"Shaping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be the fate of the Empire of the West—they were as portentous as any that the nation has ever known. On that very day in truth, and not very far off, there had already been enacted one of the mightiest events that went to the shaping of the national destiny. Over the river on the banks of its tributary, the Wabash, the battle of Tippecanoe had been fought and won between the darkness and daylight of that gloomy seventh of November. The young doctor, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... which he "catches the conscience of a king," his life was in great danger. He should either have organized a conspiracy at once, or fled to the court of Fortinbras; but he allows events to take their course, and is controlled by them instead of shaping his own destiny. Instead of planning and acting ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... He never reads a morning paper, but has some means of obtaining at an early hour each morning a pink or green evening paper that shrieks with crimson headlines. Such has been his reading through all time, and this may have been an element in shaping his now inveterate hostility toward those who would engage him in meaningless talk. Even in accepting the gift of an excellent cigar he betrays only a bored condescension. There is no relenting of countenance, no genial relaxing of an ingrained suspicion ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... will—even in archetypal Platonic drawing-rooms—converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible worlds ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Penn is of especial interest and value because the events of his career are closely related to American and English history at a time when America was separating herself from her parent country and shaping her ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... more. The terrible idea which had been growing in my brain, shaping itself out of a nebulous mass of reminiscences of what had just occurred at the studio, was now stinging me to madness. Wilderspin's extreme dejection, the strange way in which he had seemed inclined to evade answering my question as to the safety of Winifred, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... divided into three parts; the first deals with the external environment out of which Socialism is growing and by which it is being shaped, the second with the internal struggles by which it is shaping and defining itself, the third with the reaction of the movement on its environment. I first differentiate Socialism from other movements that seem to resemble it either in their phrases or their programs of reform, then give an account of the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... the textile art, as in all other useful arts, is fundamentally, although not exclusively, the resultant or expression of function, but at the same time it is further than in other shaping arts from expressing the whole of function. Such is the pliability of a large portion of textile products—as, for example, nets, garments, and hangings—that the shapes assumed are variable, and, therefore, when not distended or for some purpose folded or draped, ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... little towards prolonging "this pleasing, anxious being," yet the material improvements of our day do in effect lengthen mortal life for us. And truly, what must Indian life have been worth, when it took a month to cut down a tree with a stone hatchet, and when the shaping of a canoe was the work of a year? When two hundred miles of travel consumed a week's time, every two hundred miles' journey was worth a week's life; and if we accept the idea of a certain celebrated character, (not "Quintus Curtius," but Geoffrey Crayon, I believe,) that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... then work the dough into a long roll about three inches thick and then break into pieces the size of a large egg. Now mould until round and then let rise on the board for ten minutes. Mould again, shaping oblong. Place on a well-greased pan and brush the buns with melted shortening. Let rise for thirty minutes and then bake in a hot oven and ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... to the shed where Battiste was shaping bean-poles for the kitchen garden. The dog rushed at Battiste, barking furiously, seized him by the trousers, and tried to pull ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... rule, they said, vessels coming down from the Dardanelles kept well west of Mitylene and Chios, rounded Naxos and Syra and bore south to Santorin before shaping their course east, if bound for Syria, so as to avoid the dangerous neighbourhood. To begin with, they advised that the course should be laid so as to pass a short distance east of Astropalaia. This, they said, had long been one of the headquarters ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... misfortune with a present of eighteen ducats. Seldom was money better bestowed. Part of it went to buy books and a glass-polishing machine, with the help of which young Fraunhofer studied mathematics and optics, and secretly exercised himself in the shaping and finishing of lenses; the remainder purchased his release from the tyranny of one Weichselberger, a looking-glass maker by trade, to whom he had been bound apprentice on the death of his parents. A period of struggle and privation ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See Speculations ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... in the stern beside her father, and very soon the tiller was in her hand and she was shaping the boat's course toward the forts. Grace watched ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... returned were formidable factors in re-shaping the affairs of the nation. Grave injustices were done in some instances to young men who had volunteered in the early days of the war through patriotic motives and who returned to find their places in industry taken by others. In the main, however, the process of absorption ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall at the present moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it. It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-house. This child was a deaf mute. But its soul had the inner sense that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through natural organs realizes itself in words. Only it had to talk with its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its face, I have never seen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... cause by no dangerous engagement, and had maintained, with unswerving rectitude, his own convictions of constitutional principle. He had been sustained by the sure confidence that, in poverty and exile, quite as much as when in the possession of ample power, he was making history, and was shaping the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... logs in the same way, shaping the dam as we work. You would not believe the strength of ours, unless you saw how it stood the shock of the floating ice as it came pounding against it at the end of the winter. Our houses we build in much the same way, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious, attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation of eternal glory, such as that of the Divina Commedia. True faith, true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... saith: "Be mighty and wise, as the kings that came before! For they knew of the ways of the Gods, and the craft of the Gods they bore: And they knew how the shapes of man-folk are the very images Of the hearts that abide within them, and they knew of the shaping of these. Be wise and mighty, O Kings, and look in mine heart and behold The craft that prevaileth o'er semblance, and the treasured wisdom of old! I hallow you thus for the day, and I hallow you thus for the night, And I hallow you thus for the dawning with my fathers' hidden ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... to secure help from the Slater and Peabody Funds brought me into contact with two rare men—men who have had much to do in shaping the policy for the education of the Negro. I refer to the Hon. J.L.M. Curry, of Washington, who is the general agent for these two funds, and Mr. Morris K. Jessup, of New York. Dr. Curry is a native of the South, an ex-Confederate soldier, yet I do not believe there is any ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... skill in the art of whittling, he had made good progress toward the shaping of a toy hand-sled, when, looking up from his task, he saw something that mightily changed the face of affairs. He threw away the half-shaped toy, thrust the knife back into his belt, and rose to his feet. After a long, sagacious survey of the flood, he drew his knife again, and proceeded ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... reform—by curtailing public and private expenditures, by paying our debts, and by reforming our banking system—that we are to expect effectual relief, security for the future, and an enduring prosperity. In shaping the institutions and policy of the General Government so as to promote as far as it can with its limited powers these important ends, you may rely on my ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... great groups of human conceptions. The decree against the Encyclopaedia marks the central moment of a collision between two antagonistic conceptions which disputed, and in France still dispute, with one another the shaping and control of institutions. One of these ideas is the exclusion of political authority from the sphere and function of directing opinion; it implies the absolute secularisation of government. The rival idea prompted ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... scenery isn't dramatic enough here for a new broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show. Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery to send back ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... dusk of evening, the Two Marys was shaping her course for the north shore, the wind had subsided, and the sea moved lazily along in unbroken swells. Supper was announced, and Major Roger Potter hastened into the cabin, saying: "It is as well that we eat, for though I feel a qualm ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... possessed by the King of France," he shouted. "We have a strong garrison! We mistook your firing for more French ships!" Shaping his hands trumpet fashion to his mouth, he called this out again, adding that our Indian was of a nation in league ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... itself. Life as such is neither good nor bad, and, Audubon's undistinguishing censure is surely as much out of place as Coryat's undistinguishing approval. Life is raw material for the artist, whether he be the private man carrying out his own destiny, or the statesman shaping that of a nation. The end of the artist in either case is the good life; and on his own conception of that will depend the value of ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of the more rapid rate at which the forces of society were soon to move. Over all Europe and America great events were shaping themselves with lightning speed. Tremendous changes political and economic, social and scientific, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the people who had noted him as he passed (nude but for the girdle and the downy breath feathers of the eagle) halted at their work among the corn and the melon vines and watched him at the shrine. From the terraced roofs also the women turned from their weaving, or the shaping of pottery, and looked after the tall bronze figure girded, and white plumed. They could see his wide-stretched hands scatter the sacred meal of prayer, and then they saw only a brown runner on the mesa outlined against the ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... is opened, And the largest lamp is lit; When the chestnuts glow in the embers, And the kid turns on the spit; When young and old in circle Around the firebrands close; And the girls are weaving baskets, And the lads are shaping bows; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... incident is in my estimation, it has decided me on one point already. In shaping my future course I am now resolved to act on my own convictions—in preference to taking the well-meant advice of such friends as are still left ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... She was shaping a flimsy, black-silk dress, and doing it deftly, though it was a marvel to me how hands so stiff and cramped as hers appeared to be could ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... he rose, called for his bill and paid it, called for his hat and stick, got them, and resolutely—yet with a furtive air, as one who would throw a dogging conscience off the scent—fled the premises of his club, shaping a course through Whitehall and Charing Cross to Cockspur Street, where, with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon, he dodged hastily into the booking-office ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... deeper hole than is really necessary to accommodate the roots, but I am sure this plan gives the roots a much better start than if they are crowded into a small hole, and particularly if the ground is hardpan or similar soil. Pinching off the buds the following year or two, when you commence shaping your trees to your liking, is good, thus eliminating severe pruning. I have endeavored to follow up this annual pruning when possible, often being compelled to hire additional help for this purpose, as the nature of my ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... of the collegians, his colleagues, who seemed to have been unable to make up their minds whether he was a genius or a blockhead. Within the walls of Trinity he worked, gradually and laboriously piecing together and thoughtfully shaping out his theory of the metaphysical conception of the material world about him; poring over Locke and Plato, breathing an atmosphere saturated with Cartesianism, his active mind eagerly investigating, exploring, inquiring in all directions, and his hand recording ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... with the help of trailing branches; screened then by the bushes and the foliage, they beheld before them a most impressive spectacle. At a short distance to the left, Julia was coming on at break-neck speed; she was following the oblique line of the woods, apparently shaping her course straight toward the edge of the cliff. They thought at first that her horse had run away, but they saw that she was lashing him with her whip to ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... accounted for change, but failed to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal and all the old philosophies called this outside force God or Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on tracing the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... play upon my humors and fancies as I do upon his. And this sense is fairly required by the context, for the whole speech is occupied with the speaker's success in cajoling Brutus, and with plans for cajoling and shaping him still further. Johnson ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... wealth of affection in his kind eyes, and straightened the edge of the gorgeous sofa cover. "Aymer, old chap, you are too sensible, I know, to imagine it is going to run easily and smoothly from the first. The boy will come out all right: he is young enough to shape, and worth shaping. But he has had everything against him except one thing. It means many troubles and disappointments for you, but I believe it will have its compensations. It will help fill your life, ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... year in wages pays at least one hundred dollars on account of protection. Put such a tax on all incomes and the country would be in a ferment of excitement until it was removed. But it is upon the poor and lowly that the tax is placed, and their voices are not often heard in shaping the policies of tariff legislation. I repeat, the product of one's labor is his own. It is his highest right, subject only to the necessities of the government, to do with it as he pleases. Protection invades, destroys that right. It ought to be destroyed, until ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... a certain cold, sunshiny morning, gay and sparkling, and with it the beginning of what, for want of a better word, we may call his fate. He knew nothing of its approach, had not the slightest prevision that the divinity had that moment put his hand to the shaping of his rough-hewn ends. It was early October by the calendar, but leaves brown and spotted and dry lay already in little heaps on the pavement—heaps made and unmade continually, as if for the sport ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us as Rosmersholm before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... were in, the British troops began their retreat of eighteen miles. They had eaten little or nothing for fourteen hours. Ages ago freedom loving Nature had conspired to aid the Americans by shaping the field of battle. Huge boulders had been left by the glacier, the potent rays of the April sun made dense masses of verdure in willows, which thus became an ally of the pine. Stone fences and haystacks ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... game—a game in which there was the keenest competition, and in which the "ante" was enormously high. To produce "The Genius" would cost ten thousand dollars at the least; and were those who staked this to have no say whatever in the shaping of the play? Manifestly this was absurd; and as the manager pressed home the argument, Thyrsis felt as if he wanted to get up and run! When Mr. Jones talked to you, he looked you squarely in the eye, and you had a feeling of presumption, even of guilt, in standing out ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... different sources, will show the reader how many influences were then shaping the control of authority in Utah:—"At about this time [December, 1871] a change came in the action of the Department of justice in these Utah prosecutions, and fair-minded men of the nation demanded of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the Scotch-Irish had in shaping the destiny of Appalachian America is another much mooted question with which we are concerned here because historians give almost all the credit to this race. Even an authority like Justin Winsor leaves the impression that Virginia cared little for the frontier, and that all honor is due ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... Fortunately, as it turned out, Biddy's ordeal, in the more or less torrid zone, was not cruelly prolonged, for the pair have already received a superior appointment. It is Lady Agnes's proud opinion that her daughter is even now shaping their destiny. I say "even now," for these facts bring me very close to contemporary history. During those two days at Harsh Nick arranged with the former mistress of his fate the conditions, as they might be called, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... where he could get a kind of clay that had the appearance of making good ware. It was fine grained and without lumps or pebbles. He was much perplexed to mould the clay into right shapes. He tried taking a lump and shaping it into a vessel with his hands. He tried many times, but each time the clay broke and he was forced to try some other way. He recalled how he had made his basket out of strands of twisted grass and wondered whether he could not make his ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... more than the lark's song showering down through the golden air of April.... Here in her freedom she knew herself, a soul, a living soul, with loving laughter accepting the life ordained for it by Providence, but dominating it, shaping it, moulding it, filling it with love until it brimmed over and spilled its delight upon surrounding life to make ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... all such passages as rested upon the authority of that gospel, the book is to a considerable extent rewritten, and the changes are such as greatly to increase its value as a history of Jesus. Nevertheless, the author has so long been in the habit of shaping his conceptions of the career of Jesus by the aid of the fourth gospel, that it has become very difficult for him to pass freely to another point of view. He still clings to the hypothesis that there is an element of historic tradition contained in the book, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... sometimes an altogether false, issue being raised, the unhappy victim not merely of oppression, but of downright brutality, is shut off from justly merited sympathy. And women, too, who are more fortunately situated, in possessing somewhat kinder husbands, or in being possessed by them, shaping their views according to those entertained by the sterner sex, unite with them in the condemnation of a sorrow-stricken sister; and, instead of making her burden lighter, contribute to increasing its weight. Such women having never felt ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... House, and when my old preceptor, then Professor of Church History in St Mary's College, filled the chair. The Church at that time was but slowly recovering from the staggering blow she had received in '43, and the great Dr Robertson was shaping out the splendid scheme which was to constitute her mission for the immediate future, and give to her the consciousness and confidence of reviving life. There were plenty of aged men there, whose lives had been honourably worn out in her service; ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... The cutting, shaping, and bringing the belly to the note D, by means of this, is part of the work to which you will have to devote great attention: from the shadow thrown by the bar in fig. 15 you will notice that it is shaped somewhat after ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... on a Tuesday evening that a mighty vessel was steaming majestically out of the mouth of the Thames, and shaping her imposing course straight at the ball of the setting sun. Most people will remember reading descriptions of the steamship Kangaroo, and being astonished at the power of her engines, the beauty of her fittings, and the extraordinary speed—about eighteen knots—which she developed in her ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... how quickly Colin had learned his work—remembered how the shy self-contained lad, with always that grim memory of his boyhood shaping a vengeful purpose in his mind and making him old for his years, had developed the flair of the Bush in his hardy Scotch constitution. She was compelled to own that he had developed, too, some of the worst as ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... prolong it after nightfall, were away in the fishing-boats, receiving whacks almost as often as they needed them; for those times (unlike these) were equal to their fundamental duties. In the winding lane outside the grounds of the Hall, and shaping its convenience naturally by that of the more urgent brook, a man—to show what the times were come to—had lately set up a shoeing forge. He had done it on the strength of the troopers' horses coming down the hill so fast, and often with their cogs worn out, yet ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Dearmore," Tommy Watson's behaviour alarmed his friends. He ate little; it was plain to those who met him daily that he slept little, and William Adolphus Turnpike confided to Whimple that Tommy was "shaping up for the asylum." "He don't know what he's sayin' half the time, and the other half he ain't sayin' anything, he's just singing Scotch songs, and Tommy's singing ain't much diff'rent to the hootin' of a ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends."—[S. L. C., 1906.]—Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping Mark Twain's career. Of course, the more strenuous nights were not frequent. Their home-going was usually tame enough and they were glad enough to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... consciousness with a vividness that made his senses tingle. He was sitting on a low chair, lacing his shoes, and his fingers shook as he finished the task. He dressed with almost frantic haste, urged on by a fear that, despite his efforts, was shaping itself into a mental panic. Then, hair-brushes in hand, he faced his familiar mirror, ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... will meet my doom, or achieve my safety,' my sister said; but the young man answered, 'Nay, I will go over the fall too: I can then be of some service to you.' So he swam along by the canoe's side directing my sister, and shaping the course of the prow on the very brink of the fall. Then all shot over together. The canoe and Annette, and the young man were buried far under the terrible mass of water, but they soon came to the surface again, when ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... to make the very least, if not the very worst, of every phenomenon alleged to be spiritualistic. That kind of deliberate and obstinate blindness which prided itself on being the clear cold light of science Wallace scorned and denounced. He did not insist upon spiritualistic manifestations shaping themselves according to his own predesigned moulds in order to be investigated. He watched for facts whatever form they assumed. He fully recognised that the phenomena he saw and heard could be easily ridiculed, but behind them he ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... as she sat there alone, this bright April afternoon, shaping a garment, with a smile hovering about her lips? Her son's promotion ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... out in the dazzling welter of light—lines that grew and became more solid as he peered at them—lines that were shaping into a recognizable form, the form ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... in his seat, and laughed with a delight he had rarely felt. He was a providence watching over the boys, who expected nothing of him beyond advice for Ericson! Might there not be a Providence that equally transcended the vision of men, shaping to nobler ends the blocked-out ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... hugged each bend of the river, passing close to the channel. I hoped thus to find plains on the next change of the river's course. And so it turned out for some way, but the receding bergs guided me, even when only seen at a considerable distance, in shaping my course. Keeping my eye on their yellow slopes, I travelled far along a grassy flat which brought me to a lake containing water like chrystal, and fringed with white lotus flowers. Its western shore consisted of shelving rock. An immense number of ducks ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... their choice through which of them to run the gauntlet. The inward bound blockade-runners, too, were guided by circumstances of wind and weather; selecting that bar over which they would cross, after they had passed the Gulf Stream; and shaping their course accordingly. The approaches to both bars were clear of danger, with the single exception of the "Lump" before mentioned; and so regular are the soundings that the shore can be coasted for miles within a ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... at Rotterdam, his "Historical and Critical Dictionary," in which the lives of men were associated with a comment that suggested, from the ills of life, the absence of divine care in the shaping of the world. Doubt was born of the corruption of society; Nature and Man were said to be against faith in the rule of a God, wise, just, and merciful. In 1710, after Bayle's death, Leibnitz, a German ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... the Bishop's voice went on above this flutter of mingled emotions. "What is a book? Only a few pages and a little ink—and yet one of the mightiest instruments which Providence has devised for shaping the destinies of man . .. one of the most powerful influences for good or evil which the Creator has placed in ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the existence of this reserved power of society to call the force of woman to the common defense, either in the hospital or the field, it would be woman, who has been deprived of participation in the government and in shaping the public policy which has resulted in dire emergency to the state. But in all times, and under all forms of government and of social existence, woman has given her body and her soul to the ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... children, of whom I travail in birth again again until Christ be formed in you";[159] here S. Paul obviously cannot refer to a historical Jesus, but to some forthputting from the human soul which is to him the shaping of Christ therein. Again the same teacher declares that though he had known Christ after the flesh yet from henceforth he would know him thus no more;[160] obviously implying that while he recognised the Christ of the flesh—Jesus—there was a higher view ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... not be written but to whose tireless faith the shaping of these cruder thoughts to forms more fitly perfect is doubtless due, this finished ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... it would not be extravagance to say that these land claimants, with their enormous interests, have exercised a shaping influence upon Congress. Congress has approved 47 out of 49 of these claims. In this connection the report calls attention to the action of Congress in 1860, and the Interior Department in 1879 in the famous Maxwell land grant case, which he ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... insecure, that he chose rather to trust to such conveyance as nature had furnished him with, than to hazard his neck by any false step of the horse. He contrived, therefore, to slide off from behind, shaping his own course in ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... flighty, but not exaggerating, account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood—yea—made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of Hope I almost ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... the edge through the rind with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas, if buried in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Paris and of Italy it was prudent to interpose some months of tranquil simplicity; and at the thoughts of Lausanne I again lived in the pleasures and studies of my early youth. Shaping my course through Dijon and Besancon, in the last of which places I was kindly entertained by my cousin Acton, I arrived in the month of May 1763 on the banks of the Leman Lake. It had been my intention to pass the Alps in the autumn, but ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... which served her, after the first five minutes, for a pastoral background to the drama of human life; and then she thought of a cottage garden, with the flash of yellow daffodils against blue water; and what with the arrangement of these different prospects, and the shaping of two or three lovely phrases, she did not notice that the young people in the carriage were almost silent. Henry, indeed, had been included against his wish, and revenged himself by observing Katharine and Rodney with disillusioned eyes; while ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Potentialities and Diplomatic Intricacies, agitating to behold. Concerning which we have again to remark how these huge Spectres of Diplomacy, now filling Friedrich's world, came mostly in result to Nothing;—shaping themselves wholly, for or against, in exact proportion, direct or inverse, to the actual Quantity of Battle and effective Performance that happened to be found in Friedrich himself. Diplomatic Spectralities, wide Fatamorganas of hope, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of Hosts, whose mighty hand Dominion holds on sea and land, In Peace and War Thy Will we see Shaping the larger liberty. Nations may rise and nations fall, Thy Changeless Purpose ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... for me, Madam," I said. "I am but a simple messenger." At the same time, I saw how admirably things were shaping for us all. A woman's jealousy was with us, ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... welcome toil in all its severity—how willingly practise abstinence, and suffer privation, for the sake of the bold rights which these would purchase!—how willingly take upon themselves the responsibility of their own fate to enjoy a fortune of their own shaping! Hope herself would start from the earth where she had been so long buried, and waving her rekindled torch, would lead on to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... added to the gloominess of the night, while the rain came down in torrents, and the lightning burst forth in sharp and vivid flashes, increasing the dangers to be apprehended. The boats of the Seringapatam took different directions, each officer commanding shaping the course he thought most likely to bring him up to the wreck. Some of the searching boats went in a wrong direction altogether, being misled by a pilot as to the direction the current took. Hour after hour passed by, and no sign of the wreck was perceived; and ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... sense which is the foundation of all work that looks upward and may hope to live. The truths here expressed concerning Art may, with slight adjustment of the way of thought, be applied to Literature or to any exercise of the best powers of mind for shaping the delights that raise us to the larger sense of life. In his separation of the utterance of whole truths from insistance upon accidents of detail, Reynolds was right, because he guarded the expression of his view with careful definitions of ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Into the shaping and formation of his moral character many forces entered; and, not least of these, the Military Chaplain. This man—and every sect and denomination generously gave him—was pre-eminently God-fearing, thoroughly patriotic, unselfishly ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... they had known before. And so it came to pass that as in every fairy dwelling there was this divine art, so in every palace and chieftain's hall, and in every farm, there were harpers harping on their harps, and all the land was full of sweet sounds and airs—shaping in music, imaginative war, and sorrows, and joys, and aspiration. Nor has their music failed. Still in the west and south of Ireland, the peasant, returning home, hears, as the evening falls from the haunted hills, airs unknown before, or at ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... imaginable, not only putting Miss Shepperson at ease, but making her feel as if her position as a member of the household were the most natural thing in the world. His mere pronunciation of her name gave it a dignity, an importance quite new to Miss Shepperson's ears. He had a way of shaping his remarks so as to make it appear that the homely, timid woman was, if anything, rather the superior in rank and education, and that their simple ways might now and then cause her amusement. Even the children seemed to do their best to make the newcomer feel at home. Cissy, whose ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... possession of all the funds left by my friend, Irving Whately, to his wife and child. A friend's interest led me to investigate the business fallen to you. Irving begged me, when his mortal hours were few, to befriend his loved ones. It didn't take long to discover how matters were shaping themselves. But understanding and belief are one thing, and legal ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... promptly by the short-lived administrations of a democracy than by the stable and formally irresponsible governmental establishments of the older order. It should also be noted that these democratic administrations are in a less advantageous position for the purpose of guiding popular sentiment and shaping it ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... a lot of topworking on native seedling nut trees for others. Mr. Sly, who is with me, and I make one or more of these trips each spring. For this work I use only the slip-bark method, shaping the scion a little differently from any other I have ever seen used. This has given splendid results everywhere I have used it, which has been over the territory from ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... regard the manipulation of words as an end in itself. So cooks without eggs might come to regard the ritual of omelette-making, the mixing of condiments, the chopping of herbs, the stoking of fires, and the shaping of white caps, as a fine art. As for the eggs,—why that's God business: and who wants omelettes when he can have cooking? The movement has simplified the batterie de cuisine. Nothing is to be left in a work of art ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... in your way; therefore I have been bold to trouble you with a few lines to Mr. M. B., whom you shall easily find attending the young Lord S. as his governor, and you may surely receive from him good directions for shaping of your farther journey into Italy, where he did reside by my choice some time for the king, after ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the young nobility; like other similar places, a training-school for military command. In this association, whether near or remote, young Champlain, with his eagle eye and quick ear, was receiving lessons and influences which were daily shaping his unfolding capacities, and gradually compacting and crystallizing them into the firmness and strength of character which he so largely displayed in after years. His education, such as it was, was of course obtained during this period. He has ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... myths and creeds of groping men. This clay knows naught — the Potter understands. I own that Power divine beyond my ken, And still can leave me in His shaping hands. But, O my God, that madest me to feel, Forgive the anguish of ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... man of courage, he has elements of our blood, and the name. I think I am to be approved for desiring to make a better gentleman of the son than I behold in the father: and seeing that life from an early age on board ship has anything but made a gentleman of the father, I hold that I am right in shaping another course ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... or an orator can leisurely play. It has to deal with passions, ambitions, and selfish interests of men, as well as with the moral and intellectual consciousness of the people. Tongue and pen wield, undoubtedly, a great influence in shaping the thought of the nation and impressing them with the importance of any political measure. But the tongue is as sounding brass and the pen as useless steel unless they are backed by force and money. ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... loneliness of sorrow, is that faith which bids us look up and see how near is God, and feel what divine companionship is ours, and know what infinite sympathy engirds us,—what concern for our good is, even in this darkness, shaping out blessings for us, and distilling from this secret agony everlasting peace for the soul. How precious that faith in the clear vision of which we can say, "I am not alone, for the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... close-fitting; and I roofed it overhead, And thereto joined doors I made me, well-fitting in their stead. Then I lopped away the boughs of the long-leafed olive-tree, And shearing the bole from the root up full well and cunningly, I planed it about with the brass, and set the rule thereto, And shaping thereof a bed-post, with the wimble I bored it through. So beginning, I wrought out the bedstead, and finished it utterly, And with gold enwrought it about, and with silver and ivory, And stretched on it a thong ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... with mischievous interest, and was as anxious for an interview as Lyndsay was that she should keep her distance. Flora pressed her hand tightly on her husband's arm, scarcely able to keep her delight in due bounds, while she whispered, in a triumphant aside, "John, I was right. She is shaping her course to our side of the road. She means to speak ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... obscure; they may mean that a virtue, or instinct, similar to that which teaches the bird to build its nest, directed the shaping ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... the memoirs of Baron Trenck, but they had watched the proceedings of the badgers; so, profiting by their example, they worked on, shaping the opening spirally, until, in about six weeks, they came out to the open air beyond ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... tendency to put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,—vastly confused in the tangled strains of the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... for some of us there are clear or almost clear horizons, and such fog banks as there are conceal from them nothing that is of importance in shaping a rational course of life. Victor Dorn was one of these emancipated few. All successful men form their lives upon a system of some kind. Even those who seem to live at haphazard, like the multitude, ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of the country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results Greeley's speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their simplicity and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... of Hellas is fully felt in Homer's Phaeacia. The formative impulse is everywhere alive and at work; the instinctive need of shaping and transforming nature and life is here in its first budding, and will bloom into the greatest art-people of all time. Those two supreme Fine Arts of mature Greece, Architecture and Sculpture, are present in examples which foretell ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... are trained to work. The boys watch the flocks and help cultivate the fields, if fields there be, and the little girls are taught the household tasks of tanning the sheep hides, drying the meat in the sun, braiding the baskets, carding and spinning wool and making it into rugs, shaping the pottery and painting and baking it over the sheep-dung fires. These and dozens of other tasks are ever at hand for the Indian woman to busy herself with. If you think for an instant that you'd like to leave your own house and live a life of ease with the Indian woman, just forget it. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... into the resourceful eyes of Mr. Ruferton, driving out the vacancy. The matter by its very desperateness began to appeal to him, and already a formula of campaign was shaping itself in his constructive mind. This extraordinary man's hypnotic dominance of personality had carried other audacious days and now it swept the lawyer with its tide of confidence. Mr. Ruferton became at once the man who recognizes the value of seconds and minutes. "I ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... action of the German Government, and, in fact, had given it their effusive approbation precisely because they saw in it a strong act instead of mere words, and a decisive indication that Germany was once more about to intervene in the shaping of events in Morocco. "There are mischief-makers," replied ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... from a painter. The oar was easy. It is divided into three parts, the stem, the lead and the muzzle. I must remember this, it is very important. The men are getting so used to inoculations around here that they complain when they don't get enough. We're shaping up into a fine body of men, our company commander told us this morning, and added, that if we continue to pick up cigarette butts several more weeks we'll be able to stack arms without dropping our guns. Eli, the goat, ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... attainable. He must have regard to the ideas, sentiments, associations, sacred traditions, and immemorial customs of the several races and classes of the people. He must be prudently conservative and keenly cautious in shaping and applying new measures and methods. He must study and comprehend the inevitable oppositions of interests, and conceive modes of action which involve reasonable concessions accompanied by manifest compensations. He must ally himself with no party and yet command ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... with most of the contrivances whereby heavy weights have commonly been moved and raised among the civilized nations of Europe. We have also evidence of their skill in the mechanical processes of shaping pottery and glass, of casting and embossing metals, and of cutting intaglios upon hard stones. Thus it was not merely in the ruder and coarser, but likewise in the more delicate processes, that they excelled. The secrets ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... and the world; its output of steaming water is constant and voluminous. Thus again we find relationship between the hot spring and the geyser; it is apparent that the same vent, except perhaps for differences of internal shaping, might serve for both. It was the removal of restraining walls which changed the Excelsior Geyser ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... old college friends from Upsala, probably P. who was a lecturer, and O. who was a curate, now. They had come to see how their old pal was shaping as a husband." ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... the by, why is he never to be seen nowadays?" asked the President. He spoke with the air of a man in whom thousands of forgotten and dormant impressions have suddenly begun to stir, and shaping themselves into one idea, reach consciousness with ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active—for to be active is to call something into act and form—but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... forming character and shaping the course of life is illustrated with peculiar power in the history of the sons of a quiet family in the interior, who all insisted upon going to sea. The parents were grieved that none of their boys would remain ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the Establishment by a paltry plebeian glossiness or an unseemly whiteness at the edges; in a snowy cravat, which is a serious investment of labour in the hemming, starching, and ironing departments; and in a hat which shows no symptom of taking to the hideous doctrine of expediency, and shaping itself according to circumstances; let him have a parish large enough to create an external necessity for abundant shoe-leather, and an internal necessity for abundant beef and mutton, as well as poor enough to require frequent priestly consolation in ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot |
