"Potency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness, are rather of the pony species than what would ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... do it fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... you have not exhausted the wealth of Christianity; For to the potency of the Christian idea is added the magic of an incomparable embodiment in human life. The story of Jesus bears the idea which it enshrines eternally through the world. It is to the idea as the vessel ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vapors rise. Even, it seemed to me, I could note a faint, clear odor of innocent potency. I saw the table laid, not with gleam of snow and silver, but with plain vessels which, nevertheless, seemed now to have a radiance of their own. I knew all this. It was as though there actually lay at hand these pleasant scenes, ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... Pornic;' 'Dis Aliter Visum;' 'Abt Vogler,' the most notable production of its kind in the language; 'A Death in the Desert,' that singular and impressive study; 'Caliban upon Setebos,' in its strange potency of interest and stranger poetic note, absolutely unique; 'Youth and Art;' 'Apparent Failure;' 'Prospice,' that noble lyrical defiance of death; and the supremely lofty and significant series of weighty stanzas, 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' the most ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... been lauded and hymned by Longfellow and others as the hunter par excellence; but, to apply this to his present condition, and look there for its truth, would be idle. The incitements to indulge his taste for hunting are now so few, and of such slight potency, and the opportunities for giving it play so narrowed down, and so rare, that the pursuit of the chase has become well-nigh obsolete, and something to him redolent only, as it were, with the breath of the past. As the Indian is at present circumstanced and environed, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... correctly, of congratulation. It was as follows:— "MADAME LA COMTESSE,—Fame, with her hundred tongues, has announced to, me in my retreat the fall of M. de Choiseul and your triumph. This piece of news has not occasioned me much surprise, I always believed in the potency of beauty to carry all before it; but, shall I confess it? I scarcely know whether I ought to congratulate myself on the success you have obtained over your enemies. M, de Choiseul was one of my kindest ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the Tiber—were not yet the princes of high finance. As yet they were chiefly the hucksters and petty traders, notorious for their strange habits and for the fanaticism of their religion, which nevertheless exercised a strange potency and made many proselytes even in high places, especially among the women. Poppaea, the wife of Nero himself, is commonly considered to have been such a proselyte, although the strange notion that she herself ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of trouble might have been saved had Rita permitted him to make the settlement with Sukey, but she did not. The infinite potency of little things is one of ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... be easy to give striking instances of the potency and stretch of this remarkable woman's influence amongst the native people, an influence—strange as it may sound to those who deem any half-educated, under-bred white woman competent to take charge of an Indian school—due as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... she takes us in her arms, and sings to her tired child the soft, low lullaby of childhood's happy days.—Oh, Music, Music! Art Divine! Thou dost move and stir the heart as nothing else can do! Yet never canst thy sweet potency be better used than when it inspires praise and gratitude to the great Lord ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... a practical people. They have a living faith in the potency of the Horse-Guards, and in the maxim that "Safe bind is sure find." They have a sincere affection for roast beef. They are quite sure "the mob" will do no harm if it is vigilantly watched and thoroughly overawed. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... from him, amid clouds of Latakia, of wars and rumours of wars, distress of nations, and perplexity, seen by the light, not of the Gospel, but of the stock-exchange; while the storm fell without in lightning, hail, rain, of right Rhenish potency. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Satan in this sensuous syndicate of soul and body-destroying drugs is opium, and next in order of hellish potency come ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... that Redmond could only justify to Ireland the part which he was taking if he won, and that he and not they must be the judge of what Ireland would consider a defeat. In all probability, also, they overrated his power and that of the party which he led. They did not guess at the potency of new forces which only in these months began to make themselves felt, and which in the end, breaking loose from Redmond's control, undid his work. A new phase in Irish history had begun, of which Sir Edward Carson ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... abominable episode, a piece of bad faith on the part of fate. I ought to have been exempt from these sordid haps, but the man's hot leathery hand on my throat was like a foretaste of the other collar. And I was horribly afraid—horribly—of the sort of mysterious potency of the laws that these men represented, and I could think of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... others of Phoebus, to whom once of old, smitten with sharp desire, Apollo gladly offered his own arts and gifts, augury and the lyre and swift arrows: he, to lengthen out the destiny of a parent given over to die, chose rather to know the potency of herbs and the practice of healing, and deal in a silent art unrenowned. Aeneas stood chafing bitterly, propped on his vast spear, mourning [399-435]Iuelus and a great crowd of men around, unstirred by their tears. The aged man, with garment drawn back and girt about him in Paeonian fashion, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... of revelation, the point at which we see deepest into the truth of God, and come most completely under its power. For those who recognise it at all it is Christianity in brief; it concentrates in itself, as in a germ of infinite potency, all that the wisdom, power and love of God mean ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... Yet with amazing self-assurance President Jefferson believed that he held in his hand a master-key which would unlock all doors that had been shut to the commerce of neutrals. He called this master-key "peaceable coercion," and he explained its magic potency ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... encourage their men to excel their record of previous years. The inquiry developed, however, that a few are unwilling to employ competition even in this mild form as a means to increased efficiency. Most of the firms made conscious use of this principle and were convinced of its potency. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... animals, partly upon slaves, and partly on myself. Suffice it that their result was to furnish me with a substance which, when injected into the blood, would endow the body with strength to resist the effects of time, of violence, or of disease. It would not indeed confer immortality, but its potency would endure for many thousands of years. I used it upon a cat, and afterwards drugged the creature with the most deadly poisons. That cat is alive in Lower Egypt at the present moment. There was nothing of mystery or magic in the matter. It was simply a chemical discovery, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... foreign tyranny. Its influence in Germany as a classic of political freedom—during the Napoleonic era and later, when it was a question of setting a limit to domestic absolutism—has been immense. And there is really no danger of its losing its potency; for it appeals to a sentiment which, while it may wax and wane with the movements of the Zeitgeist, is now wrought into the heart-fiber of all the occidental nations, and not least of all—contrary to an opinion widely accepted in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Nothing of less potency than the presumption attendant on self- satisfaction could have emboldened him to call thus early, and that in the hope not merely of finding Mrs. Redmain at home, but of finding her alone; and, with the not unusual reward of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... consciousness in anything more than its history. It may have been similar to, or even identical with, physical manifestations of life, but it is not so now. Eucken admits entirely this fact of the history of mind; but the meaning of mind is to be discovered not so much in its Whence as in its present potency and its Whither.[1] A philosophy of science is bound to recognise this difference, or else all its constructions can represent no more than a torso. Physical impressions enter into consciousness, [p.21] and doubtless in important ways condition it, but they are not physical ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... and equanimity of temper secured to him a greater share of esteem and affection than was perhaps ever possessed by any other minister. Yet his estimable qualities and his political skill had not sufficient potency to disarm opposition. In the very outset of his administration, indeed, the opposition made him feel that he had not taken possession of a bed of roses; or, at least, roses without thorns. The principal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... for plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the mother"—since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of peculiar potency—who tries to exert a good influence on public opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the civilized ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... The peasantry, ez the train approached, rent the air with shouts uv "Grant!" "Grant!" His Potency, the President, promptly acknowledged the compliment. He was sacrificin hisself for them—who hed made greater sacrifices? He hed bin Alderman uv his native town, and Vice-President; he wuz too modest to make ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... is uttered,—but a deep And solemn harmony pervades The hollow vale from steep to steep, And penetrates the glades. Far distant images draw nigh, Called forth by wondrous potency Of beamy radiance, that imbues Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues! In vision exquisitely clear, Herds range along the mountain-side; And glistening antlers are descried; And gilded flocks appear. Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! But long as god-like wish, or hope divine, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... proceeding, to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, we have a proof of the wisdom of the Author of Revelation. He foresaw that the rite of "the laying on of hands" would be sadly abused; that it would be represented as possessing something like a magic potency; and that it would be at length converted, by a small class of ministers, into an ecclesiastical monopoly. He has, therefore, supplied us with an antidote against delusion by permitting us, in this simple narrative, to scan its exact import. And what was the virtue of the ordination here described? ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... eyes and the face of a ne'er-do-well had caught my attention. The day had been a hot, languorous Sunday on which all things had seemed to be exhibiting their better side, and telling the sun that it was not in vain that he was pouring out his brilliant potency, and diffusing his living gold; while the man of whom I speak had, dressed in a new suit of blue serge, a new cap cocked awry, and a pair of brilliantly polished boots, been standing at the edge of the wharf, and gazing at the brown waters of the Kama, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the charge of his gun, cutting the size of the path the volts covered, thereby increasing the potency of the discharge. The piled bodies sizzled, and to Asher's nose came a sulphurous smell. Then, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... can't, Aunt Rose, you can't.' Her distress and a kind of envy gave her courage. 'He isn't good enough. He played with you and then with me and you said there was some one else.' The figure by the mantelpiece was so still that Henrietta became convinced of the potency of her own words, and she went on: 'You know everything about him and you can't marry him. How can you ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... observation. We have here no problem which can be solved by mere mathematical meditation. Mathematics is no doubt a useful, indeed, an indispensable, instrument in the enquiry; but we must not attribute to mathematics a potency which it does not possess. In a case of this kind, all that mathematics can do is to interpret the results obtained by observation. The data from which Newton proceeded were the observed phenomena in the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... recommended by the guidebook had been closed for years, he said. I, who had not found the guide-book infallible, believed him, until he landed us at one which looked well enough, but whose chief furnishing was smells of such potency that I fled, handkerchief clapped to nose, while the limp waiter, with his jaw bound up like a figure from a German picture-book, called after me that "perhaps the drains were a little out of order." Thrifty Vanka, in hopes of a commission, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... justifiable circumstances. Only then did he have a dim sense of what might be the feelings of a girl suddenly stormed into love. He had never been sufficiently in love to know how serious a feeling—serious in its tremendous potency for joy or pain—love is. In Virginia, in London, and in Ireland, he had indulged himself in such little flirtations, such amours of an hour, as helped make up a young gentleman's amusements. But he had long ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of pleasure arising from calculation, it may be presumed that, like all other female politicians, our heroine had something of the woman lurking at her heart; something of that feminine vanity, which inclines to believe in the potency of personal charms, even when they are in the wane. Captain Lightbody's asseverations, and the notes Sir John Hunter wrote to his sister, were at last listened to by Mrs. Beaumont with patience, and even with smiles; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... with stolid awe by anxious votaries belonging to what is called the farming interest. Familiar too and household would be her worship: and in many a snug home, where she might be imagined to have little potency, small and ugly images of her would be found as household gods—the Lares and Penates—near to the threshold, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... to distinguish external objects and to attribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the variety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view of the world. An animal's customary habitat may have constant features and their relations ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... blaze and light of the nineteenth century, that the indictment is to be a substitute for the writ of error, and it is justified because a judge ought to be indicted who violates the sacred person of an embassador! What potency there must be in the recent amendment of the Constitution which has foisted the negro and set him upon the same platform as the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of Great Britain or of all the Russias to the United States of America, and ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... evils referred to, the book club is with us to stay, and the very fact that it is continually pestered by these hangers-on is conclusive proof of its potency and usefulness; features which insure its secure foundation in ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... forms of nature. All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to have burned out. One recalls the notion of Herodotus that he is grown feeble, and retreats to the south because he can no longer face the cold and the storms from the north. There is a growing potency about his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them in fall. One is the kindling fire, the ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... quite correct. At the bottom of the glass, and below the light sirupy mixture, there lurked liqueurs of which the potency was only rendered doubtful because of their low temperature. The beginning of the long drink was absolutely delicious, so soothing and so cooling; but at the end of it was as if one had filled one's ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... on his throat. He wrenched away her hands, his iron grip on both her wrists, but she was now able to dominate her aggressor from above and could hold him down with the full force of her arms. Face to face with her enemy, she recalled the potency of her witch-gaze. She narrowed her eyelids and directed her steely glance into the bloodshot eyes of her tormentor. During a few seconds they were thus: the girl half-standing, half-kneeling, rigid, tense, holding ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... charm collars and can not be seen. Nothing will prevail upon the owner to declare even their names. After opening the breast of the slain enemies they dip these mystic collars in the blood and thereby, through the instrumentality of their blood spirits, impart to the collars greater potency. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... conscious of freedom of choice, and sooner or later we must inevitably acquire some of the power and responsibility of gods. A fall it might seem, just as a vicious man sometimes seems degraded below the beasts, but in promise and potency a rise ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... now, if war thou seekest to prepare, And thither tends thy purpose, be it sped. Whate'er my craft can promise, whatso'er Is wrought with iron, ivory or lead, Fanned with the blast, or molten in the bed, Thine be it all; forbear a suppliant's quest, Nor wrong thy beauty's potency." He said, And gave the love she longed for; on her breast Outpoured at length he slept, and loosed his limbs ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of 1776; and hence, no record was made, or vote taken on the patriotic resolutions of Mecklenburg, and they became concealed from view in the blaze of the National Declaration bursting forth on the 4th of July, 1776, which only re-echoed and reaffirmed the truth and potency of sentiments proclaimed in Charlotte on the 20th of ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Wells will remind me that he claims for him no material potency; and I must own that no happier moment could have been chosen for the annunciation of an impotent God. But the plea does not quite tally with the facts. In the first place (as we have seen) the Invisible King is going to do things—he ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Government according to law. The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of Ministers of State. Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your Commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective constitution. It is possible, that through negligence, or ignorance, or design artfully conducted, Ministers ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... should one be Vaccinated.—Because the potency of virus depends largely upon its being fresh, and it is so easy to obtain pure and fresh bovine virus, and because such bovine virus is efficient it is better in all cases to use only the pure ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... poisonous, loathsome, and destructive weeds found in the whole vegetable kingdom? Let us rather shake off this abominable practice, and rise, as individuals and as a nation, in all our intellectual potency,—and let us go forth from day to day, to the noble purposes of our destiny, untrammelled by the quid, or the pipe, or the snuff-box; and before another generation shall lie down in the grave, our efforts and our example may cause the light of human science, and ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... tradition alive; and while the facts of history show us the important position of London during the period which witnessed the departure of the Celtic Bretons to their continental home,[34] the facts of tradition show us the Celtic tribesmen deeming it a way to wealth through the magic potency of dreamland. The Celtic tribesmen stood outside Roman Lundinium. Its life was not their life, and their conversion of its position into a mythic treasure house or a mythic road to treasure, and their association ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... obey the marquis, he might be a slave for ever; for he had already learned to recognize and abhor that slavery which is not the less the root of all other slaveries that it remains occult in proportion to its potency—self slavery: he must and would conquer this whim, antipathy, or whatever the loathing might be: it was a grand chance given him of proving his will supreme—that is himself a free man! He drew himself up, with a full breath, and stepped within the arch. Up rose the horror again, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... reins of state, especially when they perceived that she mocked and defied them; and they therefore refused to pay her court, and even conspired to effect her overthrow. But they had not sufficiently considered the potency of her wrath, or the desperate means of revenge to which she could resort; nor had they considered those other influences which had been gradually undermining their influence,—even the sarcasms ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... ears were for something in the overwhelming potency of the argument. But another and scarcely less important article of the indictment related to some pictures of the Life and Passion of our Lord, which Laud had once had bound up in Bibles. He had been so greatly pleased with the result that he ordered them to be called the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every article in the great trunk ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always important and this accounted for the cooling of the zeal of a certain number of enthusiasts who had vociferously supported Roosevelt in 1912. The falling-off in the vote measured further the potency of Roosevelt's personal magnetism; thousands voted for him who would not vote for other candidates professing his principles. Finally, other issues—the imbroglio with Mexico, for instance—were looming up, and exciting a different interest among the American ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... this way secured three new recipes, four magical powders and a selection of herbs of wonderful power and potency, she hobbled home as fast as she could, in order to ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... has led to his name being honoured and commemorated even with respect to parts where he was not the actual discoverer. It is a function of history to do justice in the large, abiding sense, discriminating the spiritual potency of personalities that dominate events from the accidental connection of lesser persons with them. In that wider sense, Flinders was the true discoverer of the whole of the southern coast of Australia. He, of course, made no such claim; but we who estimate the facts after ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... absorptions, to judge by the colours, are almost complementary, are the chemically active rays the same? The general relation of colour to chemical action is worthy of the application of the method by which Dr. Draper proved so conclusively the chemical potency of the yellow rays of ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... daughters of men of this stamp—and not half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here—the news brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... a mile. The influence of the death-bone is so completely under the control of the operator that it usually goes straight to the person against whom he in the dead waste of the night breathes his moody and angry soul away. Should the medicine-man, however, be conscious that the potency is inclined to swerve, if he but put his hand to the right or left it must fly in accordance with ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... The strongest military organization was therefore contemplated. In this, much employment could be given to the non-slaveholding masses, while military qualities of supposed superiority would enable the Southern Confederacy to enter into a successful contest with the North for empire. The potency of 'King Cotton' was to be made the powerful agency with which the rest of the civilized world was to be dragooned into acquiescence. On this delusive dream was built the fabric of that mighty empire, whose ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... she is constantly reminded of duties and responsibilities from which an angel might shrink. The world is to be saved by her prayers, her quiet and gentle efforts. Man, she is told, is ruled by her smiles; his whole nature subdued by the potency of her tears. Priests, politicians, and poets assure her with flattering tongue, that on her depend the progress and destiny of the race. On the other hand, she is told that she must lovingly confide in the strength and skill of man, who has been endowed with superior ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hostility. Science, leaping the hedge beyond which she at all events is a trespasser,—or in finer language, 'prolonging its gaze backwards beyond the boundary of experimental evidence,' or in still plainer terms, guessing, affirms that she discerns in matter the promise and potency of every form of life; or presently, in a devouter mood, looking on the budding glories of the spring, declines to profess the creed of Atheism. Learned criticism demonstrates the impossibility of supernatural religion. The leader ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... recovery, is a talisman, composed under certain aspects of the heavens, when the Divine Intelligences are most propitious. I am but the poor administrator of its virtues. I dip it in a cup of water, observe the fitting hour to administer it to the patient, and the potency of the draught works ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... immediately acted upon, and English agents were despatched into Germany, Italy, and France, carrying with them all means of persuasion, intellectual, moral, and material, which promised to be of most cogent potency with lawyers' convictions. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... tide Wrecked Rome's potency and pride, Something wonderful has vanished, something exquisite has died; And in spite of modern fame And the lustre of its name, Even beautiful Lake Como can ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... who always appends a name and address singularly obscure and unconvincing, yet who, at some supreme moment, recommends Somebody's pills to a dying friend,—afflicted with a similar address,—which restore him to life and undying obscurity. Yet these pictorial and literary appeals must have a potency independent of the wares they advertise, or ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... do propose dealing with him! I am an enchantress, you know, and now you shall witness a further and more convincing proof of the potency of my spells than was shown in bringing ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... at any length with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... than the average temperature of the British Isles, and if there were no counteracting forces at work, crimes of violence in India should be much more numerous than they are with us. But the counteracting forces acting upon Indian society are of such immense potency that the malign influences of climate are very nearly annihilated as far as the crimes we are now discussing are concerned; and India stands to-day in the proud position of being more free from crimes ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... pure have stooped from her decorous and noble manner of bearing! But was it decorous—was it? He hated himself for the idea that forced itself upon him, just for an instant—no more—and yet, while it was present, thrilled him with its old potency of attraction towards her image. And then this falsehood—how terrible must be some dread of shame to be revealed—for, after all, the provocation given by such a man as Leonards was, when excited by drinking, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... create Their substance, and create the' informing virtue In these bright stars, that round them circling move The soul of every brute and of each plant, The ray and motion of the sacred lights, With complex potency attract and turn. But this our life the' eternal good inspires Immediate, and enamours of itself; So that our wishes rest for ever here. "And hence thou mayst by inference conclude Our resurrection certain, if thy mind Consider how the human flesh was fram'd, When both our parents at ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... I had rebuffed his civility, stretching himself on deck to read. The book he had on board with him was Mr. Richardson's famous "Clarissa," and among other small attentions he would read me passages aloud; nor could any elocutionist have given with greater potency the pathetic portions of that work. I would retort upon him with passages out of the Bible, which was all my library—and very fresh to me, my religious duties (I grieve to say it) being always and even to this day extremely neglected. He tasted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recognition of his point of view denied him in the great factory and here he can meet men of similar condition, on terms of equality, to discuss freely and without fear the topics that interest him most. There is an immense psychic potency in this intimate association of fellow workers, especially in some of the older unions which ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... correspondences given in different treatises often vary; but what we can gather with certainty is that there must have existed a complete science of the subject; the correlation of sound with such things, once understood, is the key which explains, not only the magic potency of sound, but also the constuction of those roots which remain as relics of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... careful ritual. The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... their decks, and rending the air with their acclamations. All the laws of quarantine were disregarded. The people, weary of anarchy, and trembling in view of the approaching Austrian invasion, were almost delirious with delight in receiving thus as it were from the clouds, a deliverer, in whose potency they could implicitly trust. When warned that the ships had recently sailed from Alexandria, and that there was imminent danger that the plague, might be communicated, they replied, "We had rather have the plague than the Austrians," Breaking over ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... proud-heart sophistries, Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch! Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see! My sweet bride withers at their potency." 290 "Fool!" said the sophist, in an under-tone Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan From Lycius answer'd, as heart-struck and lost, He sank supine beside the aching ghost. "Fool! Fool!" repeated he, while his eyes still Relented not, nor mov'd; "from every ill Of life ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... Moreover, the stone had a sort of universal power against all diseases. Such a virtue could not be vegetable in its nature, but was, he thought, connected with metals. He pointed to the well-accepted medicinal virtues which inhered in gems. Metals also had great medicinal potency. Antimony, lead, iron, mercury, were well known, and of special importance was copper, the Venus ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... combinations of letters. The constituent letters of a word however cannot yield any meaning, and are thus to be regarded as elements of auditory perception which serve as a means for understanding the meaning of a word. The reason of our apprehension of the meaning of any word is to be found in a separate potency existing in the letters by which the denotation of the word may be comprehended. The perception of each letter-sound vanishes the moment it is uttered, but leaves behind an impression which combines with the impressions of the successively dying perceptions of letters, and this brings about the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... all his creations. He transports us into a holier and higher world than our own; everything around us breathes of force and solemn beauty. The looks of his heroes may be more staid than those of men, the movements of their minds may be slower and more calculated; but we yield to the potency of their endowments, and the loveliness of the scene which they animate. The enchantments of the poet are strong enough to silence our scepticism; we forbear to inquire whether it is true ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that His eye never departs from it. See how from that point the oblique circle which bears the planets[3] branches off, to satisfy the world which calls on them;[4] and if their road had not been bent, much virtue in the heavens would be in vain, and well-nigh every potency dead here below.[5] And if from the straight line its departure had been more or less distant, much of the order of the world, both below and above, would be defective. Now do thou remain, Reader, upon thy bench,[6] ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... an enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians. Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... abortive ambitions, over which a hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and jubilations and processions—dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's street. Often have I debated the potency of satire, again and again have I suggested to learned friends a scientific and historical investigation of the popular belief that satire moves mountains or even molehills. But they agree only in shrinking ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the eyes of all, in terror-stricken vision or in nightmares of uneasy conscience, leap the inextinguishable flames of hell. Salvation, meanwhile, is being sought through amulets, relics, pilgrimages to holy places, fetishes of divers sorts and different degrees of potency. The faculties of the heart and head, defrauded of wholesome sustenance, have recourse to delirious debauches of the fancy, dreams of magic, compacts with the evil one, insanities of desire, ineptitudes ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... ago, when Sir Henry Maine published that magnificent treatise on Ancient Law, which, when considered in all its potency of suggestiveness, has perhaps done more than any other single book of our century toward placing the study of history upon a scientific basis, he began by showing that in primitive society the individual is nothing and the state nothing, while the family-group is everything, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... were suddenly cut off, with their handiwork and antediluvian civilisation. The swelling floods subsided, and the God-avenging waters retired to their appointed place. The earth again stood forth in virgin strength, lonely, bare, and citiless, but with a potency and promise inviting and grand. Across these swelling floods one craft had been safely borne; in it was stored the seed-stock of a new world of man and beast. The destruction had been complete and terrible. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... tall, clean shaven, with fine features and damnable light blue eyes with a baffling gleam in them. He had a singular grace in the use of his body, especially in the movement of his hands, which were markedly expressive and attractive; and whether drawn to him or not, one could deny neither his potency nor his distinction of bearing, which was one of race as well as breeding. The first view I ever had of him was in Parliament House, where I noted on the instant the magnificent carriage of his head and chest, his extraordinary pallor, and the strange eyes, reflecting the ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow! She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history, and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. "Let him take care!" muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white teeth; so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol. "Let him take care! If he offend me there are five hundred ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... effective medicine in my arsenal is water fasting followed closely in potency by other, less rigorous detoxifying diets. Colon cleansing ranks next in healing power. In fact it is difficult to separate colon cleansing from fasting because detoxification programs should always be accompanied by colon cleansing. Further down ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... early civilizations. Like the early Egyptians, the early Sumerians may have been in touch with Punt (Somaliland), which some regard as the cradle of the Mediterranean race. The Egyptians obtained from that sacred land incense-bearing trees which had magical potency. In a fragmentary Babylonian charm there is a reference to a sacred tree or bush at Eridu. Professor Sayce has suggested that it is the Biblical "Tree of Life" in the Garden of Eden. His translations ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Who can estimate the length and breadth, the height and depth of the loftiest inspirations or the noblest joys that, in them, can be experienced? To give a full expression to the utmost intelligence, potency, amiability, purity, meritoriousness and majesty that can reside in the capability—rooms of a human soul—would be equivalent to picturing the imaginable or to portraying the infinite, and to do either the one or the other is impossible. One may be sadly indifferent to the value ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... the ritual of libations. Just as water, when applied to the apparently dead seed, makes it germinate and come to life, so libations can reanimate the corpse. These general biological theories of the potency of water were current at the time, and, as I shall explain later (see p. 28), had possibly received specific application to man long before the idea of libations developed. For, in the development of the cult of Osiris[43] the general ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... to mind the quiet confidence in Poluski's voice when describing the potency of that curious cigar-shaped bomb which so narrowly escaped being hurled at ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... instrument may be practically employed in correspondence and literary composition. The problem has been to stereotype, so to speak, the tin-foil record of what has been uttered in the mouth-piece, and thus to preserve in a permanent form the potency of vanished sounds. Nor does it require a great stretch of the imagination to see in the invention of the phonograph one of the greatest achievements of the age—a discovery, indeed, which may possibly revolutionize the ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... used for sprinkling holy water because in pre-Christian times it had been supposed to have effect against the powers of evil. The early Christians were thus just endeavouring to combine the old charm of rue with the new potency ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the stamps and pumping the feed water. It is always well, however, particularly when providing engine power, to err on the right side, and make provision for more than is absolutely needed for actual battery requirements. This rule applies with equal potency to pumping engines. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... small box of nard from the stores of Sulpicius[2] A cask shall elicit, of potency rare To endow with fresh hopes, dewy-bright and delicious, And wash from our hearts every cobweb ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... not an empire's worth, Nor wealth of Ind could buy The like, for never was jewel seen Of such wondrous potency. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... variousness Ever possessed it as they drew along: Yet throughout all it symboled none the less Potency vast and loving-kindness strong. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil, as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile as though they were female, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... weakness and the strange fortune of the human race are proved. He was no whit deficient in foresight, but was deceived by having been always absolutely secure against any force of harmful potency. He had won many unexpected victories in Africa, and many in Asia and Europe, both by land and by sea ever since boyhood; and was now in the fifty-eighth year of his age defeated without good reason. He who had subdued the entire Roman sea perished on it: ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... all pantomimic entertainments, seems to have no great value in and of itself. It is remarkable for the admirable co-operation of the performers, the potency of trained gesture and studied facial expression. The music, which was written by Victor Holoerder, is excellent in its harmony and appropriateness. The decorative quality of even the shabby scenery used in America is striking. It achieves an artistic, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some in England—Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency. Once more, good-night: And when you are desirous to be bles'd, I'll blessing beg of you.—For this same lord [Pointing to Polonius.] I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... not make a poet, nor poker a great pleader. And yet I have seen poets who relied on the potency of their breath, and lawyers who knew more of the habits of a bobtail flush than they ever did of the statutes in such ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... misunderstand. He's not complaining. In fact when I suggested relieving him if the strain was too much he said if he couldn't do Rowe's feelies I could relieve him from the payroll. It's that much of a challenge for him. So much so, he's designed a new receptor adaptor to prevent Rowe's potency from overpowering him." ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... houses, has railway-sidings and branch-lines running down to it, and on the hill above the cottages stands a cluster of blast-furnaces. In daylight they are merely ugly, but at night, with tongues of flame, they speak of the potency of labour. I can still see that strange silhouette of steel cylinders and connecting girders against a blue-black sky, with silent masses of flame leaping into ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... mandolin were wedded to her dancing fingers; and, most marvelous of all, her soul was so filled with poetry that her verses were sung from Valencia to Cadiz. It was said that she could move men to laughter, to tears, to deeds of heroism—that she could even lull them to sleep by the potency of her magic. She had once played before the Caliph under ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... tie, "we be brothers of one blood," had not that potency for Mr. Gallito that it exercised for his wife, and that it was not for him as for her the open sesame to confidence and friendship, speedily ceased to strike this note and approached him on the ground of pure business. The offer he had made to Pearl he ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... considerable group. To relieve him from that difficulty, and so prevent the incessant running amuck of the populace, it is necessary to handicap all the remaining rabble-rousers, and this is most effectively done by limitations upon free speech which originate as statutes and gradually take on the form and potency of national customs. Such limitations arose in the United States by precisely that process. They began in the first years of the republic as definite laws. Some of those laws were afterward abandoned, but what was fundamentally sound in them remained in ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... generation. To our children they are not evidently shams; they are powerful working suggestions. Human institutions are things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies still rooted in the ground has the promise and potency of growth. It will tend perpetually, according to its nature, to recover its old influence over the imagination, the thoughts, and acts ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the malignity of the poison, that, merely through holding his thumb over the mouth of the phial, carefully stopped as it was with wax, he came very near losing that member, which was consumed and almost eaten away by the deadly potency of the poison. And shortly afterwards it slew Rosso, although he was in perfect health, he having drunk it to the end that it might take his life, as it did ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, proceeded the light of evangelical truth, to spread thence to the utmost parts of the earth."[37] Thither came young Patrick Hamilton from Edinburgh, whose "reek" was of so much potency, a boy-enthusiast of nature as illustrious as his birth; and thither came also from England, which is here our chief concern, William Tyndal, a man whose history is lost in his work and whose epitaph is the Reformation. Beginning ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... approached in character that described by Hawthorne as occurring in the grounds of the Villa Borghese when Donatello, with a simple "tambourine," produced music of such "indescribably potency" that sallow, haggard, half-starved peasants, French soldiers, scarlet-costumed contadinas, Swiss guards, German artists, English lords, and herdsmen from the Campagna, all "joined hands in the dance" which the musician himself led with the frisky, frolicsome ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... religious and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories and tribes. That assembly was convened a half-century before the famous meeting between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among the Windsor meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought forth fruit as full of promise and potency for the future as the Great Charter itself. The contrast between these two historic assemblies is instructive. In the one case, we have a provincial king from the rich and beautiful country beyond the Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of the provinces ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... prefer to believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him. That it is an insufficient reserve ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Do not depreciate the potency of your charms, mademoiselle. Who, having seen you once, could help hoping ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... ever, she saw—had the same charm of manner—a charm owing not a little of its potency to the impression he made of the man who would dare as far as any man, and then go on to dare a step farther—the step from which all but the rare, utterly unafraid man shrinks. His look at her could not but appeal to her vanity as woman, and to her ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... arrived on the wings of the gale. Ere long Sergius was shivering in the recess of the door. For relief he counted the beads of his rosary, and there was scarcely a Saint in the calendar omitted from his recitals. If there was potency in prayers the angels were in the cistern ministering ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... fears allayed in the breast of those two blind men as they sit by the wayside to Jerusalem? They cry, "Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David." Is there not a stupendous wealth of kindness and potency portrayed in yon scene when Jesus stood still and called them, and uttered those strange kind words: "What will ye that I should do unto you?" How sad is the sight of a blind person! How intensely dark their surroundings! How they excite our pity! How many, alas! ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... the operation of the laws of inheritance. It was then stated that the whole story of maternal influence had not been told—that the mother could communicate qualities she never possessed. The potency of imagination at the time of conception over the child has been mentioned. It is now our design to consider its effects, during the period of pregnancy, upon the physical structure and the mental attributes of the offspring. We shall have occasion hereafter, in speaking of nursing, to ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... any element of error that it may contain; and, conversely, if no error appears, the more completely does it establish itself as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Liberalism applies the wisdom of Gamaliel in no spirit of indifference, but in the full conviction of the potency of truth. If this thing be of man, i. e. if it is not rooted in actual verity, it will come to nought. If it be of God, let us take care that we be ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... first little more than seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the Church, and the support of the French jurists, contained within them a promise and potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord's anointed, supported by the Lord's Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God: tribal sovereignty was to give way to territorial sovereignty. The people, long forsaken by their emperors, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... expressions of her attachment. Such expressions, coming from any woman, must have been rapturous and soothing in the extreme; but, when they flowed from a voice whose very sound was melody, they acted on the heart of Captain de Haldimar with a potency that was as irresistible as the love itself which ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... but the images of souls enacting, on higher planes of being, the drama of their own salvation. The reluctance of the American aborigine to be photographed is said to have been due to his belief that something of his personality, his human potency, went into the image, leaving him by so much the poorer from that time forth. Suppose such indeed to be the case: that the flat-man on the moving picture screen leads his little life of thought and emotion, related to the mental and emotional life of the living original as the body ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... which India is now meeting her problems to-day. How did these problems first dawn in the minds of some men who forecast themselves by half a century? How fared their hopes, how did their dreams become buried in oblivion? Where lies the secret of that potency which makes certain efforts apparently doomed to failure, rise renewed from beneath the smouldering ashes? Are these dead failures, so utterly unrelated to some great success that we may acclaim to day? When we look deeper we shall find ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... with the polar truths needful to their wholesomeness, and crystallizes ethical and spiritual religion into perfect forms, forms capable of translation into the idioms of every race of earth. This religion of the Christ is the one religion which to-day holds the promise and potency of further evolution, in the progressive civilization of mankind on which it ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... other. In a word, all the sources of corruption of Northern sentiment, emanating from the South, would have been renewed in their operation, with some circumstances added, tending to give to them greater potency ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... diseased, stood before the Christ, who said, Receive thy sight, rise up and walk, or, be thou healed; and o! it was so. The spoken word, however, was but the outward expression and manifestation of his interior thought-forces, the power and potency of which he so thoroughly knew. But the laws governing them are the same to-day as they were then, and it lies in our power to use them the same ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... its stately old-world balconies where violet shadows nested lovingly, arose before his memory's eyes with a strange yearning. The recollection of those striped awnings in the white light of mid-day had potency to cool, even now, the fever of his thoughts. The barren dignity of Carrick's story had contrasted vividly with the tropical colorings in which ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... festivity in this saloon, if I may judge by the character of its frescos," remarked Kenyon, whose spirits were still upheld by the mild potency of the Monte Beni wine. "Your forefathers, my dear Count, must have been joyous fellows, keeping up the vintage merriment throughout the year. It does me good to think of them gladdening the hearts of men and women, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... even to mitigate them; a certain assistance and means of safety has been devised, in the rule that no one should go to see a friend in such a condition, and to a few precautionary measures a further remedy of sufficient potency has been added, that men should not readmit into their houses servants who have been sent to inquire how a man's friends who may have been seized with an illness of this kind are, until they have cleansed and purified their persons in the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... to put all things allusively, using strange figures and metaphors. Yet, when one was used to him and to them, their potency seemed greater than polished ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... found among almost all nations. In verse 18 there is a reference to the superstition that at dawn, when these jewels are exposed to the first rays of the sun, they emit a fine vapor which wafts abroad their subtle potency. The poem is in Spanish verse, and the original is said to have been written down by Don Fernando de Avila, governor of Tlalmanalco, from the mouth of Don Juan de Aguilar, governor of Cultepec, ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... and supported in his determination to avoid the altar. Still further, he would escape the social odium which now attaches to his celibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as his right. As things stand, that odium is of definite potency, and undoubtedly has its influence upon a certain number of men in the lower ranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of bachelorhood, with one leg furtively over the altar ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... is to be violently dispelled because my own son and Sir Kennington Oval have settled between them that a pretty girl is to have her own way." As I thought of it, there seemed to be a monstrous cruelty and potency in Fortune, which she never could have been allowed to exercise in a world which was not altogether given over to injustice. It was for that that I wept. I wept to think that a spirit of honesty should as yet have prevailed ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... himself another tower of strength chosen from among the people. What might he not hope, now that he possessed the services of Lord Brittleback and Mr. Harold Smith! Renovated in a Medea's cauldron of such potency, all his effete limbs—and it must be acknowledged that some of them had become very effete—would come forth young and round and robust. A new energy would diffuse itself through every department; India would be ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... thirteenth century, whilst the enterprises which were still called crusades were becoming more and more degenerate in character and potency, there was born in France, on the 25th of April, 1215, not merely the prince, but the man who was to be the most worthy representative and the most devoted slave of that religious and moral passion which ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the present patrons of the stage. The absence of scenery, the substitution of boys and men for women, could only have passed muster with the Elizabethan spectator because he was able to realise the dramatic potency of the poet's work without any, or any but the slightest, adventitious aid outside ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of the tree by the serpent, of a temptation seductive and forbidden. Thereafter "like that" her mind, missing no day nor no night, was often found by her to be there. The quality that made "like that" not seemly to her, increased, at each return, its potency. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... had ample time since to get accustomed to the strain of the meal-hours. He would never have believed it. But then use is everything; only the very potency of his success prevented anything resembling elation. He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a loaded gun to help him on his way through the world, chances to come upon a torpedo—upon a live torpedo with a shattering charge in ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... by this lucky meal, attained by its inward working to the highest pitch of human wisdom. For the potency of the meal bred in him the fulness of all kinds of knowledge to an incredible degree, so that he had cunning to interpret even the utterances of wild beasts and cattle. For he was not only well versed in all the affairs ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... hitherto referred only to the dispersion of poisonous exhalations, as if the best and most necessary thing the atmosphere can do for us were to dilute the dose to a comparatively harmless potency. But this is now known to be not the true remedial process with respect to the zymotic germs. The most wonderful achievement of recent investigation reveals a philosophy of both bane and antidote that astonishes us with its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... to be supposed that the Bibliotaph pleased every one with whom he came in contact. There were people whom his intellectual potency affected in a disagreeable way. They accused him of applying great mental force to inconsidered trifles. They said it was a misfortune that so much talent was going to waste. But there is no task so easy as criticising an able man's employment of ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... improbable that the ready coincidence of Jervis's views with those of Nelson, as to future possibilities, arose, partly indeed from professional bias and prepossession as to the potency of navies, but still more from the false reports, of which Bonaparte was an apt promoter, and which a commission of the allies in Genoa greedily swallowed and transmitted. The deterrent effect of their own fleet, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... blended with the hope of bettering their condition, turned their faces to that "fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined battalions of Great Britain recked little of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... attributing the cause to milk proteins, fats, carbohydrates, or salts. Hopkins therefore suggested the existence of unknown factors in milk of the type to which he had earlier given the name "accessory factors." This work has recently been repeated by Osborne and Mendel who fail to find the high potency in milk ascribed to it by Hopkins but the latter's work, at that time, was accepted without question and became the ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... so, the mythological portion was recited for a magical purpose, with the object of invoking the aid of the chief deities whose actions in the past are there described, and of increasing by that means the potency of the spell.(1) In the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the employment and significance of myth in magic, and we shall have occasion to refer to other instances, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian, in which a myth has reached us in a ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... every cell is polarized in subjection to the Central Will. Perfect health, therefore, is orderly obedience, government and harmony. Every cell is a living entity, whether of vegetable or animal potency, and wherever disease is, there are disunion, error, rebellion and insubordination; and the deeper the seat of the confusion, the more dangerous the malady and the harder ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... living were far removed from the conventions of Concho. He wanted to ride, to hunt, to drive team, to work in the open with lots of elbow-room and under a wide sky. His one solace while in the store was the array of rifles and six-guns which he almost reverenced for their suggestive potency. They represented power, and the only law that he ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... and he went out. The smell of the soup, which was apparently of great potency, filled the little room. Axel tried to open the window wider, but though he was tall and he stood on his table, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... given {in return} for his mighty exploits, {still} I myself am obliged {by} it. But, however, that your affectionate breasts may not be alarmed with vain fears, despise these flames of Oeta. He who has conquered all things, shall conquer the fires which you behold; nor shall he be sensible of the potency of the flame, but in the part {of him} which he derived from his mother. {That part of him}, which he derived from me, is immortal, and exempt and secure from death, and to be subdued by no flames. This, too, when disengaged from earth, I will receive into the celestial regions, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Geraldine,—repaying liberal study. Scornfully secure of the potency of her own charms where mankind, or Tomcat-kind, might be concerned, royally devoid of morals, past-mistress in all sprightly, graceful, feline devilries, she was yet a fond mother, solicitous to the point of actual selflessness regarding the safety and well-being of her successive and frequently ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... joke entirely out of my head. It is curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself it had ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... while the quick and feeble breathing of the girl told how she was fast losing in the race with the all-omnipotent hours. On a small table stood two phials, in which were imprisoned dull-coloured liquids, powerless, despite their supposed potency, to stay the hunger of the disease so rapidly consuming the patient; and by their side was a plate of shrivelled fruit, the departing lusciousness of which had failed to tempt an appetite in her whose mouth was baked with the fever that fed on its own flame. There, gathered into a few ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... She could command not only the wind and the rain, but the thunder and lightning also, and to offend her was to run the risk of bringing about a terrifying storm. Years after her death blacks had faith in her potency for ill. One of the few white men who have attempted to climb the highest peaks of the island mountain, informed me that when he reached a certain elevation, the boys who accompanied him never spoke above an awe-struck whisper, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield |
