrium, and the old order of things it offered a facile means of acquiring new helpmates in the East by emancipating its various peoples in the name of right and justice. It held out to the capitalists who deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of that loss might be made good.[128] To the zealots of the League of Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the use ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... again, skirting the room in column of fours, preparatory to the march-past: but now the Lieutenant-Governor surveyed it from a new, and a dual point-of-view,—as a thousand individuals, that is, each a potential factor for immeasurable good in the coming rehabilitation of the state; and, then, as a vast fighting-machine perfect in every detail, resistless and awe-inspiring in its very integrity. He noted the faces as they passed—stern, intelligent faces, young, for the most part, and curiously refined, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... value of one unknown quantity in terms of the other. A child, for instance, is told that "potent" means "efficacious," that "power" means "ability," that "potion" means a "physical draught," that "potential" means "existing in possibility, not in act." These are definitions taken at random from a book in common use in our public schools. The definitions possibly are good enough for the purpose for which they were designed. I am not quarrelling ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... antiquated and mistaken idea of biography led the excellent as learned Bishop of Lincoln to abridge and mutilate so very many—the places not always marked. On this and the principle and motif which approve and vindicate the publication of the Letters of every really potential intellect such as WORDSWORTH'S, the accomplished daughter of SARA COLERIDGE has remarked: 'A book composed of epistolary extracts can never be a wholly satisfactory one, because its contents are not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens. Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable Sketches ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... name he gained. Were turbots then less common in the seas? No: but good living waxes by degrees. Safe was the turbot, safe the stork's young brood, Until a praetor taught us they were good. So now, should some potential voice proclaim That roasted cormorants are delicious game, The youth of Rome (there's nothing too absurd For their weak heads) will take him ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... look at you. Is your DX potential up where it should be? How long since you've had a thorough overhauling? Do they make you work in the mines with those ...
— The Love of Frank Nineteen • David Carpenter Knight
... wherever he stopped. None of the farms were producing more than a quarter of the potential yield per acre, and all depleting the soil outrageously. Ten slaves—he didn't bother to think of them as freedmen—doing the work of one, and a hundred of them taking all day to do what one robot would have done before noon. White-gowned chief-slaves lording it ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... relinquish his bride when the money agreement was made sufficiently potent. Sometimes, again, a man is sufficiently infatuated to marry a lady with a soiled or shady reputation, and if that circumstance becomes known to the Knight of Black-mail, it is morally certain that potential hush-money will be extorted. In point of fact every kind of "skeleton," social or criminal, if once its whereabouts be discovered and its individuality established, becomes a source of revenue to those unscrupulous pirates ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... potential ceremony, Ruth remained leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a potential someone," corrected Malcolm Sage, raising his eyes suddenly and fixing them full ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... the ordinary potential gradient we have two self-recording quadrant electrometers. The principle of this instrument is the same as that of the old Kelvin instrument; the clockwork attached to it unrolls a strip of paper wound on a roller; at intervals the needle of the instrument ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... useless persons to Paradise and thus cheering the lives of the friends they leave on earth. Assured of this, as we are, all inactivity is unbearable to us. At the present moment we are, so to say, unemployed philanthropists; we are but a potential and passive blessing to our fellow-creatures, though we burn to be doing good to all! I appeal to my friend, Count Gambardella, here. Is this not the ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... has received the sign manual of the sovereign of France, through His Imperial Majesty's principal Minister of State; it has been ratified by the Senate of this Republic; it has been sanctioned by Almighty God; and still we are told, in a voice potential, in the other wing of this capitol, that the arrogance of France,—nay, sir, not of France, but of her Chamber of Deputies—the insolence of the French Chambers, must be submitted to, and we must come down to the lower degradation ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... he is indispensable. We are a maritime power, ruling a maritime empire, our potential enemies being military nations. He has warned us that democracy cannot govern an empire. Perhaps our type of this creed is not so full of the lust for domination and aggrandisement as was that of Athens; it ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... riverine loafer about the Kew Waterfront, really a potential cheat, robber, and occasional murderer, looked upon the recent arrival at the "Green Dragon" as a prey specially destined by Providence for his necessities. He was never more completely mistaken. Kennedy McClure was, in the loafer's own language, "fly to the tricks of all wrong coves." Had ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... little adventure of a half dozen wagons which he was freighting out to Laramie—bacon, flour and sugar, for the most part; each wagon driven by a neighbor or a neighbor's son. Among these already arose open murmurs of discontent over the way their own contingent had been treated. Banion had to mend a potential split before the first wheel had ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... community of States, by the most potential voice of Law, says to the whole body of its laboring population, Ye are not men and shall not be; ye are chattels—it is absurd to speak about kind treatment—about happiness. It is about cattle that they are talking! Our vast body of laboring men do not yet feel the force of such ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... which Hamilton is not discussing; but he hardly ever attempts to trace the history of Hamilton's own view, or the train of thought by which it suggested itself to his mind. And the result of this is, that Mr. Mill's interpretations are generally in the potential mood. He wastes a good deal of conjecture in discovering what Hamilton might have meant, when a little attention in the right quarter would have shown what ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... significant, because the most Oriental, fact of the episode was that the appeal to remorse had been made through the criminal's sense of fatherhood,—that potential love of children which is so large a part of the soul of ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... in brief, and only up to the present, is the story of how the Jewish massacres were stayed. The Jews were potential Germans, and Germany, who sat by with folded hands when Arabs and Armenians were led to torture and death, put up a warning finger, and, for the present, saved them. In her whole conduct of the war, nothing has been more characteristic ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... just as the Party paid your fine. It needs you and must have you; and were the cost ten times as great, would bear it to get you back! Remember, Gabriel, the Party is far larger than when you were buried alive in a cell. Even though in some ways outlawed and suppressed, its potential power is tremendous. All it needs is the electric spark to cause the world-shaking explosion. All that keeps us from power now is the Iron Heel—that, and the clutch of the Air Trust ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... The threat to bar the Harley doors to Richard had set him agog with angry apprehensions. What! should his best agent of politics, one who was at once the correspondent of that powerful influence the Daily Tory and the authorized mouthpiece of the potential Mr. Gwynn who owned the Anaconda, nay, was the Anaconda, be insulted, and arrayed against him? And for what? Because of the baby heart of a girl scarce grown! Was a White House to be lost by such tawdry argument? Forbidding ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... sinful. Further, there are qualities which need careful cultivation and stimulus to bring them into due proportion. We each of us receive, as it were, an undeveloped self, and have entrusted to us potential germs which come to nothing, or shoot up with a luxuriance that stifles unless we exercise a controlling power. Besides all this, we all carry in us tendencies which are positively, and only, sinful. There would be no temptation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you make," said Daniel, with the chilly dignity that was characteristic of him in such circumstances and that never failed to have a sobering effect on his potential antagonist. "I have nothing to fear. I should like to live in peace with the father of my wife, and for this reason I have come ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... my little hand through his arm and carried me off to a lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful relief to be out of the noise and the glare—and alone with Gordon. But instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the evening reacted suddenly ...
— Different Girls • Various
... United States should assert or even insinuate these things during the great War for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent to heights undreamed of—is amazing now: what will ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... been largely associated, in mind and person, with all the acts and progress, professional and political, of my life. I feel his loss intensely; and I feel it with more regret, because I know that on this occasion his voice would have been potential in our counsels, and would have been united with all of us who labor most earnestly for the preservation of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... a Class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You're calling the shots, God help you! First, we want to know if they have the Delphinus ... and if so, where it is. Next, we want to know just how warlike these goons are. Can we control them if they're bloodthirsty. What's their potential?" ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... remains is the life of action of a reasonable being. Now of reason as it is in man there are two parts, one obeying, one possessing and considering. And there are also two aspects in which the active or moral life may be taken, one potential, one actual. Clearly for our definition of the chief good we must take the moral life in its full actual realisation, since this is superior to ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... total of more than fifty million dollars' worth of potential aerial mail business that is simply waiting for the establishment of aerial mail routes which can easily be established within the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... of editorial writing did the two have, as the days went. The Colonel, mystified but pleased by revelations of actuality and life in his heretofore too-embalmed assistant, found an increasing interest in developing him. Here was a youth, with the qualities of potential great valuableness, and the wise editor, as soon as this appeared, gave him his chance by calling him off the fields of taxation and currency and assigning him to topics plucked ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... for the church. On the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas themselves. The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak—idle without looking empty. It was ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... so has she. His rights in this matter are very clear and very potential. I am quite ready to admit that we cannot marry for many years to come, unless he will provide the money. You are quite at liberty to tell him that I say so. I have no right to ask your father for a penny, and I will never do so. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... assertion does not deliver us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever element of mystery may enter into ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... race to achieve material prosperity at the expense of its morality. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every human desire, the race exhausts its vitality in a surfeitment of caprice. The animal instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... whom he had a seat at table. But their acquaintance sufficed to establish his position. Before dinner-time he knew half a hundred; in the evening his introductions had run up into the hundreds, and he felt that he had potential friends in every Southern city; and before the week was over there was not one of the thousand guests he did not know or might not know. At his table he heard Irene spoken of and her beauty commented on. Two or three days had been enough to give her a reputation in a society that is exceedingly sensitive ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... immediately performed my promise. I had always intended that not only the young lady, but her father, should know what we thought of Patrick, and what he might have been, if he had lived. I wrote to that potential personage, telling him of all the facts of the case, except the poverty, which might be omitted as essentially a slight and temporary circumstance. I reported of his life of industry and simple self-denial,—of his prospects, his friendships, his sweet and gay decline and departure, and his honorable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... traitors, actual and potential. It must have been brought into use only after the cult had fallen upon evil days, and then only when the Chief himself was in danger. Beating to death, hanging, and poison were the usual ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... support, and gaining in efficiency, in many cases, they are able to return to a more important part in production. Let us see what this means. While these men are out of work, they are not producing anything. They are idle, and thus a loss to the community. In addition, they are fast losing any potential ability for production, which they have had. But they now become producers, a gain to the community, and their potential ability for production is at least conserved if not increased. Secondly, out-of-work men are a burden on the community. While they continue to live without employment, ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... bird's place. It is the rule of a sitting bird to sit tight, not to be scared off by trifles, and to take great risks rather than expose her eggs to cold and destruction. The ascent and approach of the serpent is absolutely noiseless. Not a leaf is stirred. The potential mother of a brood calmly sits with eyes half closed, at peace with all the world. Suddenly, and with a horrible shock, she discovers a deadly serpent's multi-fanged head and glittering eyes staring at her within ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... eighteen years of age. He became one of the leaders of the Roman Catholic emancipation movement, being second to O'Connell only as a leader of party and an orator; his eloquence, however, was more refined than that of his more potential colleague. His speeches were dramatic, rhetorical, and effective. Their moral tone was offensive, vituperative, and vindictive. He was very small of stature, ungainly and unprepossessing in appearance, and had a strange squeaking voice; but in spite of these and other defects he was, next ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... had been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek, certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... to regard this quality in our existence as a somewhat superhuman term, an abstraction beyond the realm of common life, or at most an asset within the reach of a favored few; whereas it is a common attribute playing a potential part in our every-day activities. In its very nature opportunity is democratic and goes, like a wayfarer, knocking at the gates ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual, for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of handing about the curate's assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, and that she had got it at the Stores in ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, "keen on girls," as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... along the Dalmatian coast which would answer the needs of Jugoslavia as well, or almost as well, as Fiume. Now, I am speaking from first-hand knowledge when I assert that this is not so, for I have seen with my own eyes every harbor, or potential harbor, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic from Istria to Greece. As a matter of fact, the entire coast of Dalmatia would not make up to the Jugoslavs for the loss of Fiume. The map gives no idea of the city's importance as the southernmost ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... these formed along its shores to be the sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all so clear as these untried wooden bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the wood in hope to get a glimpse of the speakers, for I felt sure that this was an affair of gravity in which ordinary scruples ought not to count. It seemed to me that the woman was in peril; at any rate the man had not disavowed a willingness to murder. When a man is enacting the role of potential assassin he has not the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the growth rate of the population. Growth has been held back by antigovernment strikes and demonstrations, a decline in world coffee demand, and the erratic commitment of the government to economic reform. Formidable obstacles stand in the way of Madagascar's realizing its considerable growth potential; the extent of government reforms, outside financial aid, and foreign investment will be key determinants. Growth should be in the 5% ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... subject. His apprehensions centered almost entirely upon his father. His affection for his father he had always taken for granted. It was not an emotion to exclaim over. Now that he realized, for the first time, his potential power to hurt his father, to bow that gray head in grief and shame and humiliation, he was vouchsafed a clearer, all-comprehending vision of that father's love, of his goodness, his manliness, his honor, his gentleness, and his fierce, high pride; to Donald simultaneously ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... had never yet arrested a real spy, saw potential spies everywhere, and as he was fond of the company of the great, he always made his suspicions a pretext for going to see General Bramble or Colonel Parker. One day he remained closeted for an hour with the colonel, who summoned Aurelle as soon ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... investing his model with a code of spirituality, inspired with fire, which epicureanly endows fleeting emotion with a voice, and vitality lends also to distant-reaching invisible ends: hinting that the picturesque alchemy of music is potential too in reaching and touching the lower chords of animal passion, where movement is rapid and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever to animal instincts without measure in extolling ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against the Germans. But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us. We talked with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper. He received us beneath the portico of the Theatre Royale, built after ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe. The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious distinction—of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it—is that the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and no small volume of it in the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front immediately. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and animal vitality. Oh, yes; it's clear the Sicilians can lower their standard to any extent. But they can never raise it. They are the cancer of Tunisia. Wherever they go, they bring their filth, their mafia, roguery and corruption. Every Sicilian is a potential Arab, the difference between them being merely external; the true African variety wears less clothes and keeps his house cleaner. I know them! A race of sinister buffoons and cut-throats, incapable of any ennobling ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... of fire, strength, and action. These attributes seemed to cling about him. There was something vital and compelling in his presence. Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit. In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired. The life in him was marvelously significant. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... quest After the divine! Striving ever for some goal Past the blunder-god's control! Dreaming of potential years When no day shall dawn in fears! That's the Marna of ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... neither motion nor power of motion. But the same body suspended at a height above the earth has a power of motion, though it may not have exercised it. Energy is possible to such a body, and we agree to call this potential energy. It consists of our old tensions. We, moreover, speak of the conservation of energy, instead of the conservation of force; and say that the sum of the potential and dynamic energies of the material universe is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... without question the orders of the princes and chiefs by whom the blessed enterprise is directed. That indisposition should seclude, I trust for but a short time, your highness from their councils, in which you hold so potential a voice, I must lament with all Christendom; but, as a soldier, I must obey those on whom the lawful right of command devolves, or set but an evil example ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... accordingly our miss-information [A] on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied upon. Under these painful circumstances, and with the chance of still further abstractions from our common stock of potential learning, we have engaged a staff of consulting engineers, who contract, for certain considerations, to know every useless thing from A to Z, and every obsolete one from Omega to Alpha. In these gentlemen we repose unlimited confidence in proportion to their salaries; for a considerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... at any event-particle E can be expressed in terms of two functions which I call the potential and the 'associate-potential' at E. The potential is practically what is meant by the ordinary gravitation potential, when we express ourselves in terms of the Euclidean space in reference to which the attracting mass is at rest. The associate-potential is defined by the modification of ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... century after century, millions of men have gone forth in the light of the all-beholding and life-giving sun to cast into the bosom of the earth the sustenance of their children! It is a sublime act of faith, and this sacrifice of a present for a future good, an actual for a potential blessing, is no less beautiful and holy because familiar and old. The Divine Master himself could not contemplate it without emotion and was inspired by it to the utterance of ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... advantage in the first signals sent is, however, obtained by the use of Messrs. Sieman's and Halske's submarine key, by which the cable is put to earth immediately on signalling being interrupted, and the wire thus kept at a potential half-way between the potentials of the poles of two counter-acting batteries employed, and the first signals become legible, which, with the ordinary key, would be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... degradation. He might be fairly compared with some of those antique Italian nobles whom the painters have preserved to us with their courage, their unscrupulousness, their refinement of lust and cruelty—the voluptuary actual with the fiend potential. He was certainly handsome, with that dark, aquiline, commanding beauty which women so generally recognise as dominant. With men he was distant and cold; but such a bearing never deters womankind. The inscrutable laws of ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... and had a body of Teutons been before the factory, or even inside it, many of them would have been accounted for, since there were several holes in the wall through which Ned's bullets sped, carrying potential ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... left a silence between them that was vividly accentuated by the manifold voices of the laboring vessel. For in the swift meeting of eyes, John Pearse and Venner, host and guest, friends to that moment, saw in each other an established rival, a potential foe. Involuntarily they drew apart; and when Dolores returned from the deck she found them spread out like star rays, having nothing in common except a ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... pioneer men and women there gathered for safety; no hostile demonstration was ever staged near Fort Snelling. Its history was not made by the rifles and sabers of the soldiers; the axe and the plow of the pioneer who worked in safety beneath its potential protection have left their history upon the landscape ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... they now promulgated was, not any arbitrary or hasty deliverance, but the very "mind of the Spirit" either expressly communicated in the Word, or deduced from it by good and necessary inference. In this way they aimed to reach the conscience, and they knew that they thus furnished the most potential argument ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... proper place, To proper placemen, every Russ credential; And was received with all the due grimace By those who govern in the mood potential, Who, seeing a handsome stripling with smooth face, Thought (what in state affairs is most essential) That they as easily might do the youngster, As hawks may pounce upon ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... freely offered for use in fruit growing magazines and state horticultural society publications to supplement the columns of our official organ to spread the information regarding our activities, thus reaching a wider circle of potential members. We are glad to report some membership ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... the most advanced product of it. It is a great maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature. Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and he can make whatever particular applications ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... dealt with is that magical one when South Africa unnoted and obscure was startled from the simplicity of her bucolic life by the discovery of gold and diamonds. This was, of course, some years before the fountains of her boundless potential wealth had become fully unsealed. I was one of that band of light-hearted, haphazard pioneers who, rejoicing in youthful energy and careless of their own interests, unwittingly laid the foundation upon which so many great fortunes have ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... wishes he knew which,—he remains an enigma. There is not one of the array of elders of either political persuasion who, while laughing at his satirical sword-play, does not watch him covertly out of the corner of the eye, trembling at the potential ruin they consider him capable ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... to his origin in the sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... She was a beautiful woman, childless, and much praised for her interest in church works. She was rich and enjoyed the peculiar distinction of wearing very fashionable gowns even to church. Upon this occasion something reserved, potential and authoritative in her manner made me nervous. I had a premonition that she was after somebody's dearest idol. And I was not left long in suspense as to whose ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... imaginary lines of the parochial unit or the boundaries of jurisdiction. They will not be met with rightly and successfully, if the Church as a unit does not agree on a uniform plan of action. For, to prevent a deplorable waste of potential powers, of misdirected energies and of overlapping work, to forward the great cause of the Church and realize its Catholic aspirations, to present a united front to common dangers, the union and co-operation of all the parishes and all the dioceses ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... colourless in the circle of a sea and sky widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth, just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing sunshine, very harsh ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... answer was a foregone conclusion. Its exact purport we do not know yet, but it amounted to a flat refusal, as most of us had foreseen, and was accompanied by alternative proposals which placed Joubert in the position of a potential conqueror—dictating terms, and our acceptance of these cannot be read by the Boers in any other light than as an admission of weakness or pusillanimity. Of course we know that it means nothing of the kind, but simply that Sir George White would not expose sick and ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... scheme has all been carried out. What was a watery desolation has been converted into a potential paradise. Faust is a great feudal lord, with a boundless domain and a fleet of ships that bring him the riches of far-away lands. But thus far he has simply been amusing himself on a grand scale. He has thought always mainly of himself. He has courted experience, among other things ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in the open court, lie down on them, crack jokes, and make faces at the audience. A specially gifted member of the fraternity hurries down a beam with a baby in his clutches, which he has powdered with ashes. He dances about with it, and exhibits the squalling brat in every attitude as a potential Koshare. The people scream and shout with unmixed pleasure. Now they point at a pair of monsters, one stamping and the other tripping daintily, who effectually mimic the late partners of the dance in the most heartless manner. Another of these hideous creatures is sitting down, his head covered ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... roll, on their silent but potential course," said the Earl, looking around him, "without a voice which speaks to our ear, but not without influences which affect, at every change, the indwellers of this vile, earthly planet. This, if astrologers fable not, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institution could become, what it has become, shows what was the intent of Nature ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... grim, withered features grew softer, purer, grander; and rose ennobled, for a moment, to their long-lost might-have-been, to that personal ideal which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines, dim and potential, in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Sorceress she was, pander and slave-dealer, steeped to the lips in falsehood, ferocity, and avarice; ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... awaiting the generous contributions of knowledge to be made by the teacher. College examinations usually test for multiplicity of facts acquired, rather than for power developed. College teaching usually does not perceive that the mind is a reacting machine containing a vast amount of pent-up potential energy which is ready to react upon any presentation; that development takes place only as this self-activity expresses itself; that education is evolutionary rather than involutionary. Teaching is, therefore, a process of arousing, sustaining, and directing the self-activity of pupils. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... whole before committing any part of it to paper, balancing and reshaping until it fully satisfied his sense of unity and rhythm. Something of formality and ponderousness quickly becomes evident in his style, together with a rather mannered use of potential instead of direct indicative verb forms; how his style compares with Johnson's and how far it should be called pseudo-classical, are interesting questions to consider. One appreciative description of it may be quoted: 'The language of Gibbon ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Root, this Kesava who is eternal (compared with all other existent things), changes at the end of each Kalpa. He, however, who lies at the Root and who is endued with supreme might and puissance, lies in the waters when universal destruction comes (in the form of the potential Seed of all things). Kesava is that Creator of pure Soul who courseth through all the eternal worlds.[1386] Infinite and Eternal as He is, He fills all space (with emanations from Himself) and courseth through the universe (in the form of everything that constitutes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... in displacing the shattered masses. The proportion of useful work obtainable has been variously estimated at from 14 to 33 per cent. of the theoretical maximum potential." ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... jolly old upper Middle Classes." Had he been told about her ancestry he would, I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... rescue. I hurriedly stepped back, and the German, in following me, rode near a large stone by the roadside. He had, doubtless, passed the stone many times in his travels up and down the road, but the thought probably had never occurred to him that it would be the cause of his death. The most potential facts in our lives are usually too ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... speak harshly to the potential cinch binder, telling him to get over there! He does not; so I let it pass. After all, he is only a horse. Why should I terrorize him? I bridle him with a manner far from harsh. He doesn't like the taste of the bit—not seasoned right, or something. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... thing I have to whisper in your faithful ear. Our fat friend being desirous to honour Literature in my unworthy person, has intimated to me, by his organ the Doctor, that, with consent ample and unanimous of all the potential voices of all his ministers, each more happy than another of course on so joyful an occasion, he proposes to dub me Baronet. It would be easy saying a parcel of fine things about my contempt of rank, and so forth; but although I would not have gone ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... adds to his representation of the visible world some new attribute or quality born of his own spirit Primitive artisan, craftsman, painter, each creates in that he reveals and makes actual some part, which before was but potential, of the ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... something of those interesting ultimates—be qualified to speak ex cathedra—for a doctor of divinity recently denounced me as a child of the devil. In that case you behold in me a prince imperial, heir-apparent to the throne of Pluto, the potential master of more than a moiety of mankind. But don't tell anybody that I've got a title, that I belong to the oldest nobility, or all the Goulderbilts will be trying ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... from sexual love, but there can be no such love without jealousy, potential at any rate, for in the absence of provocation it need never manifest itself. Of all the ingredients of love it is the most savage and selfish, as commonly witnessed, and we should therefore expect it to be present ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the veriest scoundrel, and yet the words came out as smoothly as I have written them, as if to show me that I had been a potential scoundrel ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... nor the potential danger of the situation was sufficient to prevent Jerry and Slim from taking a full eight hours of much-needed sleep, while Lieutenant Mackinson, Joe and three other officers whom the captain had taken into his confidence in the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... on inexorably, "there are potential freeman and potential slaves. The latter invariably outnumber the former. They're cowards: the timid, the unsacrificing—the ones that want peace at any price—the ones who will trade freedom for security. Those were the ones who ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... on. "We have Mr. Rand's word for it that the prisoner had no thought of the watchman, and no intention of using, even in case of need, the weapons with which it has been proved he was provided. Mr. Rand must know. As a rule, gentlemen bearing arms about their persons may be considered the potential users of said arms, whether the antiquated rapier or the modern pistol—but then, I bethink me, we are not speaking of men of honour. We are speaking of a small criminal in a small way, and Mr. Rand assures us that his thoughts ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... rate her young men are always confiding their woes to me. My status as a potential grandmother makes me a suitable repository for ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... be practical confiscation to compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd suffer in potential profits. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al. |
