"Pliancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... necessary for our well-being, nature would not have made the body so proper for it, by giving such an activity to the limbs, and such a pliancy to every part as necessarily produce these compressions, extensions, contortions, dilatations, and all other kinds of motions that are necessary for the preservation of such a system of tubes and glands as has been before mentioned. And that we might not want ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Nobili, Guglielmi is about to commit himself to a deliberate lie. Lying is not his practice; not on principle, for he has none. Expediency is his faith, pliancy his creed; lying is inartistic, also dangerous. A lie may grow into a spectre, and haunt you to your ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the Southern wing of the party with their votes, and yet were often deserted when they desired offices. "It is," said one of them, "paying us a great compliment for our principles, or great contempt for our pliancy." Mr. Buchanan wrote to a Virginia Democratic leader, "Poor Forney deserves a better fate than to be wounded 'in the house of his friends,' and to vote for a Whig in preference to him was the unkindest cut of all. It will, I am confident, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. It seems as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process. It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children. Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful, such as the balancing the artificial tree and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... her there, so answered her stupidly. For all my day-dreams of the week that I had been away I was not prepared for her. And indeed she had altered. The strain of fear and incessant watchfulness was removed, and with the lessening of that tension had come a pliancy of look and gesture, a richness of tone that found me unprepared. I made but a poor figure. It was as well that work clamored at me, and that I had to turn away and direct ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... of the voice require vigour and pliancy of muscle, to perform their office with energy ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... dogmas of the prevailing creed of Christendom, are to be included some of the most authoritative names of the last three centuries; our present formulas would not have been subscribed by Bacon, Newton, Locke, Kant; unless from mere pliancy and for the sake of quiet, like Hobbes. If they had been in clerical orders, and had freely avowed their opinions as we know them, they would have been liable to deposition. Yet the difficulties that these men ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... of the old means of enjoyment, the books, the pencil, the guitar; but where the wash-tub and the axe are so constantly in requisition, there is not much time and pliancy of ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... whispered to himself. "Her little girl, the babe that was on her breast!—So like, and yet unlike. A hint of pliancy here, of weakness perhaps, that is not Kate. Wilfulness with Kate, never weakness—And already a woman, already come to the time of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... in his gestures. Children are perpetually going out of themselves; it is one of their chief amusements to represent those grown people whom they have had an opportunity of observing, or whatever strikes their fancy; and with the happy pliancy of their imagination, they can exhibit all the characteristics of any dignity they may choose to assume, be it that of a father, a schoolmaster, or a king. But one step more was requisite for the invention ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political counsellors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which difficulty means new device—let them say, 'We will lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... personally conducted to a happy consummation, but from no quarter have I seen any general scheme of reconstruction emerge which I thought it likely we could force our spirited business men and self-reliant laborers to accept with due pliancy ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... political career, for my father was private secretary to a man high in the Whig Ministry, and had been promised strong interest in my behalf. At college I lived in intimacy with the gayest men, even adopting follies and vices for which I had no taste, out of mere pliancy and the love of standing well with my companions. You see, I was more guilty even then than you have been, for I threw away all the rich blessings of untroubled youth and health; I had no excuse in my outward lot. But while I was at college that event in my life occurred, which ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... and were attended with consequences so important to themselves and the country. By the difference just mentioned, between Mr. Pitt and Lord Thurlow, the ministerial arrangements of 1793 were facilitated, and the learned Lord, after all his sturdy pliancy, consigned to a life ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... best distinguish himself in statesmanship, for the mind is a weapon not to be slighted—when it is builded with strength, sharpened with careful use, and so wielded"—his gaze fell full upon Marcantonio for a weighty moment—"so wielded that it hath no pliancy save at the will of its owner. For sometimes it chanceth"—again he paused for a moment—"that a mind hath more masters than one, and ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Erie board, Drew successfully pretended for a time that he was fully subservient. Ostensibly to carry out Vanderbilt's plans he persuaded that magnate to allow him to bring in as directors two men whose pliancy, he said, could be depended upon. These were Jay Gould, demure and ingratiating, and James Fisk, Jr., a portly, tawdry, pompous voluptuary. In early life Fisk had been a peddler in Vermont, and afterwards had managed an itinerant circus. Then he had become a Wall street broker. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... her, which in old times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility. That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so grateful to her,—he and Joe and the ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... a long while under water, and the velocity with which we saw them go down, the water being perfectly clear, was very surprising. The frequent ablutions of these people seem to make swimming familiar to them from their earliest childhood; and, indeed, their easy position in the water, and the pliancy of their limbs, gave us reason to look on them almost as amphibious creatures." These trifling ornaments were most eagerly coveted by all ages and sexes, and often prized much above any other European goods however useful, so prevalent and powerful is the love ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... ground to pollen-like fineness and certain chemicals from the reef outside are among its component parts. One other element invokes perpetual thanksgiving—the flaked mica, which glistens delusively with hues of silver and gold, and gives to the tide-swept track that singular pliancy which resists the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... employment. Each day's food was to be obtained by the rifle. Wood was to be procured for their fire. All their clothing, from the cap to the moccasin, was to be fashioned by their own hands from the skin of the deer, which they had carefully tanned into pliancy and softness; and there were to be added to their cabin many conveniences which required much ingenuity with knife and hatchet for their only tools, and with neither nail nor screw for their construction. In addition to this they were under the necessity of being ever on the alert to discover ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... remains that the lid is broken and repaired repeatedly, sometimes on the same day. In spite of the earthy casing, the silk woof gives it the requisite pliancy to cleave when pushed by the anchorite and to rip open without falling into ruins. Swept back to the circumference of the mouth and increased by the wreckage of further ceilings, it becomes a parapet, which the Lycosa raises by degrees ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... necessity of mutual concession—more willing than most to be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical experience of his permanent subordinates—but one whom, assuredly, no one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... the tranquillity that follows successful labor, and sank with undiminished prestige into his grave at the end of 1565. Those who believe in masterful and potent leaders of humanity may be puzzled to account for the triumph achieved by this common-place arbiter of destiny. Not by strength but by pliancy of character he accomplished the transition from the mediaeval to the modern epoch of Catholicism. He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to steer ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Future when men and women will not dissipate their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of life and of love, adapting themselves with pliancy and intelligence to the milieu in which they find themselves, they will unafraid enjoy life to the utmost. Women will for the first time in the unhappy history of this globe establish a true equilibrium and "balance of power" in the relation of the sexes. The old ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... maid, Camilla said to her, "I am ashamed to think, my dear Leonela, how lightly I have valued myself that I did not compel Lothario to purchase by at least some expenditure of time that full possession of me that I so quickly yielded him of my own free will. I fear that he will think ill of my pliancy or lightness, not considering the irresistible influence he ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... pliancy of mind, this lack of conviction, this absolute want of moral sense, which ought to have given the Count such great advantages in his conflict with the world, were, in reality, the main source of his weakness. Fortune had made a soldier of the man, and he filled the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... In England and in the United States the architect and engineer produce more than we do with greater pliancy, fertility, originality and boldness of invention, with a practical capacity at least equal and without having passed six, eight or ten years in purely theoretical studies.—Cf. Des Rousiers, "La Vie Americaine," p. 619: "Our ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of all the many household slaves, white-headed and shrunken, and bent with the toil of years, squatted by the fire in the court of the slaves' quarters, cleaning a copper pot with a swab of twigs soaked in oil to pliancy. Within the house a feast was in progress, so that all the slaves were there on service, and Marcus had the fire to himself. He crooned softly as he scrubbed; and the flames struck gleams of light from the ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor |
