"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... identifications?" Kennon chuckled. Would he? There was no question about it. The address, 200 Central Avenue, was only a few blocks away. In fact, he could see the building from his window, a tall functional block of durilium and plastic, soaring above the others on the street, the sunlight gleaming off its clean square lines. He eyed it curiously, wondering what he would ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... and perennial fascination in the contemplation of the future. The past is a fixed province, the finished result of an ever-moving present. The future is the province of the poet, the prophet and the seer. The past is adamant, the future is plastic clay. The past is with God alone; the future is with God and man. We toil for it; dream of it; look to it; and all ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... art, approached it from so clear an intellectual standpoint. Beethoven through the greatness of his mind was able to enlarge the symphonic form, which had been left by Haydn and Mozart. It became more responsive, more plastic, in his hands. Form in art is the creation of the intellect; what goes into it is the outflow of the heart. Thus Liszt created the Symphonic Poem, and Wagner completely revolutionized the musical ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own art; since ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... is the true mission of romanticism,—not to break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production, but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as in the active, sense of that word,—should accept form, as well as give form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... accommodating its practice and principles of action to altered circumstances, there can be no doubt that it is by considerations of well-being, half conscious though the process of application may be, that the change is directed. The plastic power by which men accommodate their actions and even their maxims of conduct to modifications in surrounding circumstances is one of the advantages which they gain by the progress of civilisation. In ancient society the tyranny of custom is often almost absolute. In modern society ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... is desirable that the splint should take the shape of the part accurately, a plastic material may be employed. Perhaps the most convenient is poroplastic felt, which consists of strong felt saturated with resin. When heated before a fire or placed in boiling water, it becomes quite plastic and may be accurately moulded to any part, and on ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... appearance its history in adventure; it had the grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features—whether of rock or of more plastic human mold—that have been carved by the rough handling ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... whom Ganganelli called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal Nature had imparted to him as its noblest gift, which helped Juan ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the difference lies in the plastic spirit of the antique, and the picturesque spirit of the romantic poetry. Sculpture directs our attention exclusively to the group which it sets before us, it divests it as far as possible from all external accompaniments, and where they cannot be dispensed with, it indicates them ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... treacherous Mamsell Ramen, valet-surgeon Eversmann, and plenty more: readers of Wilhelmina's Book are too well acquainted with them. Nor are expert Conjurers wanting; capable to work strange feats with so plastic an element as Friedrich Wilhelm's mind. Let this one short glimpse of such Subterranean World be sufficient indication to ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... linen and paper; but the divine touch of art turned everything to gold. One statue of Henri IV. with his flowing plume, and his rich romantic dress, was quite striking. It was the very plume that had won at Ivry, and yet was nothing more than a sheet of paper cut and twisted by the plastic ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... half of the eighteenth century, passed all at once from the most opposite way of thinking, to an almost over-scrupulous strictness of manners in social conversation, in romances and plays, and in the plastic arts. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... cheeses made by curdling milk with rennet, warming and fermenting the curd, heating it until it is plastic, drawing it into ropes and then kneading and shaping while hot. Provolone, Caciocavallo and Mozzarella are in ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... setting illuminated with appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often called upon to render incidental aid to the general impression. The dramatist, therefore, must be endowed not only with the literary sense, but also with a clear eye for the graphic and plastic elements of pictorial effect, a sense of rhythm and of music, and a thorough knowledge of the art of acting. Since the dramatist must, at the same time and in the same work, harness and harmonise the methods of so many of the arts, it would be uncritical to centre ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... which teaches that when Allah was engaged in the work of creation, he tempered the lightning with the south wind, and thus created the horse. Whimsical as is this idea, it yet suggests the swiftness, the fire, the mettlesome, generous, but plastic temperament of our favourite quadruped—the only one of our dumb servants in whose spirit we can rouse at will the utmost emulation, the keenest desire for the approval of its lord. Even the countenance of this animal denotes most of the qualities ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Illinois. In numerous mounds the skeletons were found packed closely side by side, immediately beneath a layer of hard, mortar- like substance. The fact that this mortar had completely filled the interstices, and in many cases the skulls also, showed that it had been placed over them while in a plastic state, and as it must soon have hardened and assumed the condition in which it was found, it is evident the skeletons had been buried after the ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... constipation and constipation nervous misery. It is inevitable that inflammation should determine this outcome since it induces spasmodic contraction of the muscular walls of the tube, lessening the bore or closing the portion of the canal invaded. Plastic infiltration takes place in the walls of the gut, thickening and binding them together; or, if the inflammation be of a simple catarrhal or atrophic nature, the plastic infiltration will more or less bind the circular muscular bands of the gut together ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... hallway that led to Colonel Mannheim's suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they were ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and more into common life, which demands first what is necessary and then what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils. The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized Milesian shall be a thing of beauty as well ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Swarms all the mind; absorpt is yellow care, And at each puff imagination burns: Flash on thy bard, and with exalting fires Touch the mysterious lip that chants thy praise In strains to mortal sons of earth unknown. Behold an engine, wrought from tawny mines Of ductile clay, with plastic virtue formed, And glazed magnific o'er, I grasp, I fill. From Paetotheke with pungent powers perfumed, Itself one tortoise all, where shines imbibed Each parent ray; then rudely rammed, illume With the red touch of zeal-enkindling sheet, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... wrath it is!' The other deities All in one voice exclaim'd; 'And, might the thing be named, Some other god would make Bolts better for our sake.' This Vulcan undertook. His rumbling forges shook, And glow'd with fervent heat, While Cyclops blew and beat. Forth, from the plastic flame Two sorts of bolts there came. Of these, one misses not: 'Tis by Olympus shot,— That is, the gods at large. The other, bearing wide, Hits mountain-top or side, Or makes a cloud its targe. And this it is alone Which leaves ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... What brought the moon into that position, close to the surface of the earth? We will only say that there is the gravest reason to believe that the moon was, at some very early period, fractured off from the earth when the earth was in a soft or plastic condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... frowning now, considered, selected and rejected. Finally she settled on three slim books bound in russet leather, in glossy plastic, in faded cloth. She took a little purse from the table, put the cigarette case into it. Then, with a laugh, she took one cigarette and slipped it into a ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon
... portrait raise, Each rival stroke the force of life conveys; Heroes and beauties round their tablets stand, And rise unfading from their plastic hand; Each breathing form preserves its wonted grace, And all the Soul stands speaking ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... furnish materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Jane could discern trouble in Miss Collett's face. But Miss Collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile. The smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance of her hand. It implied that, if Miss Holland was to be set up in a high place and worshipped, Miss ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... vehicles by which the pigment is made fluent and plastic are quite as important in their effects. They not only have to do with the business of drying, owing to the substances used as dryers, but they may have to do with the chemical action ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... various influences which, during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... revealer and bringer of the great mercy of God, and have so been led in some measure to put your confidence in Him for your salvation and deliverance. But have you apprehended Him as the mould into which your life is to be poured, that life having been made fluent and plastic by the warmth of His love? You have apprehended Him as your refuge; have you apprehended Him as your inward sanctity? You have gone to Him as the source of salvation from the guilt and penalties of sin; have you gone to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... The Plastic Art.—If painting under the new conditions entered on a fresh course of power and conquest, if it set itself successfully to provide an imagery for new and intense thought, sculpture, on the other hand, seems to have withered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... apprehended, tried, condemned and executed, the whole of the tragedy and its sequel would be, not only lived over in imagination but repeated automatically, in fact, and worked out in full detail in the plastic matter of the astral region. Probably few people have the imagination to comprehend what the murderer feels of apprehension and fear at his trial when his life is in the balance; or what he suffers while hiding from justice and making futile efforts to escape the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... and both this and the other parts of the relief are of exceptionally hard plaster, answering to the Italian gesso duro.... Such as it is, this painted relief is the most magnificent monument of Mycenaean plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say that no figure of a bull, at once so powerful ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person simply ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... to be always with her: he would be her "comic." It was a new system which had come into fashion: the most plastic performances spoiled by the juxtaposition of their caricatures; acrobats, Olympian gods, parodied by a merry-andrew in a ridiculous coat: just as though Nunkie Fuchs, for instance, had taken it into his head to appear with his Three Graces ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... these a priori theories led, when put in practice upon human beings, including himself. And, in the first place, it will probably be conceded that no optimist could have, or ever hope to have, a fairer opportunity to try his experiment than had Moses on that plastic Hebrew community which he undertook to lead through Arabia. Also it must be admitted that Moses, as an expounder of a moral code, achieved success. The moral principles which he laid down have been accepted as sound from ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... in his dramatic works and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Shif'less Sol's plastic and sensitive mind had been affected by his meeting with Henry. Despite his great confidence in the skill and strength of the young leader, he had been worried by his long absence and his meeting with him had been ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fairy tale is to rob human beings of their childhood, that transition period in which breadth and richness are given to human life so that it may be full and plastic enough to permit the creation of those exacting efficiencies which increasing knowledge and responsibility compel. We cannot omit the adventures of fairyland from our educational program. They are too well adapted to the restless, active, and unrestrained life of childhood. They take the ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... both feared and abhorred, and now, in the wane of her beauty, she was easily content with such crumbs of money profit as could be picked up by an easy code of a plastic surface morality which covered ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... illustrates Sir Thomas's peculiar mysticism. The external world was not to him the embodiment of invariable forces, and therefore capable of revealing a general law in a special instance; but rather a system of symbols, signatures of the Plastic Nature, to which mysterious truths were arbitrarily annexed. A Pythagorean doctrine of numbers was therefore congenial to his mind. He ransacks heaven and earth, he turns over all his stores of botanical knowledge, he searches all sacred and profane literature to ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... observation is naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday—Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Church, and of the Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and plastic political development of the English race. Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, and England for ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... no purpose, hold faith with Mattioli and Fallopio, who maintained fossils to be the fermentations of a materia pinguis; or Mercati, who saw in them stones bewitched by stars; or Olivi, who described them as the 'sports of nature;' or Dr Plot, who derived them from a latent plastic ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... time obfuscated in the abysm-born vapours of doubt; at another, radiant with the sun-fires of faith made perfect by fruition; it can amaze no considerative fraction of humanity, that the explorer of the indefinite, the searcher into the not-to-be-defined, should, at dreary intervals, invent dim, plastic riddles of his own identity, and hesitate at the awful shrine of that dread interrogatory alternative—reality, or dream? This deeply pondering, let the eager beginner in the at once linear and circumferent course of philosophico-metaphysical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... towards the end-result of an instinct remarkably straightforward and sure. They make few mistakes, and do not have to potter around. By contrast, the instincts of mammals are rather loosely organized. Mammals are more plastic, more adaptable, and at the same time less sure; and this is notably true of man. It would be a mistake to suppose that man has few instinctive tendencies; perhaps he has more than any other creature. But his ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... has been established, which has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of civilised nations. All the upper and middle classes of Christendom centre themselves to one focus of taste and merge into one plastic commonwealth, to be shaped and moulded virtually by a common tailor. Their coats, vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made substantially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood out with some show of pluck and patriotism, and made a stand for national ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... deprecatory things, and the feeblest male is jocular after his wont. But it is remarkable how soon the charm of this delightful occupation seizes hold of you. For really the sensations of moulding this plastic matter into shape are wonderfully and quite unaccountably pleasing. It is ever so much easier than drawing things—"anyone can do it," as the advertisement people say—and the work is so much more substantial in its effects. Technical questions arise. In moulding a head, do you take a lump ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Environment. And not only are the highest organisms the most mobile, but the highest part of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower. Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the body of a child: but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be turned to music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... has been much discussion. Some have considered them to be evidence of violent volcanic action in the dim past; others, again, as the result of the impact of meteorites upon the lunar surface, when the moon was still in a plastic condition; while a third theory holds that they were formed by the bursting of huge bubbles during the escape into space of gases from the interior. The question is, indeed, a very difficult one. Though ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... of the plastic age, my ancestor was observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in the streets, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... unusually high modelling, in some cases being almost detached from the door. The effect is curious and interesting rather than strictly beautiful, on the whole; but in detail many of the figures display rare power of plastic skill, proportion, and action. They are, at any rate, very individual: there are no other doors at all like them. They are the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... between Central Asian and Central American art, both in architectural forms and plastic and sculptured remains. He thinks that its tradition was transmitted from Asia to America in the third and fourth centuries of our era. If so, it was an unlucky moment for the recipients, as the art of Asia, as well as that of Europe, was then at its lowest and most debased ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... of view this idea of human nature is utterly false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal. It can be brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with angels. Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal, believed that men and women could be changed into anything—into ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... a very important part. A child born with a tendency to some vice or intellectual trait, may have this tendency entirely overcome, or at least modified, by training. So, also, virtues implanted by nature may be lost during the plastic days of youth, in consequence of ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... the triumph of a purely plastic art," Blondet went on. "You will not know what she said, but you will be fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white shoulders; she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout and smile; or throw a Voltairean ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... don't think so," he replied; "when I have a work that demands a particular tension of the mind, I am in a state of extraordinary nervous excitement; images are clearer, my senses are more alert, and for the form, why, the style is plastic, and steadily becomes better in proportion as the tension becomes stronger." She sighed, and added: "You are exhausting yourself and you will ruin your health. Just look at S. He spent two years in writing one short story; but how he has worked at it and chiselled it down! not the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic aether was destitute of the story of the fight and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... regardless of details of religious faith, was interested in poor Charlotte. Progress was slow at first. Then the leaven began to work. One day the expressman moved a big box from the Evanson home to a local hospital. It contained the paraphernalia of a one-time invalid. One plastic nurse lost a chronic case. To-day in the Evanson household, all discussions of illness are under the ban. The home is no longer a private infirmary, but breathes a bit of the after-glow of cheer which should linger long after the passing of one so worthy and radiant as Annette—the mother ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... been knit like steel about her plastic years burst wide. "Thou art ill! What has happened to thee? Ay, Dios! what it is to be a woman and to suffer! Thou wilt die! ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... "I haven't answered, have I? No, Mr. Booth, I've never posed for a portrait. It is a new experience for me. You will have to contend with a great deal of stupidity on my part. But I shall try to be plastic." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... "but, above all, the necessity of the carnivorous appetite of replacing the bodily waste, by the azote contained in animal tissues. The lungs are satisfied with a provision of vegetable and farinaceous food. But to be strong and active the body must be supplied with those plastic elements that renew the muscles. Until the Maories become members of the Vegetarian Association they will eat meat, and human ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... were returning to England from a journey around the world. They had lived in East London for many years, and had been identified with the public movements for its betterment. They were much shocked that, in a new country with conditions still plastic and hopeful, so little attention had been paid to experiments and methods of amelioration which had already been tried; and they looked in vain through our library for blue books and governmental reports which recorded painstaking ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... But what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero, the withering fire of Juvenal, the plastic imagination of Dante, the humour of Cervantes, the comprehension of Bacon, the wit of Butler, the supreme and ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... the working of natural selection in this direction alone, has entailed a vast increase in the amount of cerebral organization that must be left to be completed after birth, and thus has prolonged the period of infancy. And conversely the prolonging of the plastic period of infancy, entailing a vast increase in teachableness and versatility, has contributed to the further enlargement of the cerebral surface. The mutual reaction of these two groups of facts must have gone on for an enormous length of time since man began thus diverging from his ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, the sculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth century the artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as they knew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that the history of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentation first of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highest imaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the sport of seeming chance, The plastic shapes of circumstance, What might have been we fondly guess, If earlier born, or ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... at first sight to be reversed; for Mr. Browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. Here, however, the poet in him comes into play. He leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. In this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and tossing arms below him and about him. Demagogue he may have been; demigod he looked in that, his moment of supreme triumph, biding his time to play upon the passions and the prejudices of this multitude as a master organist would play upon the pipes of an organ. Here was clay, plastic to his supple fingers—here in this seething conglomerate of half-baked intellectuals, of emotional rebels against constituted authority, of alien enemies of malcontents and malingerers, of parlour ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... vivacity of attitude and gesture which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel gratings, that those long-distant ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so possessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much cultured, not profound, not deeply passionate; not particularly reflective though ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... forming part of it, is one of the chief characteristics of modern as distinguished from ancient art. It is this which makes the Elizabethan drama so different from the Greek. It is this again which already separates the works of Duccio and Giotto from the plastic arts of Antiquity. Painting lends itself willingly to the consideration of minor episodes, and for that reason is almost as well fitted to be in touch with modern life as the novel itself. Such a treatment saves a picture from ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... way from square to square of the big rope hairnet that served as guidelines on the outer surface of the big wheel, Mike Blackhawk completed his inspection of the gold-plated plastic hull, with its ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... its insistence on the observation of the flat visual impression to the exclusion of the tactile or touch sense that by the association of ideas we have come to expect in things seen. An increased truth to the character of appearances has been the result, with a corresponding loss of plastic ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... to struggle together. They were very dissimilar. Birkin was tall and narrow, his bones were very thin and fine. Gerald was much heavier and more plastic. His bones were strong and round, his limbs were rounded, all his contours were beautifully and fully moulded. He seemed to stand with a proper, rich weight on the face of the earth, whilst Birkin seemed to have the centre of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Manifestation of the plastic art, which is found among tribes less intelligent, is rare among the Eskimo. In fact, the only thing of the kind seen was some rude pottery at Saint Lawrence island, the design of which showed but crude development of ornamental ideas. ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Grecian or Roman greatness), New-York should be able to point to a statue of the representative of those ideas which are most eminently national, and of which she, as the intellectual and commercial metropolis of the whole country, is the centre. For plastic art, Mr. Webster may be regarded as perhaps the finest subject in modern history, and the head which Thorwaldsen thought must be the artist's ideal of the head of Jove, when modelled to the size of life, in the fit proportions of such a statue as is proposed, would be more imposing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... characters are found in their most primitive and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic figuration of Assyria. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the plastic period of your lives, with the world before you, and the mightier world within to mould as you will; and you can be almost anything you like, I do not mean in regard to externals, or intellectual capacities, for these are only partially ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to present reflections and observations concerning Nature, we must at the same time indicate that these remarks will chiefly have reference, first, to plastic art; then, to art in general; finally, to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... entities reside in me in the same way.[219] All entities, O son of Kunti, attain to my nature at the close of a Kalpa. I create them again at the beginning of a Kalpa.[220] Regulating my own (independent) nature I create again and in this whole assemblage of entities which is plastic in consequence of its subjection to nature.[221] Those acts, however, O Dhananjaya, do not fetter me who sitteth as one unconcerned, being unattached to those acts (of creation). Through me, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... has more rivals than as a sculptor. We may limit the supreme masters of the plastic art to two, or to three at the most; but the supreme masters of the pictorial art are twice three, at the very least. By the side of Michelangelo there is Raphael, also an Italian; and has any one really a right to exclude Titian from ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion:—Or, was there even a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture, were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky, so much above the less animated clay of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Poetic and plastic art are alike in being both formative; that is to say, they are intended to bring to view a limited amount of matter in definite relations which are fixed by nature; and when the poet gives expression to an idea, the process is exactly the same as when a painter or ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... art, he is infinitely more humane, sympathetic, holy. His creations are statuesquely moulded like Goethe's, but they have the same quick music of heart-throbs that Shakespere's have. Hawthorne is at the same moment ancient and modern, plastic and picturesque. Another generation will see more of him than we do; different interpreters will reveal other sides. As a powerful blow suddenly descending may leave the surface it touches unmarked, and stamp its impress on the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... must request you urgently, Let me for once do as I like. I have been intent upon establishing so unfailing, so plastic, a connection between the music and the poem and action, that I feel quite certain as to the result. Rely upon me, and do not attribute it to my being in love with my own work. If you should feel compelled to make cuts on account of excessive difficulty, I should ask you to consider whether ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... ware can be made almost as thin as an egg shell or a piece of heavy paper, and after being allowed to become thoroughly dry can be safely burned in the kiln. It can readily be understood that it would not be possible to make such fragile pieces by the usual processes with plastic clay, which must be of the consistency of putty or dough, on the potter's wheel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... Poetry is a good deal a matter of heart-beats, and the circulation is more languid in the later period of life. The joints are less supple; the arteries are more or less "ossified." Something like these changes has taken place in the mind. It has lost the flexibility, the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when the gristle had but just become hardened into bone. It is the nature of poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex, and unexpected ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... leaders was too great to allow them to succumb to that temptation. They seem to have feared the possible effect of immediately incorporating in their ranks, while their new organization was still so plastic, the bulk of those conservative classes which were, after all, the backbone of this irreducible ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... course, All hail to thee! Since, innocent of blame, E'en mortal creatures may address thy name— For all that breathe and creep the lowly earth Echo thy being with reflected birth— Thee will I sing, thy strength for aye resound! The universe that rolls this globe around Moves wheresoe'er thy plastic influence guides, And, ductile, owns the god ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... jus in re,—a right inherent in the thing, and whose principle lies in the external manifestation of man's will. Man leaves his imprint, stamps his character, upon the objects of his handiwork. This plastic force of man, as the modern jurists say, is the seal which, set upon matter, makes it holy. Whoever lays hands upon it, against the proprietor's will, does violence to the latter's personality. And yet, when an administrative committee saw fit to declare that ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... in the passionate preference displayed by men of real power for the society of simple and even truculent persons over that of those who are urbanely plastic and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... sticky, and incapable of swelling in water. On the other hand, although some distinguished chemists deny or exalt the nutritive properties of bran, agriculturists, taking practical observation as proof, attribute to that portion of the grain a physiological action which has nothing in common with plastic alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous a force ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... contracted, pulling itself lower into the sand. At the same instant something thin and sharp lashed out through a fold in the skin, striking at Brion's boot and withdrawing. There was a scratch on the hard plastic, beaded ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... present somewhat enchanted hour was to the intellect and the spirit, rather than sensuous, still less sensual. Nevertheless, an almost passionate desire of earthly beauty took him—of the beauty of things seen, of things plastic, beauty of the human form; beauty of far-distant lands and the varied pageant of their aspect and history; of great rivers flowing seaward; of tombs by the wayside; of the glorious terror of the desert's naked ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Vospovitch is an innovator. Don't you see that he's brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art, of music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to. People are tired—the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... intellects, and refined manners have been in large proportion among the banished Poles, and the exiles of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished than ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... tell me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... neighbors, this country of Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for itself an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its ideality and produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... dome, the fluted column with its capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to the ear!—farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks human flesh, and in the plastic expression of the culled excellencies of the human shape, shines forth the god!—farewell to painting, the high wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artists's mind in pictured canvas—to paradisaical ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... the folly of the over-production—and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood—of yesterday. To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... in appearance, organization and life-history. They are so very plastic that they can adapt themselves readily to their various hosts, hence we have a great variety of forms. But they all agree in certain characters; all take their food and oxygen and carry on excretory processes ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... hangs up the desk 'phone and turns to me I catches him smotherin' a smile. "Torchy," says he, "are you a patron of the plastic art?" ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... river I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was a great ill-looking thing, and my second ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... behold the chain of love. Combining all below and all above; See plastic nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend; Attract, attracted to, the next in place Formed and impelled its neighbor to embrace, See matter next, with various life endued, Press to ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, 45 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it.... When I was young, my imagination was always in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... may be urged, granting that organic beings in a state of nature present some varieties,—that their organisation is in some slight degree plastic; granting that many animals and plants have varied greatly under domestication, and that man by his power of selection has gone on accumulating such variations until he has made strongly marked and firmly inherited races; granting ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... situation and produce the same effect, is the permanent or organic stricture. Of this disease the forms are as various as the situations are, for as certainly as it may reasonably be supposed that the plastic lymph, effused in an inflamed state of the urethra from any cause, does not give rise to stricture of any special or particular form, exclusive of all others; so as certainly may it be inferred that, in a structurally uniform canal, inflammation points to no one particular place ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... cleft, the breeze drove. Suddenly the battle was done, victory easily gained. We were cheered by a gush of level sunlight. Even the dull, gray vapor became a transfigured and beautiful essence. Dull and uniform it had hung over the land; now the plastic winds quarried it, and shaped the whole mass into individuals, each with its character. To the cloud-forms modelled out of formlessness the winds gave life of motion, sunshine gave life of light, and they hastened through the lower atmosphere, or sailed lingering across the blue breadths of mid-heaven, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... often do; and surely it is not from reflection. They have their own inspirations. Young Powell's inspiration consisted in being "enthusiastic" about Mrs. Anthony. 'Enthusiastic' is really good. And he was amongst them like a child, sensitive, impressionable, plastic—but unable to find for himself any sort ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... England already (1743-17—?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonourable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five once swallowed ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang |
