"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friction, attrition; rubbing, abrasion, scraping &c v.; confrication^, detrition, contrition^, affriction^, abrasion, arrosion^, limature^, frication^, rub; elbow grease; rosin; massage; roughness &c 256. rolling friction, sliding friction, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... discharged his duties as a citizen, returned to his Josephine, to his children; and, weary with the storms and debates of the last months, longed for a quiet little place, away from the turmoil of the capital and from the attrition of parties. Josephine acquiesced gladly in the wishes of her husband, for she felt her innermost being shattered by these last exciting times, and perhaps she cherished the secret hope that her husband, once removed from Paris, would be drawn away from the dangerous ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... credible sincerity professed Protestantism probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... structure, and to consider lexical elements only. But this statement must be clearly understood. It is postulated that in the growth of languages new words are formed by combination, and that these new words change by attrition to secure economy of utterance, and also by assimilation (analogy) for economy of thought. In the comparison of languages for the purposes of systematic philology it often becomes necessary to dismember compounded words for the purpose of comparing the more primitive ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... strongly opposing parties, which, indeed, are necessary to all true national life, preserving the balance of political power, acting as a check upon injudicious and interested legislation, and, above all, evolving truths by the very attrition of conflicting ideas, yet the intimate association of the past, bringing about a thorough acquaintance with the virtues and patriotism of the great mass of those who profess radically different ideas and opinions, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the weightier ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... there was left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift of dwelling with songlike sweetness on those words ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... epigrammatic, the proverb was well calculated to arouse individual thought and make a deep impression on the mind. Transmitted from mouth to mouth for many generations, like the popular tradition or law, it lost by attrition all its unnecessary elements, so that, 'like an arrow,' it shot straight to the mark. Based on common human experience, it found a ready response in the heart of man. In this way crystallized experience was transmitted, gathering effectiveness and volume ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... certain extent; he can at least lead an outwardly decent life. That is worth something, that is "meritorious." He may not feel a very deep contrition over his wrong-doings, but he can feel at least an attrition, that is, a little sorrow, or he can wish that he might feel sorry. That is worth something; that is "meritorious." He cannot love God with all his heart and all his soul, and all his strength, but he can ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... write dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... democratic reader to realize fully the terrible proportions of this problem. We whose lives assume little, require little of them. Intangible objections to the desires of our hearts do not count for much against their realization; there needs the rough attrition of reality to turn back our calm, complacent acquisition of that which we see to be for our best interest in the emotional world. Claims of ancestry mean nothing. Claims of society mean not much more. Claims of wealth ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... that intelligence devoted to Brahman, is the lower Arani; the preceptor is the upper Arani; penances and conversance wit tithe scriptures are to cause the attrition. From this is produced the fire ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... morning sun came upon them over treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works had ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... edges, suggest a rusty metal in the instrument. We must remember, however, that the inks of that period were frequently corrosive, as is proved by the state of many documents now made illegible through the gradual attrition of the paper by mineral acids. It is also not impossible that artists may have already invented what we call steel pens. Sarpi, in the seventeenth century, thanks a correspondent for the gift of one of these mechanical devices. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... a little woman stood in an arch raised by two steps from our own level. Carrying a candle, she descended and tripped toward him. She was not pretty, but sprightly and keen, as the perpetual attrition of life must needs make her, and wore the everlasting grisette costume, which displays the neatest of ankles, and whose cap is more becoming than wreaths of garden millinery. I am too minute, I see, but it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... cruisers and her colonies, and her shipping had been destroyed or driven from the seas. Though losses from submarines averaged 150,000 tons a month in 1915, they had not yet caused genuine alarm. The German fleet was still a menace, but, in spite of attrition warfare, the Grand Fleet was ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... that the usually fine gold got by hydraulicing in Californian canyons, in the gullies of the New Zealand Alps, and the great New South Wales drifts, is largely the result of the attrition of the boulders and gravel of moraines, which has thus freed, to a certain extent, the auriferous particles. But when we find large nuggety masses of high carat gold in the beds of dead rivers, another origin has to ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Monro, with Bethune's Mounted Infantry, captured eighty fighting Boers near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were taken by a night attack at Boschberg. There is no striking victory to record in these operations, but they were an important part of that process of attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to bring the war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside, and to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in a quarrel with ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of wild fowl, was extremely difficult. On the northern sides, these islands showed other features quite as peculiar to the glacial region upon which we were wandering: there the low projecting ledges of granite were polished by the constant attrition of oceanic ice and icebergs, until walking ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... story, but upon mentioning it at the Cape of Good Hope to Dr. Andrew Smith, he told me that he recollected finding on the south-eastern coast of Africa, about one hundred miles to the eastward of St. John's river, some quartz crystals with their edges blunted from attrition, and mixed with gravel on the sea-beach. Each crystal was about five lines in diameter, and from an inch to an inch and a half in length. Many of them had a small canal extending from one extremity to the other, perfectly cylindrical, and of a size that readily admitted ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... in the lonely hills, and be fed by many a mountain rill in the solitude, and the men who are to keep the freshness of their Christian zeal, and of the consecration which they will ever feel is being worn away by the attrition even of faithful service, can only renew and refresh it by resorting again to the Master, and imitating Him who prepared Himself for a day of teaching in the Temple by a night of communion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... craft, the British authorities did not figure on employing the submarine as a separate offensive tactical unit being sufficiently equipped in large ships carrying large guns. And being weaker in capital ships Germany was compelled to rely upon underwater warfare in her campaign of attrition. Not only were the naval authorities of the rest of the world uninformed about the improvements that German submarines carried, but they were fooled even as to the actual number which Germany ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... rainbow is caused by the rays of the sun becoming infused into some dense cloud, and pouring into it a liquid light, which, as it can find no exit, falls back upon itself, and shines the more brilliantly because of a kind of attrition; and receives those hues which are most akin to white from the sun above; its green hues from the cloud under which it lies, as often happens in the sea, where the waters which beat upon the shore are white, and those farther from the land, which, as being so, are ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... republican atmosphere. There was little of justice perhaps, and less of security and comfort; but there was at any rate life, intellectual development, thought, pulsation, fierce collision of mind with mind, attrition of human passions and divine faculties, out of which an elemental fire was created which flamed over the civilized world, and has lighted the torches of civilization for centuries. He who would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... families, at such times, they are, like Pharaoh's plague of frogs, ' in their bed-chambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading-troughs.' * Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth- crickets, and, playing with them as they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials half fined with beer, or any liquid, and set in their haunts; for, being always eager to drink, they will crowd ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... was as surprising to Madame as it was disconcerting. The consequences were such as her wily husband had foreseen. Encountering no externally resisting medium, its force was wasted by internal attrition, so that Madame was being reduced to a nervous wreck, all of which was duly appreciated ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance; second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal sections of our common country to the Constitution and laws ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... later, I heard that Epsilon-Terra had received its official name: Atri-Terra. Atri from attrition. I've wondered ever since whether GS based the choice upon the secular or the ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... Volume 1.* We now perceive but slight indications of the action by which the great area of stone in the valley of the Cox, the Grose etc. has been removed. There are no accumulations of sand but huge blocks of rock, scarcely worn by attrition, occur in great abundance in the bed of the stream; neither do we find in the larger channels of the rivers below any sand deposits, but on the contrary the very rich alluvium which distinguishes the banks of ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Fire for sacred purposes is produced by the attrition of two pieces of wood. In marriage and other solemn covenants fire is regarded as the holy witness in whose presence the agreement is made. Spenser in a description of a marriage, has borrowed from the Roman rite what he calls the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... history the evidences of final cause and providential design, we may surely look upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its ultimate stage of schism—that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the children of God as the past ages of church history have ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... have nothing to do with that first eventful year of married life—the year of attrition in mind and character, when two natures, differing in many points, and these sharpened as it were by education, are suddenly brought into immediate contact. There were some ideals overthrown, no doubt—it is often so; and some good qualities discovered, which were unsuspected ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued to a company was regarded as a valuable corporate asset by its sharers. At times a company possessing a licence would diminish by attrition until the ownership of the licence became vested in the hands of a few of the original sharers, who, lacking either the means or ability to continue to maintain themselves as an effective independent organisation, would form a connection with a similarly depleted ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... 1/34th. The fact appears to be that the amount of the resistance denominated friction depends, in a great measure, upon the nature of the unguent employed, and in certain cases the viscidity of the unguent may occasion a greater retardation than the resistance caused by the attrition. In watchwork therefore, and other fine mechanism, it is necessary both to keep the bearing surfaces small, and to employ a thin and limpid oil for the purpose of lubrication, for the resistance caused by the viscidity of the unguent increases with the amount of surface, ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... that instinct which, implanted in us by the Almighty, led the untutored Indian (as we are pleased to call him) to breathe into the nostril of the buffalo or the wild horse, and by that single act to subdue his angry rage, or that impelled the first discoverer of combustion to extract fire from the attrition of two pieces of wood. The American Indian, living entirely on flesh, "discovered for himself in tobacco smoke a means of retarding the change of matter in the tissues of the body, and thereby of making hunger more endurable."—(P. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... with pronouncing on Solomon's final condition, But he stands on the page of this history, a sad, enigmatical figure, a warning to all young people to take heed that the attrition of the world does not rub off the bloom of early religion, or make them cynically ashamed of the unselfishness of their early desires. There is no sadder sight than an old man whose youthful enthusiasm for goodness and belief in the super-excellency of wisdom have withered, leaving ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upon you unawares, and as the streets are generally very narrow, it is difficult to secure a retreat in good time. At the corners of the streets are large stone posts, to protect the houses from the otherwise constant attrition from the wheels. The streets are paved with large stones, and the noise of the wheels, arising from the rapidity of their motion,—re-echoed by the height of the houses, is no trifling trial ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his gait, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... using the same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until, by mere attrition if in no other way, there should be nothing ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... survivors will be largely under discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary outbreak. Exhaustion is likely to be a very long and very thorough process, extending over years. A "war of attrition" may last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to conditions of strain and deprivation still only very vaguely imagined. What happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America or elsewhere may extend the areas of waste and accelerate ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... bliss the sign of which is Nirv[a]na" (iii. 261. 47), he can only suppose that the word means here absorption into brahma or union with Vishnu. In fact Nirv[a]na is already a word of which the sense has been subjected to attrition enough to make it synonymous with 'bliss.' Thus "the gods attained Nirv[a]na by means of Vishnu's greatness" (iii. 201. 22); and a thirsty man "after drinking water attained Nirv[a]na," i.e., the drink made him happy (ib. 126. 16). One ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... many not more than five feet square. The stones exposed are each about seven by twelve inches square, and four inches thick, those in their original position retaining correct angles, but, when thrown down, worn away by attrition ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... seemed to have conversed with cultivated minds, yet the results of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man awake and active ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
